John Chuckman
REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM “CONFESSIONS FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL” BY JOHN CHUCKMAN ON AMAZON.CA
I watched this some time ago.
It is of course a riveting claim, and the man is fairly convincing in the way he speaks.
But I’m afraid to say that what he says is no truer than the Warren Commission report, which is to say, not at all.
As someone long familiar with the assassination literature, I spotted a serious error in the man’s story.
There is no question that someone on the Knoll fired from the front. We had witnesses at the hospital to damage to the limo’s front windshield and the metal trim around it.
That evidence was always denied by officials, and the limo was rushed to Detroit to be re-built, very much including a new front windshield.
And there is no doubt that Kennedy was hit by at least two shots from the front.
The first in the throat as his limo emerged, in the Zapruder film, from behind the freeway sign. This is supported by testimony of all attending emergency room doctors that that wound was a wound of entrance.
They performed tracheotomy on the wound for breathing apparatus, somewhat enlarging it. It was further cut sometime in the autopsy work. In the photos we have of Kennedy’s body, illegally distributed by someone unknown, there is a rather stark one of Kennedy lying on a table with the then much-enlarged wound clearly visible.
This was done to support the notion of its being a wound of exit rather than entrance, the official Warren Commission story. We needed Oswald behind the President firing.
The second shot, the truly fatal one, was from the right front. This is the one that blew away a portion of his skull and scattered brain material behind, striking police outriders.
This is the shot the man featured in the film claims was his. But he claims only a single shot. Moreover, the way he describes firing it just does not quite jive with what we see in the Zapruder film.
So, just on that basis, the man’s claim is not true.
But we have new evidence now, the first seriously important evidence in many years. This also suggests something quite different than the man in the film claims.
Just-released assassination documents show that two people - Eugene Dinkin of the Army and David Christensen of the Air Force - intercepted independently, in their official work with decoding and secret communications, some advance discussion of the Kennedy assassination. The names Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey were in the decoded material. Both men were committed to mental institutions for a time, the old Soviet trick to totally discredit someone.
It is very interesting the name of the notorious Corsican assassin, Jean Souetre, coming up.
The greatest book ever written on the assassination was Anthony Summer's original "Conspiracy" about forty years ago.
It is not to be confused with any of the later editions which are totally different books. Indeed, I’ve always suspected someone got to Summers for his later editions. The books tended to take the unconvincing Mafia-did-it slant which offialdom made great efforts to promote.
Summers, who was a gifted investigative reporter from Britain and did some other ground-breaking work, as with his books on J. Edgar Hoover and Marylin Monroe, mentioned the Corsican figure and trying to trace him in the original book.
Of course, the name Guy Bannister (retired Senior FBI agent from Chicago) is interesting, too. He was in his retirement from FBI running some kind of dirty operation in New Orleans under a cover. Guns for anti-Cuba forces likely and other anti-Castro activity. He was a virulent American commie-hater type.
He had Oswald working at his shop, something we only learned by an accident.
Oswald was running a phony campaign about fair play for Cuba in which he handed out pamphlets to people which contained a form to be filled-out and mailed.
The concept is an old security agency trick for getting names of people who are sympathizers with some cause under suspicion.
The accident was Oswald's in using an office stamp for Bannister's Camp street office on the backs of some of the pamphlets. It connected them, and that wasn't supposed to happen.
Oswald's pamphlet activity has always been cited as yet more evidence of Oswald's communism or sympathies with communism, but we know from many little facts that Oswald was not a communist. He was a patriotic type in fact. His statements about Marxism, made, mind you, at the time of working covertly with Bannister, were clearly legend-building stuff.
Just the opposite was true. He was being paid to hand out phony pamphlets and to do other tasks, working against Castro and with guys like red-neck Bannister.
Cuba is pretty much what the whole assassination was about, which is why the assassins needed someone identified as a communist as their patsy. There were large numbers of men associated with America’s security agencies at the time who were almost hysterical about Castro because he represented a serious challenge to an American Imperial Plantation System which had long kept an entire continent subservient.
And one of those particularly vicious types at the CIA was William Harvey, the third name mentioned on the intercepts. Harvey ran such dirty stuff as Operation Mongoose, a 1960 secret plan to decapitate Cuba's leadership. He was known as CIA's chief assassin.
