
Dealey Plaza with Grassy Knoll to the Left
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A new, peer-reviewed article in Science and Justice, the
publication of Britain?s prestigious Forensic Science Society,
proves there was a gunshot from the grassy knoll during the
Kennedy assassination at Dealey Plaza in Dallas in 1963.
This means that there must have been two gunmen. Lee
Harvey Oswald, accused of shooting at Kennedy from the a
window of the Texas School Book Depository, could not have
been in two places at once. The assassination was therefore
a conspiracy, and the murder of the President remains an
unsolved crime. There is no statute of limitation on murder.
The National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. disputed the
evidence of a 4th shot from the grassy knoll, which could be
heard on a police recording of the sounds from Dealey Plaza
that day, saying that it was simply random noise. D.B.
Thomas, author of the British article, says this viewpoint is
seriously flawed, since it failed to take into account the
testimony of a Dallas patrolman who said the gunshot-like
noises from the knoll occurred ?at the exact instant that John
F. Kennedy was assassinated.?
Former House Assassinations Committee member Robert
Blakey said the NAS study always bothered him. ?This is an
honest, careful scientific examination of everything we did,
with all the appropriate checks,? he said of the article. ?It
shows we made some mistakes too, but minor mistakes.
?The main thing is when push comes to shove, he [Thomas]
increased the degree of confidence that the shot from the
grassy knoll was real, not static. We thought there was a 95
percent chance it was a shot. He puts it at 96.3 percent.
Either way, that?s beyond a reasonable doubt.?
Physicist Norman Ramsey of Harvard, who was chairman of
the NAS panel that dismissed possibility of a knoll bullet, said
he was ?still fairly confident? of his group?s work but wants to
study the journal article carefully before making a comment.
Although the evidence is now legally strong enough to justify
re-opening the Kennedy murder case, it is doubtful that the
FBI, already strongly committed to the 'single gunman'
theory, would mount an effective investigation.
Meanwhile, in a last-minute good deed that has went
unnoticed amid the scandal surrounding his pardons,
President Clinton on January 19 rejected an appeal by the
secretive President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(PFIAB) and directed that hundreds of pages of historical
PFIAB records related to the assassination of President
Kennedy be released to the National Archives.
Several years ago, the JFK Assassination Records Review
Board (ARRB) ruled that excerpts from 17 PFIAB documents,
dating from 1961 to 1963, were subject to a 1992 law
requiring their
release to the public.
Despite the clear language of the requirement, the PFIAB
objected to the action. The PFIAB then waited until late 1998
when the ARRB was about to be disbanded, then filed an
appeal to the President seeking to block disclosure of the
designated JFK records. Due to the lateness of the appeal,
the Review Board was unable to reply. But President Clinton
rejected the appeal the day before his term ended.
The newly released records relate to U.S. operations against
Cuba during the Bay of Pigs incident and the Cuban Missile
Crisis, said Professor Anna Nelson, a historian at American
University and a member of the JFK Assassination Records
Review Board. "These are records that will give you new
insight into that period," she said. The documents are now
open to researchers at the JFK assassination records
collection at Archives II in College Park, Maryland.
As a larger consequence of President Clinton's action, it may
now become easier to win public access to other historical
records of the PFIAB. Using the same legal fiction that NASA
uses to prevent the public from having direct access to Mars
photos, the PFIAB has contended that it ?owns? its records
and that they are beyond the reach of the law. In a
December 2000 report to the Secretary of State, the State
Department's Historical Advisory Committee warned it
was ?gravely concerned about the efforts of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to
block access to and to delay declassification of its
documents.?
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