Doug Horne, “INSIDE THE ARRB” – Part II

Doug Horne has sent me some PDF files that provide some essential data tables from his book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (2009)–in five volumes–as well as some prose samples which summarize his overview of the JFK assassination and its cover up. For those who don’t know it, Horne served on the staff of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) during the final three years of its four-year lifespan, from 1995 to 1998, and is the first U.S. government official involved with the medical evidence to allege a cover up in Kennedy’s autopsy and in the creation of the autopsy photographs and x-rays. Established by President Clinton in the wake of Oliver Stone’s controversial movie, JFK, the ARRB was chartered to locate and declassify records still being kept secret by the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies, and to make them publicly available in a new “JFK Records Collection” in the National Archives. Although Congress did not want the ARRB to reinvestigate or even draw conclusions about the assassination, the staff did take depositions under oath from certain key individuals.

Analysis of the sworn testimony before the ARRB of ten people involved in the autopsy, and others interviewed previously by the HSCA, have led Doug Horne to the inescapable conclusion that a high-level government cover up was in place from the very afternoon of the president’s death. INSIDE THE ARRB, the product of over 13 years of writing and research, provides the best explanation yet offered of the true nature of the medical cover up in the assassination of JFK, and does so in meticulous detail, with scrupulous use of primary source material. It incorporates the latest information–much of it new evidence not revealed elsewhere–gleaned from the ARRB’s depositions and interviews of medical witnesses, conducted from 1996 to 1998. With precise accuracy, and with a relentless focus on the massive fraud uncovered in the official records of the 35th President’s assassination, Horne presents a persuasive case that the assassination of JFK was an “inside job,” a true coup d’etat in America, which was ruthlessly and brazenly covered up by those who ‘broke the back of the American century’ in Dallas on 22 November 22 1963.

In his blog, Bill Kelly has published Chapter 41 of Dick Russell’s On the Trail of the Assassins – A Revealing Look at America’s Most Infamous Unsolved Crime (2008), pp. 363-389. This is Doug Horne’s interview with Russell, which touches on many of the topics of INSIDE THE ARRB. (Kelly also has a good review of Horne’s book.)

The Five Members of the ARRB

The files labelled “ARRB 1-4” are matrices, summarizing (in a tabular format) the data that caused Doug to conclude there were two distinct and separate brain examinations following the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. They have been pulled from Chapter 10: ARRB 1, “Summary of Evidence in Support of a Brain Examination on November 25, 1963”; ARRB 2, “Summary of Evidence in Support of a Brain Examination Between Nov 29-Dec 2, 1963”; ARRB 3, “How John Stringer’s ARRB Testimony Impugns the Authenticity of the Brain Photographs in the National Archives”; ARRB 4, “Summary of Evidence for Two Separate Brain Exams Following JFK’s Autopsy”.

The file labeled “ARRB 5“, (Tabular Comparison of the Changing Autopsy Conclusions) is a data table explaining the four different sets of conclusions that were recorded as the autopsy findings evolved during the two week period following JFK’s autopsy and has been extracted from Chapter 11.

The data table labeled “ARRB 6” is a crucial matrix from Chapter 14, Doug’s Zapruder film chapter, which destroys the old, previously believed-in chain of custody for the Zapruder film and firmly establishes that the government had its hands all over the film the weekend following the assassination. It establishes a high level of U.S. government interest in the film commencing one day after the assassination and also establishes the site of the film’s initial alteration: “Hawkeyeworks,” a CIA photo lab at Kodak headquarters in Rochester, New York.

You can download a zip file which contains ARRB 1-6 here. A text file titled, “About the Author”, summarizing Doug’s professional accomplishments to date, as well as the key documents declassified by his team, and the most important memos and research papers he produced while on the staff of the ARRB, can also be found in the zip.

Doug has also sent some prose samples from Chapters 13 “What Really Happened at the Bethesda Morgue (And in Dealey Plaza?)”, 14 “The Zapruder Film Mystery”, 15 “The Setup – Planning the Texas Trip and the Dallas Motorcade”, and 16 “Inconvenient Truths” respectively. They summarize his overview of the assassination and the medical cover up. In this blog I am publishing an excerpt from Chapter 13 (pages 1183-1184). In the next blog I will publish excerpts from Chapters 14, 15 and 16. You can visit Doug’s blog site at insidethearrb.livejournal.com–the December 5 2009 journal entry is his Errata Page, which is updated as necessary.

When he completed his book in November 2009, Doug wrote:

The only real certainty we are left with about the events in Dallas in 1963 is that there was a massive cover up, and that the two official explanations about what happened–offered up by the Warren Commission and the HSCA–cannot be true. So much physical evidence was destroyed, and so much tainted evidence was introduced into the official record, that I am convinced the reason the evidence in the Kennedy assassination “doesn’t come together” like a normal homicide case is because there is fraud in the evidence. To continue to assume that all of the evidence held by the U.S. government is sacrosanct, and should be accepted at face value, will only guarantee that there will never be a consensus about what happened.

