The JFK War: Hany Farid, Jefferson Morley and the Zapruder film

by Jim Fetzer

“How can Jefferson Morley pretend to be an expert on the assassination of JFK when he is abysmally ignorant about it?”–Jim Fetzer



We are encountering the most massive disinformation in American history as the 50th observance of the assassination of JFK approaches. Long discredited theories–such as that a Secret Service man accidentally shot JFK with his AR-15, that Jackie shot JFK with a derringer, and an impostor was killed, while JFK is in Tahiti sipping Mai-Ties–are being marketed around the web.

The obvious cases are bad enough, but some not so obvious continue to make the rounds, including that William Greer, the driver, who pulled the limo to the left and to a stop to make sure JFK was killed, shot him with a .45 during the stop. But if that had been the case, then JFK’s brains would have been blown out to the right/rear, when they were instead blown out to the left/rear.

 More insidious are those who deny the existence of the limo stop or make other attempts to prove that the Zapruder film is authentic. That poses a daunting task, since it would be necessary to show that, in every respect, the extant film corresponds to what actually happened during the event as it took place in Dealey Plaza. If that is not true in any respect, its authenticity has been falsified.

Hany Farid, a computer scientist from Dartmouth College, who has a lab funded by the FBI, offers a striking case of a faculty member abusing his position to disseminate false information about the assassination of JFK. Jefferson Morely, a well-known reporter, whose work I have previously questioned, has created a new web site to promote his own extremely slanted view about JFK, including the Zapruder film.

Hany Farid and the backyard photos

We last encountered Hany Farid, a computer scientist from Dartmouth College, when he claimed to have shown that the backyard photographs of Lee Oswald, which were allegedly taken by his wife, Marina, had been verified by showing that he had been able to reconstruct the nose shadow in one of the photographs, which he claimed thereby established their authenticity. I kid you not!

Since there are at least four of these photographs (and the negative for a fifth is missing), you might have thought that he would at least extend his argument to all of them, instead of focusing on only one. And it might have been appropriate had he acknowledged that the nose shadow was only one of multiple proofs that the photos were faked, where he did not bother with any of the rest.

Thus, for example, the chin in the photos is a block chin, not Oswald’s more tapered and pointed chin. There is an insert line between the lower lip and the chin. The tips of the fingers of his right hand are cut off. And when you use the newspapers he is holding as an internal ruler, it turns out that the man in the photos at 5’6″ is too short to be Lee Oswald, who was approximately 5’10”.

Moreover, for a photographic expert, his claims are astoundingly shoddy, since it even turns out that the face in all four of the photos is exactly the same, which is an optical impossibility, insofar as the subject was photographed at different times and positions. As Lee told Homicide Detective Will Fritz during his interrogation, his face had been pasted on someone else’s body–which is true!

This matte was subsequently discovered in the desk of a DPD detective, who claimed he had only make it to see if it could be done. I wrote to the President of Dartmouth, Jim Yong Kim, at the time to object to the abuse of his faculty position, but it was swept under the rug. Jim Marrs and I subsequently published “Framing the Patsy: The Case of Lee Harvey Oswald”, which leaves no doubt about it.

Hany Farid and the Zapruder film

As so often happens in Washington–where the bigger the liar, the further you go–Jim Youg Kin became the President of the World Bank, where, as Karen Hudes has explained, he has been doing more of the same but on a grander scale. Hany Farid, in the meanwhile, having demonstrated his competence with regard to the backyard photos, has turned his attention to the Zapruder film.

As in the case of his work on the backyard photo(s), he commits the fallacy of special pleading by ignoring all the evidence that contradicts his predetermined position. Even if he were correct about the nose shadow in one photograph, it should not be the same across all four photos, not to mention other proofs of fakery. He wants to show that the black area in Frame 317 is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Even if he were correct, that would not overcome the mountain of evidence from more than 60 witnesses, the internal contradictions in the extant film, its inconsistency with the medial and ballistic evidence and other witnesses who have viewed another and more complete film that includes, for example, the limo coming to a complete stop. As before, Hany Farid implies that, if one issue is resolvable, he has resolved them all.

