Luna's Ridiculous Hearing
- Fred Litwin
- May 20
- 8 min read
Updated: May 22
My initial thoughts. More to come.
I must be a glutton for punishment. I watched the complete two hours+ of the Luna hearing and I thought my brain would explode. I don't know what was worse - the silly testimony of the witnesses or the brainless questions of the committee members.
The objective of the Task Force is not to indulge in conspiracy theories, but to push for the release of information so these theories can be put to bed and the American people can finally have truth.
And yet they engaged in some of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Where to even start?
Dr. Don Curtis
Dr. Don Curtis is one of the few remaining doctors from Parkland Hospital. He is a dentist and he found himself in the emergency room where he performed some cut-down on JFK"s legs.
He said that he was never called to testify before the Warren Commission but you can find his testimony to Arlen Specter in Volume VI. Here is his testimony about the head wound:
At the end of his testimony, Dr. Curtis was asked if he had anything to add:
In 1998, he wrote a letter to Vince Palamara in which he wrote:
The wound involving the right posterior lateral surface of the skull appeared to me to be an exit wound or a tangential entrance wound.
I have to say that Dr. Curtis's memory has improved over time. He now says there was a entrance wound in JFK's right temple, and an exit wound in the back of his head.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (43:00)
Dr. Curtis: After I did that, then Dr Perry had already completed the tracheostomy, and I was looked up, and then the President's heart had stopped or it wasn't running. They put a monitor on the President and found out his heart was not beating. And so the, and so the external cardiac massage was being done by Kemp Clark, the chief of neurosurgery, And somebody relieved him, and Kemp Clark went and picked up the head and stopped the resuscitation. "This wound is not compatible with life." You got dead quiet. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody said anything for the longest time. Then he said, okay, and he looked -- by that time, the chiefs of all the surgical services were against the wall, across the room from me, and all in white coats, and they had responded to the call that they needed help. And so he said, pointed them out, I need to tell each of you individually what the wound is, so you can say that later on. And then he described the wound as about a three or four inch hole in the posterior cranium and then there's a bullet hole in the right temple. So he described it. The bullet hole came through the temple, into the cranial vault, created huge pressure in the cranial vault, and when the bullet finally tumbled into the posterior wall, it blew it out, and he explained all that to individually, to these five doctors, seven doctors, and those doctors knew what was happening and what happened to the President and the wound that killed him, and they never were called by the by the Warren Commission. So, that didn't work.
Really? This does not match anybody else's testimony. And all the doctors either provided statements or did testify before the Warren Commission.
It's clear that Dr, Curtis has read the conspiracy literature because he referred to the many turns of the so-called magic bullet. And he even presented a diagram of the shots - including a shot from the overpass which somehow hit Kennedy in the throat -- missing the windshield and Governor Connally.
Dan Hardway
Dan Hardway testified about his work with the HSCA and his relationship with the CIA. This excerpt from his written submission caught my eye:
He says the CIA repeatedly denied that any associated with DRE existed in 1963. But here is an excerpt from an HSCA draft report on the DRE:
Hardway also wrote that "It was also denied that any CIA officer was assigned to work with them in 1963." Here is another excerpt from that same HSCA draft report:
The report notes that "with this discovery, someone immediately called the DRE's case officer at the Miami CIA station."
Did Hardway not read this report?
Hardway believes there was a CIA covert operation directed against the HSCA. He claims this was admitted in a CIA letter to the Committee, but I sure would like to see that letter.
To Hardway, Oswald had no agency. He was a pawn in the CIA hands when he went to Mexico City and he was a pawn in the CIA's hands in New Orleans. This was all done to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Why they had to send Oswald to Mexico City to do that is beyond me.
Judge John Tunheim
Judge John Tunheim was a major disappointment. He told Congresswoman Luna that the CIA misled the ARRB regarding George Joannides.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (1:20:20)
John Tunheim: We had in our hands a small file on George Joannides that was disclosed. That disclosed nothing really, so it was returned. We didn't know the details of his work at the time. We now know much more about Joannides and his file should be immediately disclosed. There's no reason anymore for protecting those files. Clearly, we were misled. I actually wrote to President Biden asking that he order the CIA to release the Joannides file, and I never received a response.