Final Cover for INSIDE THE ARRB – Volume I

Posting my blogs about Doug Horne is proceeding slowly because, as I observed in the blog of 29 Decemeber 2009 7/7 London Attacks: Fact or Fiction? An interview with Rory Ridley-Duff my webmaster, Lola Heavey, is having her internet access restricted by the British “authorities” (see her blog regarding the loss of internet access at her flat We are cut off from the internet). This graphic, for example, illustrates that, to download some photos Doug sent us via email, would have required Lola to stay at her local public library for 112 hours and 40 minutes!

About the Author

Douglas Horne was born in Oceanside, California (at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base) on 19 May 1952. He grew up in California, Virginia, Arizona, and Ohio.

After graduating Cum Laude from The Ohio State University in 1974 with a B.A. in History, he worked for about a year as an entry level computer programmer before enlisting in the Navy and attending Officer Candidate School. Mr. Horne served on active duty in the Navy for about 10 years, from August 1975 to July 1985. He was trained and designated as a Surface Warfare Officer, and served on board three surface combatants home-ported out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii from 1976-1981: USS Ouellet (FF-1077); USS Reeves (CG-24); and USS Worden (CG-18). His two tours of shore duty were in Saudi Arabia (from March 1981-March 1983), and in Oakland, California (from March 1983-July 1985).

Doug took up a challenging Federal civil service position with the Department of the Navy in August 1985 and relocated to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii where he served as the Operations Manager for a Military Sealift Command field office dedicated to the logistic support of a new class of civilian manned Ocean Surveillance Ships. These vessels, towing the SURTASS passive sound collection array, provided strategically significant sensor information about the location of Soviet submarines throughout the final years of the Cold War.

Mr. Horne relocated to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area in August 1995 to work for the Assassination Records Review Board. He was initially hired as a Senior Analyst on the Military Records Team, and was promoted to the position of Chief Analyst for Military Records in the Spring of 1997. In addition to his crucial role in assisting with the 10 depositions of persons associated with the autopsy on President Kennedy, Doug served as the point man for all ARRB contact with Kodak related to its performance of pro bono work for the Review Board (namely, an analysis of the Zapruder film’s authenticity, and the digital preservation of the autopsy photographs). As a member of the Military Records Team, Horne was personally instrumental in helping to define the broad search criteria which the Review Board directed that the Department of Defense use in its search for ‘assassination records.’

Under his direct guidance, the ARRB’s Military Records Team ensured the declassification of the following noteworthy military records: (1) the complete minutes of the 8th SECDEF Conference on Vietnam from May of 1963; (2) a history of Joint Staff responses in 1962 to urgent requests for proposed action against Cuba from the Operations Officer for Operation Mongoose (Brigadier General E. G. Lansdale)—namely, the “Northwoods” Case File detailing JCS contingency plans and recommendations to invade Cuba in 1962; (3) the Califano papers describing intragovernmental planning for response to a possible coup in Cuba throughout 1963; (4) contingency plans for a possible invasion of Cuba developed by the Joint Staff in 1963; and (5) a large collection of Army Intelligence records detailing proposed sabotage actions against Cuba, as well as other key Army records documenting a relationship between George DeMohrenschildt and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and meetings between RFK and Cuban exile leaders in 1963.

Mr. Horne wrote the following research memos while serving on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, which can all be obtained from the JFK Records Collection at Archives II in College Park, Maryland:

In September 1998, when the Review Board completed its efforts and shut its doors, Mr. Horne assumed the position of Manager, Visitor Services Branch at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and filled that post for about two-and–a-half years. The author currently works for the U.S. State Department. All views expressed in this book are his alone, and do not reflect the official position of any person or agency within the U.S. government.

Excerpt from Chapter 13 (pages 1183-1184)

It is my contention that President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a domestic conspiracy, and that the conspirators implemented an immediate, effective, and wide-ranging coverup as soon as he was killed. The medical coverup was just a part of this effort, but it had to go into effect immediately, and did. An honest autopsy was prevented from taking place by the Secret Service’s removal of the body from Dallas, and a dishonest autopsy was performed by persons who knowingly participated in that charade because they had been “gaslighted”—they had fallen for the World War III cover story, and with that justification in the forefront of their minds, they could all comfort themselves with the knowledge that they were ‘just following orders’ in a time of national crisis. And it was a time of national crisis: fear and uncertainty ruled, and just 13 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fear of nuclear war was palpable because of the ‘legend’ carefully constructed around the accused assassin.