So he compounds one fallacy (special pleading) with another (hasty generalization), which of course is the strategy he has adopted, hoping that those who are unfamiliar with the evidence in this case will be taken in. But he has to know that there is ample proof that the dark area at the back of the head was painted over in black and that the film is not even internally consistent, as Frame 374 reveals:

Since the blow out at the back of his head — the blue-gray, cashew-shaped defect, as opposed to the pinkish skull flap, which was also blown open when JFK was hit in the right temple by a frangible (or “exploding”) bullet — it has to have been cover-up in those earlier frames, as as group of Hollywood film restoration experts have long-since concluded. So Farid is committing a fraud by abusing his position at Dartmouth to spread false information to the public about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Hany Farid is a fraud.

Jefferson Morley and the Zapruder film

Is there any chance that he is unaware of the importance of Frame 374 or the confirmation of the painting over of the blow out in Frame 317 and many other frames? He lists The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003) among his references, which gives the specious impression that he has actually studied its contents and findings. Frame 374, which is emphasized in the prologue, refutes his claims about the film, as I have shown. So Hany Farid only had to read as far as page 25 to know that what he was claiming was false. An even more blatantly fallacious approach to the film is found on Jefferson Morley’s
JFKFacts.org web site:

It is not difficult for even new students of JFK to discover there is something odd about Jefferson Morley’s new JFKFacts.org web site, since he lists the web site of John McAdams, who is a notorious proponent of the lone-gunman theory, as “one of the best”, and my assassinationscience.com, as “one of the worst”. When he was challenged about this classification, he explained that his derogation of my site was because I promote the alteration of the Zapruder film, which is ironic, since the faking of the film is a fact about the assassination of JFK. Here is the challenge (posed by someone other than I) and his response thereto:

He dismisses the alterationist thesis, not by refuting any of the evidence, but on the basis of hypothetical questions, where the answer to 1) appears to be that it is flawed and they did not want to make it available for research that might expose its shortcomings, as John P. Costella, Ph.D., has done; and 2) that it DID ignite a call for a reinvestigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977-79), because it appears to show the effects of a shot fired from the right/front! How can Jefferson Morley pretend to be an expert on the assassination of JFK when he is abysmally ignorant about it? He characterizes his questions as “elementary facts” when they are both predicated on false assumptions. On JFK, Morley is a moron.

Indeed, to be precise about it, questions cannot qualify as facts because (apart from their presuppositions, which in this case are false) they are non-assertive. Asking a question is not the same thing as positing an answer. On a proper understanding of the meaning of the word “fact” as a claim that is not only true but provably true, he has blundered. It is a fact that the Zapruder film cannot possibly be authentic, even on the basis of the simple proof I have advanced comparing frames 317 and 374 above! It is not even internally consistent, since it shows both a blow-out and no blow out at the back of the same head at approximately the same time.

Morely characterizes assassinationscience.com as “misnamed”, which is absurd. Even Vincent Bugliosi has observed that my three are “the only exclusively scientific books” ever published on the death of JFK. It is also a fact that I have published many articles making this point, including “JFK: Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?” and “Did Zapruder film ‘the Zapruder film’?”, to which the answer is emphatically, “No!”, because no one took a film fabricated in a laboratory, as was the extant film at a CIA lab in Rochester, NY, near Kokak Headquarters.

Multiple proofs the film is a fake

Since rationality requires that we revise our beliefs with the acquisition of new evidence and alternative hypotheses, the time has come to abandon the fantasy that the Zapruder film is authentic. But don’t expect the Josiah Thompsons, the Robert Grodens and the lesser fry to abandon their promotion of Zapruder film authenticity. Consider this: The JFK Lancer Conference for the 50th observance of the death of JFK in Dallas is featuring as its keynote speaker Jefferson Morley!

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

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