Don Curtis, Parkland resident, on JFK assassination: "the posterior part of his head was blown out."

[Karmadillo]

114. Have the photos really been authenticated? Bolo Boffin says yes, but

the facts maybe say no.

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_5.htm

HOW FIVE INVESTIGATIONS INTO JFK’S MEDICAL/AUTOPSY EVIDENCE GOT IT WRONG
Gary L. Aguilar, MD and Kathy Cunningham
May 2003

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Did the HSCA Really Authenticate JFK’s Autopsy Photographs?

Given the centrality of autopsy photographs, whose bona fides the Justice Department, the Clark Panel and the Rockefeller Commission took as a given, the HSCA quite rightly sought scientific validation. It got it, announcing that the committee had authenticated the images. But in a footnote in the HSCA’s Volume 6, the committee hinted at a niggling flaw in its endeavor. It reported:

“Because the Department of Defense was unable to locate the camera and lens that were used to take these [autopsy] photographs, the [photographic] panel was unable to engage in an analysis similar to the one undertaken with the Oswald backyard pictures that was designed to determine whether a particular camera in issue had been used to take the photographs that were the subject of inquiry.”[316]

In effect, the HSCA was saying that it was unhappy the original camera was unavailable to totally close the loop. Nevertheless, it expressed satisfaction the loop had been closed enough for confidence in the images because it had found features in the extant images that showed a kind of internal consistency one would find only in authentic images. Those consistencies – the presence in the collection of “stereo pairs” of images, and so on – essentially comprised virtually the entire HSCA case for authentication. But there was an important part of the story the HSCA didn’t tell in either the text or in the footnote.

Luckily, in the late 1990s the JFK Review Board’s Doug Horne did tell it, after he excavated that part of the story from suppressed HSCA files. It is a rather different story than the one implied by the HSCA’s comment, “Because the Department of Defense was unable to locate the camera and lens that were used to take these [autopsy] photographs.” Regarding that very sentence, Horne wrote, “By late 1997, enough related documents had been located and assembled by the authors to bring into serious doubt the accuracy of the HSCA’s [statement].”[317] It was not precisely true the Department of Defense had been unable to locate the camera used to take JFK’s autopsy photographs. After what chief counsel Robert Blakey bitterly complained had been a pattern of stonewalling,[318] the DoD finally lifted a finger.

It turns out that in fact the DoD had found the camera. The DoD wrote the HSCA that the Naval Hospital only had one camera of this type in its possession and that, “the only [camera] in use at the National Naval Medical Center in 1963”[319] had already been sent to the HSCA for study. The HSCA, however, wasn’t pleased with the camera the Defense Department had sent. In a letter asking the Secretary of Defense to look for another one, HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey explained the problem:

“<O>ur photographic experts have determined that this camera, or at least the particular lens and shutter attached to it, could not have been used to take [JFK’s] autopsy pictures.”[320]

Whereas the HSCA had publicly asserted it had been unable to perform corroboration tests on JFK’s autopsy photographs because original autopsy camera could not be located, the suppressed record suggests that the camera was found, and that the HSCA had in fact conducted corroboration tests, tests that showed the camera didn’t match Kennedy’s images. The HSCA staff elected to keep this nonsensitive information from the public. They also withheld it from their forensic consultants who, like the medical experts on the Clark and Rockefeller panels, had reasonably assumed the pictures were authentic when they formulated their conclusions.

lots more...