The ARRB knew that Joannides oversaw the DRE in 1963 and that he was a liaison with the HSCA.
And then Tunheim came out with this during questioning: (1:47:05)
John Tunheim: I think it's an interesting question you posed as to why. I mean, I think that clearly, if you look at the history of all this, there were cover-ups by both the FBI and the CIA, perhaps other organizations, in part because they had a lot of contact with Oswald in advance of the assassination, and there's no evidence that they alerted the Secret Service to the erratic behavior of Oswald. Oswald was in New Orleans. There was CIA contact with him, then, when he was a volunteer for this Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I mean, they knew all about his visit to Mexico City. Both the FBI and the CIA knew about it. The FBI was following him in Dallas because he was a suspect in another shooting. All of this suggests that they had a lot of contact with him ahead of time, and the -- I don't know what that suggests, other than the fact that they wanted to cover that up, the fact that they knew a lot about him ahead of time and didn't do much about it.
Oswald was a suspect in another shooting? Where on earth did Tunheim get that from? There was no CIA contact with Oswald in New Orleans - Carlos Bringuier had contact with him, but he was an unpaid delegate to the DRE and only provided information to the CIA after the assassination.
Douglas Horne
Douglas Horne was a huge embarrassment. He testified that the Zapruder film was altered and that JFK's body was also altered before the autopsy. He wrote that he believes that JFK was shot three times in the head - I would have liked to have seen him debate Dr. Curtis about the head shots.
I've already debunked a lot of Horne's nonsense:
Photographs of the brain
Stringer was very clear that he took the photographs of JFK's brain.
Oliver Stone's so-called documentary makes it sound like the autopsy photographer said that he did not take the photos of JFK's brain that are in the current inventory,
The Autopsy Photographs
Did Robert Knudsen take additional autopsy photographs?
Did Saundra Spencer take additional autopsy photographs?
The reason Horne focuses so much on the brain is that the left hemisphere of JFK"s brain was intact -- meaning there could not have been a shot from the grassy knoll. Dr. Cyril Wecht recognized this years ago:
A letter from Dr. Wecht to Thomas Stamm on the head shot.
A letter from Dr. Wecht to Sylvia Meagher on the head shot.
Abraham Bolden also testified but the streaming service did not capture the audio of his presentation. I hope that they release the video so that I can comment on his testimony.
The questions from the Committee members were ridiculous. No one was prepared to ask serious questions. Luna apologized to Bolden for his treatment by the U. S. government -- but has she reviewed the trial documents from his conviction. Last year, I went to the National Archives and I have the complete Bolden file and I can tell you that there is a lot of evidence against Bolden. At some point, I will review it all.
Had they done a modicum of research about Douglas Horne, they might have asked him about the shot fired by limousine driver William Greer.
Inside the ARRB, Volume 4, page 1150
The very unpleasant and tentative possibility exists that limousine driver William Greer fired a fourth head shot into the President's left temple with his revolver. This cannot be proven today, since there is no left temporal wound mentioned in the autopsy report, nor is there such a wound depicted in the autopsy photographs of the left side of the head (But the autopsy report has been rewritten, and the head was not shaved at autopsy, so the absence of evidence for a left temporal wound in the autopsy report and in the autopsy photographs is not conclusive, by any means.)
Inside the ARRB, Volume 5, page 1415:
And so Horne believes the Zapruder film has been altered to hide the car stop when Greer shot at JFK.
Somebody should pull the plug on the Committee, or get an adult to oversee it. If they were serious, they would ask Robert Reynolds, and Gerald Posner to testify. They would focus on the files in Moscow, Minsk, Mexico City and Havana, and get some of the private collections online.
Lastly, we need digitization of the current collection and a new search tool.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts
An analysis of Congresswoman Luna's Congressional Hearings
Congresswoman Luna doesn't really know much about the JFK assassination.
Have a look at the book on Luna's desk
Morley somehow knows what is in the supposed 2,400 recently-discovered FBI files.
Gabbard likes James Douglass's book, JFK and the Unspeakable,
A link to an excellent article by Michael Isikoff.
Congresswoman Luna Finds a New Witness
Here is the conspiracy witness who knows the truth.
