United States House Select Committee On Assassinations - Criticisms and Further Research

Criticisms and Further Research

The sole acoustic evidence relied on by the committee's experts to support its theory of a fourth gunshot (and a gunman on the grassy knoll) in the JFK assassination, was a Dictabelt recording alleged to be from a stuck transmitter on a police motorcycle in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. After the committee finished its work, however, an amateur researcher listened to the recording and discovered faint crosstalk of transmissions from another police radio channel known to have been made a minute after the assassination. This was supported by the National Academy of Science article.

Further, the Dallas motorcycle policeman thought to be the source of the sounds followed the motorcade to the hospital at high speed, his siren blaring, immediately after the shots were fired. Yet the recording is of a mostly idling motorcycle, eventually determined to have been at JFK's destination, the Trade Mart, miles from Dealey Plaza.

In 2001, this criticism of the Committee's acoustic evidence was rebutted in a Science and Justice article written by D.B. Thomas, a government scientist and JFK assassination researcher. He concluded the HSCA finding of a second shooter was correct and that the NAS panel's study was flawed. Thomas surmises that the Dictaphone needle jumped and created an overdub on Channel One.

The 1981 Committee on Ballistic Acoustics was charged with reviewing the HSCA’s acoustic evidence, they concluded that the acoustic evidence of conspiracy was invalid. Donald Thomas who reportedly performed the first independent peer review of the HSCA’s work and who people think was “an expert on acoustic testing” never read Thomas’ own report on his work with the acoustic evidence in which he acknowledges that "he is not an acoustic expert."

In 2003, computer animator Dale Myers used various films from the day of the shooting to plot the locations and speeds of the motorcycle police officers during the assassination, and concluded that no police motorcycles were anywhere near the precise microphone location on Houston Street required by the Committee's acoustic experts. Myers' study confirmed the same misgivings voiced by HSCA photographic consultant Richard E. Sprague in 1978.

A majority of witnesses who testified on the source of the shots said they came from the direction of the Depository. However, many witnesses thought the shots came from the direction of the Knoll. Only five witnesses, from a total of over one hundred, thought the shots came from two directions simultaneously.

The Mitrokhin Archive--The KGB in Europe and the West, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, documents extensive manipulation by the KGB in creating and fostering conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination. The origin of the infamous forged letter, purported to be from Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, remained inconclusive in the final opinion of the Committee, leaving, in the words of Hunt, "an article of faith that I had some role in the Kennedy assassination."

In 2003, Robert Blakey, staff director and chief counsel for the Committee, issued a statement on the Central Intelligence Agency:

...I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald.... We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.

See also: Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy