Noam Chomsky and Larry Sabato: Mainstream purveyors of JFK disinformation

 by Jim Fetzer

The Case of Noam Chomsky

An American philosopher has questioned Noam Chomsky’s continued silence over the September 11, 2001, attacks and the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy.

In an interview with Press TV on Wednesday, Professor James Henry Fetzer said, Chomsky “neglects to observe that 9/11 was a false flag operation; he neglects to observe that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was deliberately contrived by the powerful special interests in the US.”

Many independent observers reject the government version of the September 11 attacks and believe rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to make America a police state by encroaching on the people’s civil liberties and advance the agenda of the military-industrial complex.

“If you go on to ‘Fetzer on Chomsky’ on the internet, I take him apart for claiming that there were no policy issues involved in the death of JFK, where nothing can be further from truth,” Fetzer said.

YouTube – Veterans Today –

“JFK was planning to pull out forces from Vietnam; he was threatening to shatter CIA into a thousand pieces; he was cracking down on organized crime;… he was going to cut the oil depletion allowance; he was opposing Israeli development of nuclear weapons, all of which went forward with Lyndon Johnson at the helm – none of which were sustained,” he noted.

“JFK even wanted to have AIPAC – the Israeli lobby – registered as a foreign agent,” the editor of the Veterans Today said.

In an article published by Truthout on Monday, Chomsky described the US as the “world’s leading terrorist state” due to its global operations run by the CIA.

Fetzer said the leading US intellectual is “correct in recognizing that the United States is engaged in a history of terrorist acts” but he believes the timing of Chomsky’s recent comment is “extremely suspicious,” adding that “as we approach the 51st observance of the death anniversary of JFK that Noam Chomsky is continuing to abuse his position as a left-wing gatekeeper, and to inhibit clear thinking on the part of progressives who still idealize him.”

Although US official inquiries have determined Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine Corps veteran, was responsible for the assassination, Kennedy’s murder is still shrouded in mystery.

The 46-year-old president, who had been in office only for three years, is often ranked among the country’s most revered presidents.

Kennedy was also the only US president, who strongly opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

The Case of Larry Sabato

Most Americans are unaware that, by the evening of the assassination, the FBI and the Secret Service had concluded that three shots had been fired with three hits: JFK had been hit in the back; Texas Governor John Connally had also been hit in the back; and JFK had been hit in the back of the head, killing him. There was only one shooter and no “magic bullet.”

The theory that a single bullet had hit JFK in the back of his neck, passed through and exited his throat, then entered the back of John Connally to cause all of his additional wounds was only introduced after it was discovered that James Tague, a bystander, had been injured by a shot that missed. That left only two shots for seven wounds to avoid multiple assassins.

A year ago, I observed that Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University, had taken the absurd position that, although the Warren Commission had bungled its investigation, it had arrived at the right result: Lee Oswald was the lone assassin of our 35th president. But without offering any supporting evidence, he was in the position of accepting a conclusion with no premises.

The gross differences in the description of the wound at the back of Kennedy’s head — from Parkland, where it was the size of your fist; at Bethesda, where it took out the whole back of his head; and from the HSCA, which contracted it to a small entry at the top of his head — by itself show that a cover-up was taking place. But the proof of conspiracy is actually even simpler than that.

Merely by determining where JFK was hit in the back, we can prove that he was killed by a conspiracy. We have the jacket and the shirt he was wearing, which have holes about 5.5″ below the collar, just to the right of the spinal column. A wound was identified on the official autopsy diagram from Bethesda at that same location.

We have an FBI sketch showing that the wound to the back was lower than the wound to the throat and the death certificate by JFK’s personal physician, who stated he had been killed by a wound to the head but that there was a second wound to the back at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, the same location.

We have re-enactment photographs where the stand-in for JFK has a small patch on the back of his head but a larger one on his jacket, at that same location. And we have Arlen Specter, a junior counsel for the Commission, using a pointer to demonstrate the trajectory the “magic bullet” would have had to have taken.

Below his hand several inches, however, is the large patch on the back, which means that a photograph intended to illustrate the theory actually refutes it. And we have the mortician’s summary of the wounds, which describes a wound to the back five to six inches below the shoulder.

The wound was shallow and only entered about as far as the second knuckle of your little finger. But if JFK was not hit in the back of the neck, then the “magic bullet” theory cannot be true and the wounds to his throat and to Connally have to be accounted for on the basis of other shots and other shooters.

David W. Mantik, the leading expert on the medical evidence in this case, took a patient with similar chest and neck dimensions and created a CAT scan. He then plotted the official trajectory and discovered that it is anatomically impossible because cervical vertebrae intervene.

It may sound surprising to you, since there have been so many documentaries that claim to show the official trajectory was possible, including ABC and other channels. But what you did not notice is that, while they model the muscles of the neck, they do not include the cervical vertebrae.

