Response to Deep Politics Quarterly article


Posted by Jim Fetzer ® (jack white,Jim Fetzer), Jan 23,1999,17:27 Post Reply  Forum


Dear DellaRosa group,

With the demise of the Queenbee group, I no longer have a place
to post emails, since my University Computer Network does not access
newsgroups. Jack White tells me that this is a place inhabited
by sincere JFK researchers, so I thought you might be interested
in my response to a recent article in Walt Brown*s DEEP POLITICS
QUARTERLY regarding the November Lancer Conference. I had submitted
it to Queenbee, but got a message saying that group was no longer operative.

Quote of my Queenbee message:

Walt and Vince,

The cheap shots directed at me in "Conference Notes" by Greg Jaynes in the
current issue of DEEP POLITICS QUARTERLY 4/2 (January 1999) certainly de-
serve a rebuttal. I had addressed these matters previously in a post on
queenbee, which I am hereby submitting. My confidence in your sense of
fair play, however, has been severely shaken by your refusal to publish my
earlier response to Walt Brown's review of ASSASSINATION SCIENCE. Here is
a clear-cut case where you have a moral obligation to permit me to reply.

As an illustration of the gross unfairness of what appears on this page,
the author reports that several persons (Vern and Jeff Pascal are named)
wrote to say "they felt Madeleine Brown gave an outstanding effort in her
commentary on the LBJ years--and involvement", but nowhere mention that I
was responsible for arranging and moderating that session. Madeleine and
I have had over 100 conversations over the years, and it was a privilege
for me to interview her. Here is a chance for you to correct the record.

Jim

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:25:54 -0600 (CST)
From: james fetzer
To: research@queenbee.net
Subject: JUST THINK ABOUT WHAT'S GOING ON HERE

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Several posts have now appeared (from Michael Parks, Martha Moyer, Mike
Sheppard and others) trashing the alterationist position without address-
ing the new arguments and the new evidence of film alteration presented
during the conference. Indeed, these critics do not even explain WHAT
WAS PRESENTED during the conference before issuing their condemnations.

It might be worthwhile to consider that the panel was divided into pro-
and anti-conspiracy groups with three members apiece: Jack White, David
Mantik, and David Lifton were pro, while Hal Verb, Josiah Thompson, and
Art Snyder were anti. It should be observed that I was not a member of
the panel, but became involved by an email from Art and Margaret Snyder:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 19:58:10 -0800
From: Arthur E. Snyder
To: James Fetzer
Subject: Talk During Lancer Z-Panel

Dear Prof. Fetzer,

As the moderators, we would like to invite you to speak for about 10 minutes during the Lancer Zapruder film panel on the topic of eyewitness testimony and the authenticity of the Zapruder film. Margaret has been following the debate on the internet and we feel that what you have to say needs to be heard.

This time will be taken off the top and will not be subtracted from the time of the pro-alteration panelists. You will still be a key commentator and will share in the time allocated to them.

We leave for Dallas Sunday morning, so we will assume you accept unless we hear otherwise.

Arthur and Margaret Snyder
___________________________________________________________________________

I frankly was suspicious about this invitation, suspecting that I was about
to be used as "the straight man" for criticism by Tink, with whom I had re-
cently engaged in a rather strenuous exchange, some of which I have posted
as a partial response to the recycling of old material in his presentation.

At the Dallas Grand Hotel, four different people warned me that I was being
"set up" for attack by Art and Tink. That did not bother me at all in the
abstract, because I knew that Tink, in particular, had problems with one of
the arguments that appears in ASSASSINATION SCIENCE concerning reliability
of eyewitness testimony, which is discussed on p. 210 and on pp. 278-279.

Art Snyder several times reminded me that I was NOT a member of the pro-al-
teration panel, even attempting to physically intervene when I started to
take a seat at the table on the podium. This was resolved by NONE of the
pro-alterationists sitting at the table. The schedule went as follows:

(1) Jack White presented a 45-minute video advancing at least five or six
decisive proofs of film alteration plus mentioning at least a dozen more
features of the film that support alteration, which ended with an inter-
view with a French investigative journalist, William Reymond, who claims
to have viewed the original, unaltered version of the Zapruder film and
who describes what he saw in the original not included in current films.

(2) David Mantik presented a 30-minute piece discussing evidence of film
alteration and especially focusing on Roland Zavada's recently-released
report to the ARRB on the authenticity of the film. He explained that
Zavada's technical focus did not include issues of content, which meant
that the most important evidence of film alteration was not within his
scope of consideration. Nevertheless, numerous technical findings that
are found in Zavada's report provide further evidence of film alteration.

Early in Mantik's presentation, he called upon me (who was handling
his overheads) to briefly address two key points, namely: the necessity
for eyewitness testimony in courts of law to lay a foundation for the ad-
missibility of photographic records, including film; and the reliability
of eyewitness testimony under certain conditions. I put up and read two
key paragraphs from ASSASSINATION SCIENCE found on p. 210 based upon MC-
CORMICK ON EVIDENCE and Loftus' EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY as published there.

(3) David Lifton discussed the history of the film and issues involving
chain of possession. Unfortunately for the purpose of this summary, I
had to leave the ballroom to address other matters and, although I came
back before he had concluded his presentation, I cannot from experience
provide further information about details of content of his presentation.

At this point, I was afforded ten minutes to discuss eyewitness tes-
timony, which I had been invited to do. I related an argument that David
Mantik presents in his chapter on the film from ASSASSINATION SCIENCE, in-
cluding reading the eyewitness reports of the limousine being brought to a
halt from some fifteen eyewitnesses, as found on pp. 274-275 of his piece.
I also displayed an overhead drawn from SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS on which he
(David) had identified the locations of most of the witnesses involved.

Interestingly, the witnesses who report the limousine stop are among
the closest witnesses to the assassination, including all four motorcycle
patrolmen. I also mentioned that David had included a summary of a study
published in the Harvard Law Review which Loftus had included in her book
as found on pp. 278-279 of ASSASSINATION SCIENCE. In all cases, pages of
relevance were presented as overheads. The presentation took ten minutes.

I even mentioned that I was here because Tink thought that there was
something wrong with David's argument, which I have endorsed, but that I
did not mind being his "straight man" if there was something to learn from
further discussion. Following my brief remarks, there was a break lasting
around 20 minutes; then the anti-alternationist panel convened as follows:

(4) Hal Verb made a lengthy presentation that may have run as long as 45
minutes, which contained no more than a single sentence concerning film
alteration. The whole piece would have been familiar to anyone who has
heard Hal discuss his views about the sequence of shots, which may have
a place on the program, but not as part of a debate on film alteration.

(5) Tink followed with a presentation that lasted no more than 30 minutes,
during which he make categorical denials of at least five assertions that
David Mantik had made about how some of Zavada's findings in fact support
alteration, none of which Tink supported by any evidence or argument. He
then turned to attacking me on various grounds, with material that would
have been familiar to anyone who had access to our earlier extended debate.

Practially none of you who are reading this would know from what has
been said by others about the conference, but at this point, Debra Conway
took the microphone and issued an extended criticism of Joshiah Tompson
for abusing his position by making personal attacks on a speaker in an
evident attempt to settle an old score remaining from an email exchange.
This lasted more than five minutes. I thought it was highly appropriate.

(6) Art then followed with about 20 minutes of technical explanation of
why David and I had misinterpreted the table published in Loftus' book on
the basis of a distinction between Type I and Type II errors in the theory
of statistical inference. This was the only issue that Art discussed and
concerned only the one issue that I had been specifically asked to address.

At this point, the panel came to the stage, including myself. This I
now believe was a mistake, since our purposes would have been better ser-
ved by my remaining in my seat in the audience. Nevertheless, it happen-
ed this way. Michael Parks had been invited to serve as a commentator,
as had I, and began with a question that I thought was somewhat out of
focus, but whose specific content I cannot at this moment recall. After
a response to the query from David Mantik, Tink Thompson mentioned he had
to depart for COPA shortly and would therefore be unable to remain here.

I felt that, if I were to say anything at all about this whole matter,
I should do so while Tink was present. I therefore took the microphone
and offered several remarks in response to (what had amounted to) around
40 minutes of personal villification. I observed, first, that Tink was
simply begging the question by taking for granted the government's own
account of the chain of possession. I noted, second, that of around 50
arguments for alteration, he and Art had basically focused on only one.

Tink had remarked during his presentation that "you cannot prove a
negative", so I observed, third, that, while he may be strong on rhetoric,
he is weak on logic, offering as examples that the premises "All lecturns
are brown" and "This lecturn is white" (as indeed it was) logically imply
the conclusion, "Not all lecturns are brown", which is a negative; and
that the premises, "Some lectures are nasty", logically implies the con-
clusion, "Not all lectures are nice", which is another obvious negative.

He had also asserted that I was "hiding behind Mantik's skirts" rela-
tive to the eyewitness argument, so I explained, fourth, that in my role
as an editor, I was especially sensitive to the origin of arguments and
that I did not want to take credit for positions that others had advanced,
even though, in this case, as I had explained, I fully agreed with David.

I added that this appeared to be another case of killing the messenger
when you do not like the message, concluding by remarking that it remind-
ed me of a joke told by Richard Pryor, where a man's wife discovers him
in bed with another woman. They get out of bed, dress, she departs and
he casually begins reading a newspaper. The wife stammers, "Who is that
woman?", to which he replies, "What woman?" "That woman you were in bed
with", she says. "There was no woman!", he replies. She asks again and
he shouts, "Listen, who are you going to believe--me or your lying eyes?"

By mid-joke, however, Debra Conway apparently thought that I had said
too much and, after asking me if I had finished, cut off the mike, so I
completed the joke without it. That is the whole unvarnished story about
what happened during this session. The joke took too long to tell, but
I am afraid it sums up perfectly what happened during this session. The
anti-alternationists did essentially nothing to counter the new evidence.

Some of the most sensational evidence of film alteration was presented
at Lancer by Jack White, yet you are not hearing about it in these posts.
Indeed, under the circumstances, the posts from Parks, Moyer, and Shepp-
herd are not merely seriously misleading but completely irresponsible.
They are faithless distortions intended to distract you from the facts.
I am not the issue. The film has been doctored and it has been proven!
But if you do not think about what is going on here, you may be taken in.

David and I have discussed the matter since and wonder exactly what
Art Snyder or Tink Thompson think eyewitnesses would have reported, say,
if the limousine had NOT stopped? Would they have reported that it HAD
stopped? And if the limousine HAD stopped, what would they expect them
to report? That it had NOT? I am not convinced that Art is even right
in his technical criticism of the use we have made of the Harvard study,
but they have certainly not explained away the eyewitness testimony--or
any of the other arguments that were presented in support of alteration.

Jim

Thanks to Rich for allowing me to post this here.

Jim




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