Missing Octafish today. That is all. nt

[Octafish]

106. The Warrant Report (sic)

From someone much smarter and better educated than I can ever be, thanks to birth and probation:

The Warrant Report

Tim Madigan on the philosophers who investigated the Kennedy assassination.

EXCERPT...

It is a remarkable fact that three of the earliest and most influential critics of the Warren Report were professional philosophers – Bertrand Russell, Richard Popkin and Josiah Thompson. Russell, who was 91 years old at the time of the shooting, was one of the first prominent individuals to raise serious questions about the report, even before it was completed. In early 1964 he helped organize the ‘Who Killed Kennedy Committee’, and befriended attorney Mark Lane, author of the first major critique of the Warren Report, Rush to Judgment. Writing from his home in Wales and guided by Lane’s investigations, Russell issued his ‘Sixteen Questions on the Assassination’ a few weeks before the Report came out. Raising doubts about the impartiality, credibility and competency of the Commission, he pointed out that all of its members – who were appointed directly by President Lyndon Johnson – were deeply connected with the Washington establishment, especially its secretive investigative agencies, the CIA and the FBI. Some of the Commission could be suspected of having a vested interest in covering up uncomfortable facts about their own strained relations with the late president. For instance, Commission member Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA, had been fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Not a single Commissioner, Russell asserted, would have been accepted as an impartial member of a jury if Oswald had been tried (a moot point after Oswald’s own murder by Jack Ruby a few days after the JFK shooting). Russell also raised questions about the fact that several people in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination had claimed to hear bullets being fired from in front of the President. Such claims were dismissed by the Commissioners, who seemed dedicated to proving that all bullets had been fired solely by Oswald, from behind the presidential motorcade. While accepting the well-known point that witness testimony is often unreliable, Russell nonetheless expressed his worries that the Commissioners were so eager to prove Oswald was the lone gunman that they ignored evidence contradicting this. Most of all, Russell asked why the Report’s conclusion was known well before the investigation was completed. This seemed to go against all the proper methods of truth-gathering and rules of logic, and looked more like an attempt to make the premises fit the conclusion rather than having the conclusion follow from the premises.

Shortly after the Warren Report was issued, Richard Popkin, then a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, wrote a highly influential article for the New York Review of Books entitled ‘The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory’ (later expanded into a book). Popkin argued that if one used just the Warren Report as evidence, then one must necessarily conclude that there had to have been at least two Lee Harvey Oswalds for all the various details of the Report to make sense. The government’s own case for a lone gunman contradicted itself.

Popkin admitted that reading all 26 volumes of the report was a daunting task – especially as at the time there was no index for the work – but it was a labour he was up to. Popkin was noted for his encyclopedic memory, his ability to put together disparate facts (as witnessed by his investigative work in the history of ideas, which detailed previously unknown connections between various Sixteenth Century theologians and philosophers) and his dogged pursuit of problems. Popkin, a student of Skepticism, basically cast a skeptical eye on the purported solid evidence offered by the Warren Commission to prove that there was no conspiracy. If there was more than one ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ who was at more than one place simultaneously, or more than one person purporting to be Oswald, then there had to be a conspiracy. Thus, the Warren Report proved the very opposite of its own conclusion.

SNIP...

Here lies the continuing epistemological nightmare of the Kennedy shooting. Will we ever know what actually happened that day? There have recently been Warren Report defenders such as Gerald Posner (Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, 1994) and Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Manson family, who just published Reclaiming History: the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007), a 1,632 page book in which Bugliosi painstakingly attempts to answer every criticism of the Report. But there remains something deeply unsatisfactory about the Report. Whether because of the shoddy nature of the Commission’s investigations, the uncertainties and contradictions of the eyewitness interviews, the ulterior motives of the Commissioners and their aides, or other more controversial reasons, the very public murder of President Kennedy continues to nag at our collective consciousness. The trail grows colder, but questions remain – questions initially raised by three devoted professional truth seekers.

SOURCE: https://philosophynow.org/issues/66/The_Warrant_Report

Now, that's the logical -- the philosophical -- perspective. What the author doesn't bring up is the information that Allen Dulles withheld from the Warren Commission, specifically the Mafia-CIA plots to assassinate Castro. Going from what we've learned since 1963 and the Warren Report in 1964, Dulles and CIA actions have more than a potential bearing on the case. They also are proof of obstruction of justice.