Even Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the City of New York and the head of the HSCA medical panel when it re-investigated the case in 1977-78, observed that if the “magic bullet” theory is false, then there had to have been at least six shots from three different directions.

And the “magic bullet” theory is not only false and provably false but is not even anatomically possible. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just download my Cambridge presentation,“Reasoning about Assassinations,” which I published in an international, peer-reviewed journal.

In my article “Truth or conspiracy?” I cited this study and made the points about the changes in the description of the wound to the back of JFK’s head. I wrote to Professor Sabato and asked him about it, only to receive a reply from an assistant that he admired my research but was too busy with interviews to respond.

William Colby, former director of the CIA, allegedly observed that the agency owns everyone of significance in the major media. Larry Sabato is someone of significance in the major media. It would be reassuring for him to come clean about JFK and let the students, faculty and staff of Mr. Jefferson’s University know that he is on the up-and-up.

James Fetzer has published 29 books, including “Assassination Science” (1998), “Murder in Dealey Plaza” (2000) and “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax” (2003). He was a visiting associate professor at the University (1979-80) and a visiting professor (Spring 1985).

The physicians described a fist-sized blow-out at the back of the head

Ken Stroupe • 17 days ago

Perhaps Professor Fetzer misread Mr. Sabato’s book and the numerous sections that point to countless missteps and irregularities in the medical procedures at Parkland and Bethesda. Sabato’s book contains whole passages about Bethesda physicians not conferring with Parkland before they began the autopsy; that the President’s clothing was removed at Parkland and that Bethesda did not have the opportunity to examine those articles; that Bethesda did not dissect Kennedy’s back-to-neck wound and how that could have proven useful; and that the autopsy occurred under highly irregular conditions, among many other important points.

Contrary to Professor Fetzer’s assertions, Sabato’s book notes repeatedly that the research and conclusions therein DO NOT rule out the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Further, Sabato states that “the chance of a conspiracy of some sort…cannot be dismissed out of hand.”

What Sabato argues – and it’s backed up by empirical evidence by scientists trained in audio forensics – is that the key “evidence” used by the House Select Committee on Assassinations to determine that the President’s death was the result of a conspiracy, i.e. the Dallas Police Dictabelt, is not valid. Why? Contrary to what “the government” told the American public via the HSCA conclusions, the recording contains NO evidence of gunfire and therefore COULD NOT have been recorded in Dealey Plaza.

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It had been obfuscated by “patching” the X-rays, but can be seen in frame 374

James Henry Fetzer Ken Stroupe • 14 days ago

Ken lists some “missteps and irregularities” that take on a far more ominous significance for those of us who are familiar with the evidence, where leaving the shirt and jacket behind was a violation of autopsy protocol but makes excellent sense if the plan was to conceal the true causes of the death of JFK. Bob Livingston, M.D., world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics, heard a description of the small, clean puncture wound to the throat broadcast over the radio that day and, in part because he was then Scientific Director of two of the National Institutes of Health (which are located across the street from Bethesda Naval Hospital), he called Commander Humes and explained to him that this was an entry wound and that the neck had to be carefully dissected, because if there were proof of shots from behind, there had been multiple shooters and therefore a conspiracy. Humes feigned not to have learned about the throat wound until after the autopsy, which is one of many deceptions on his part and far from the worst.

That the autopsy was conducted “under highly irregular conditions” is hardly new, because all this was explained by the experts, including Bob Livingston, who contributed to the first of my books on JFK, Assassination Science (1998), which also includes studies by David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., proving that the official autopsy X-rays had been altered to conceal a massive, fist-sized blow out at the back of his head. That was certainly “irregular” but was obviously deliberate. As Bob explains in the same volume, they also substituted another man’s brain for that of JFK, a conclusion he based upon the difference between the consistent reports from seven or eight of the Parkland physicians, who had observed cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue extruding from the wound, while the brain shown in photographs and diagrams–which is virtually undamaged–has a completely intact cerebellum and cannot possibly be the same brain. Once they had “patched” the blow-out, there was no where for those brains to go, so they simply made the substitution.

Any serious student of the death of our 35th president would know these things because that book shattered the cover-up and exposed the complicity of medical officers of the US Navy, agents of the Secret Service and even the president’s personal physician, who offered to testify to the HSCA but, astonishingly, whose offer was declined. How could the HSCA expect to sort out the medical evidence when it would not even receive the testimony of JFK’s personal physician? That does not appear to have been its intent, which the contraction of the wound to a small wound of entry at the top of the head reflects. When it struck me that the HSCA had performed a massive sleight-of-hand, I called Cyril Wecht, M.D., whom I know, who had been on the panel, and asked him how they had accounted for the enormous discrepancy between the description in the official autopsy report from Bethesda and their conclusion, he told me, “I’ll have to check my notes”!