It is my belief that those who planned and executed JFK’s murder at the height of the Cold War did so because they were adamantly opposed to, and feared, his foreign policy: they believed he was rapidly losing the Cold War to the Communist Bloc, and that he was actually inviting nuclear attack by the USSR through what they perceived was the ‘weakness’ of his defense doctrine and foreign policy. These same people believed that nuclear war with the USSR was not only inevitable, but winnable, and that it would be preferable to fight it when the U.S. still had a measurable superiority in nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The ability to execute a successful first-strike on the USSR and the Communist Bloc with virtual impunity was quickly running out, for the Soviets were rushing to achieve a rough parity with the United States in nuclear weapons as fast as they could; the Men Who Killed Kennedy feared seeing him win a second term because they believed that during John F. Kennedy’s second term, the United States would not only lose the Cold War, but would lose its chance to decisively defeat Communism on the nuclear battlefield, without paying a heavy price in return. Knowing that JFK vehemently disagreed with this mind set caused them to both fear and despise him, and motivated them to remove him from office before he could be reelected to a second term.

History has shown that they got away with murder, but that they didn’t get what they hungered for—a decisive defeat of Communism on the battlefield. They got the hot war they so desperately wanted in Southeast Asia, but it became a nightmare, and a disaster, for the United States. And JFK’s successors, rather than pursuing true nuclear disarmament as Kennedy had planned, oversaw an escalating nuclear arms race and negotiated arms control agreements with the USSR that formally permitted the Soviet Union to build up its forces to a level of true parity with the United States, ending the American superiority in strategic nuclear weapons and ushering in the era of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” With the onset of the aptly named “MAD” doctrine in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the wet dream of the flag-waving, paranoid jingoists in the 1950s and early 1960s—a successful first-strike against the Soviet Union and the achievement of a worldwide Pax Americana following a nuclear Jihad against the Communist Bloc—was forever dead. Furthermore, in the wake of the shameful coverup of the Kennedy assassination, America was left not only with an accelerating, and unwinnable ‘hot war’ in Vietnam, but with a legacy of disillusionment, and profound distrust in government, at home.

No one ever came forward to officially acknowledge the coverup of the JFK assassination because of shame, as much as fear. The shame on the part of major players in the medical coverup—Burkley and Galloway, for example—was probably driven by suspicion that they had been hoodwinked by the World War III cover story in 1963, and literally suckered into aiding and abetting obstruction of justice. Mid-level players in the medical coverup such as Humes, Boswell, Finck, and Knudsen were not about to admit to covering up the true facts in JFK’s death because it would have destroyed their professional credibility, and with it, their careers. Low-level participants like Dennis David and the duty sailors who carried in the shipping casket at 6:35 PM, the two x-ray technicians (Custer and Reed), the two autopsy technologists (O’Connor and Jenkins), and the two official photographers (Stringer and Riebe); outsiders like the guards from the Marine Barracks and the Joint Service Casket Team; and innocent witnesses like the two FBI agents (Sibert and O’Neill) and the morticians (Robinson and VanHoesen), were true victims of the coverup who were simply exposed to many strange things the night of the President’s death, and who were really and truly ‘in the dark,’ and just innocently following the orders they had been given, without knowing a coverup was underway. Neither Dennis David, Custer, Reed, O’Connor, Jenkins, Stringer, Riebe, Robinson, VanHoesen, the U.S. Marine guards from Marine Barracks, the Joint Service Casket Team working for Lt. Bird, General Wehle, nor his aide, Richard Lipsey, fully understood what was going on around them because of compartmentalization and the suppression of evidence.

By now, those who gave the cynical and deceitful orders to carry out the medical coverup are all deceased, and many of the mid- level participants have died or are close to death. And the American people are left today with a fraudulent visual record of the autopsy (which is still being suppressed); a dishonest, third-generation autopsy report; and the long-delayed, but reasonably accurate accounts of low-level participants to the strange events surrounding the autopsy—people like Tom Robinson and John VanHoesen, Jerrol Custer and Ed Reed, John Stringer and Floyd Riebe, Paul O’Connor and James Jenkins, Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill, and Dennis David and Roger Boyajian—who have provided us with enough of the truth to allow us to ascertain that we have been lied to about a seminal event in our nation’s history.

Studying the assassination and the coverup is a journey through darkness, and that journey will only lead into bright, sunlit uplands if the student of the assassination gains a proper overview of the deep politics, and the macro forces behind the crime, because with that knowledge comes a full and proper understanding of what a uniquely special politician and leader John F. Kennedy truly was. These are the twin goals of Chapter 16—to understand the forces behind the assassination, so as to be on the alert for similar situations in the future; and to gain an unabashed, mature, and unapologetic appreciation for the unique qualities of President John F. Kennedy, and for the courage and wisdom he displayed against overwhelming opposition at home, within the national security establishment of his own country, during a period of great peril for Western Civilization.

Most academics scoff at the high esteem with which JFK is still held by the common man, the average citizen; but the last chapter in this book will demonstrate why that high esteem is fully merited. The ability of the American people to see through the official lies about Jack Kennedy’s assassination, in spite of the Warren Commission, the HSCA whitewash of the Warren Commission (nothing more than a ‘modified, limited hangout’), Gerald Posner, and Vince Bugliosi, is a testament to the basic concept underlying our democracy—faith in the innate wisdom of an educated populace—and a cautionary tale about the ultimate inability of propaganda, and official edicts, to control human thought.

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