As though that were not bad enough, Douglas Horne, who had served as the Senior Analysis for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), created by Congress in the wake of the resurgence of interest in the case generated by Oliver Stone’s film, “JFK”, discovered during the course of their depositions that Humes had taken a cranial saw to the skull of JFK and enormously enlarged the wound to make it look more like the effect of a bullet fired from behind. I am distressed and dismayed that Sabato is putting a spin on these “irregularities” to suggest that they were the result of haste and incompetence rather than deliberate deception. When you know the evidence, there is no room for doubt about it, where Horne published a five-volume summary of what he had learned inInside the ARRB (2009). Among the first steps in research is to conduct a search of the literature on the subject, which Professor Sabato appears not to have done. My Cambridge study on the true location where JFK was hit in the back was also published in 2009.

When Ken observes that Sabato does not rule out “the chance of a conspiracy of some sort”, he would like you to overlook that Larry’s conclusion is that, even though the Warren Commission was not properly conducted, it reached the correct conclusion. Because the acoustical evidence had induced the HSCA to go beyond The Warren Report (1964), when he discounts it, he leaves the impression that its original conclusion (of Lee Oswald as “the lone assassin”) was correct, even though its own investigation, as Ken reaffirms, was botched and bungled. The problem is that we have overwhelming proof of conspiracy WITHOUT THE ACOUSTICAL EVIDENCE, which means that Larry Sabato has not made his case. That he offers a conclusion that is not supported by premises was what first led me to describe his position as “absurd”–and there is nothing here that changes my mind. I sought to keep it simple by focusing on the gross discrepancies between the descriptions of the wound in my earlier article and the non-existent “magic bullet” in the second. Either way, Professor Sabato has to answer for misrepresenting the evidence in the death of JFK.

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It was also blacked out in early frames of the Zapruder, which means the film is not even self-consistent

James Henry Fetzer Ken Stroupe • 16 days ago

A year ago, I published an earlier piece here, in which I made the following observations:

As a long-time student of the death of JFK and a former visiting member of the University faculty in the department of philosophy, I was fairly astonished to watch Larry Sabato, Ph.D., a prominent member of your faculty, maintain to a national television audience that, even though the Warren Commission’s investigation was bungled, it correctly identified Lee Oswald as the “lone, demented gunman.”

Knowing how much of the evidence that it had relied upon was planted, fabricated or faked, that struck me as a virtual admission that the Warren Commission had framed Lee Oswald, but he had done it, after all. Since it should not have been necessary to frame a guilty man, I wrote the following letter to Dr. Sabato:

“Larry,

I just watched you with Krystal Ball talking about your book, which claims that, while the Warren Commission has its reasoning wrong, it still had its conclusion — that Lee Oswald was the lone demented gunman — right. As a retired professor of philosophy who spent 35 years offering course in logic, critical thinking and scientific reasoning, I have to ask, how do you know? Since you discount the evidence presented by the Warren Commission, what is your proof?

In the brief for your book on amazon.com, it states, “Sabato reexamines JFK’s assassination using heretofore unseen information to which he has had unique access…” What information could that possibly be? I have spent more than 20 years investigating the case with the best qualified experts to have ever studied it, have three edited books on his death—Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003)—and I am fascinated that you might have “new information.”

Given your background, I have to ask if you have made any studies of the medical evidence in this case, which is especially complicated, involving altered X-rays and fake autopsy photos. At Parkland the wound was described as the size of your fist when you double it up, but at Bethesda it had grown to a huge wound close to 1/3 the size of his skull, yet the HSCA reduced it to a small entry at the crown of his head. I am attaching a comparison of those descriptions. How do you explain this?

The proof of conspiracy in this case is actually very simple. All you have to do is locate where JFK was hit in the back. Without the “magic bullet” theory, the Warren Commission — and the case for a lone gunman — falls apart. Are you aware that the “magic bullet” theory is not only false but provably false and, indeed, not even anatomically possible? I attach a peer-reviewed article establishing this, which I presented during a conference at Cambridge. I would be grateful to know what I have wrong.

As someone who has admired your work in the past, I am concerned.

Best wishes,

Jim”

There was more, but the argument was crystal-clear and deserved a substantial response.

He did not respond then and your discussion of his book, which comparatively few will ever read, is non-responsive to my complaint about what he told a national television audience. I am struck that you are not rebutting anything that I have said here because, even when we discount the acoustical recording, the case for conspiracy is overwhelming. I not only reported the gross discrepancy in the description of the head wound but also explained that, merely by determining where JFK was hit in the back, we can prove the existence of conspiracy.

If there was no “magic bullet”, then the wound to JFK’s throat and those to Connally have to be accounted for on the basis of other shots and other shooters. I issued that complaint to him on 24 October 2013. My proof was published in 2009 in an international, peer-reviewed journal. It is not a difficult argument, yet Professor Sabato has yet to respond and either defend the indefensible or admit that he made a serious mistake. After more than 20 years of research on the assassination, I am not letting him off the hook. Mr. Jefferson’s University deserves better.

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