From www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!news.mindspring.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.comm.net!not-for-mail Tue Sep 24 21:19:30 PDT 1996 Article: 2330 of alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated Path: netcom.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!news.mindspring.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.comm.net!not-for-mail From: jmcadams@netcom.com (John Mcadams) Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated Subject: Mercer Documents 6 / Garrison account Date: 21 Sep 1996 22:18:05 -0500 Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Lines: 157 Sender: jmcadams@able.comm.net Approved: jmcadams@netcom.com Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: able.comm.net Apparently-To: alt-conspiracy-jfk-moderated@uunet.uu.net Status: O Jim Garrison, "A Heritage of Stone" (New York: J.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970), pp 170-174: On the morning that the President of the United States was to be executed, the intermittent early rains had ended and the sun was shining brightly. Julia Ann Mercer was driving westward on Elm Street and had just passed the grassy knoll when a traffic jam occurred, briefly halting all movement. This happened about an hour before the President's parade was to arrive. When stopped by the congestion, she was just beyond the underpass a short dis- tance farther down the parade route from the knoll itself. The knoll, it will be recalled, was the high ground, con- cealed by a wooden fence and defiladed by trees, overlook- ing the street on which the President soon would be passing. As she pulled to a stop, she noticed on her right a green, unmarked pickup truck parked next to the curbing. To her considerable surprise, she saw a young man dismount from the truck and remove a rifle. The rifle was wrapped in brown paper, but its outlines were quite unmistakable. The young man carried the rifle up the steep incline, which was a westward extension of the grassy knoll, just across the railroad tracks from the knoll. Aware that the President soon was to be passing by this location, Julia Ann Mercer stared at the driver, who was still at the steering wheel of the truck. The driver, whose round face and thinning dark hair would become a familiar one to her, turned and glanced back at her. He stared at her for a long moment, and she saw his features distinctly. One more time, before the traffic jam cleared up, their eyes met, and she looked at him full in the face. Then she drove off and let the incident pass from her mind. When the news of the assassination rocked the world, she recalled the incident of the truck and the unloading of the rifle. Here a comment must be made about Julia Mer- cer. She is a highly intelligent individual of obvious good character, the kind of witness whom any lawyer would feel fortunate to be able to call before a jury. Her conver- sation from the status of witness to nonwitness is a forceful commentary on the superstate's serene disregard of truth, on its contempt for the mind of the individual. On Saturday, the day after the assassination and before Oswald's murder by Ruby, FBI agents showed Miss Mer- cer identification photographs. They lay in front of her perhaps two dozen pictures of men. Among them she rec- ognized the driver of the truck from which the rifle was unloaded just past the knoll. When the photograph was turned over by one of the agents she saw the man's name: Jack Ruby. She remem- bered the name afterward. She informed the agents that this was the driver of the truck from which the rifle was taken. When asked if the young man resembled Lee Oswald, whose face already was being hammered into history as the lone assassin, she re- plied that he did not resemble Oswald in any way. Appar- ently, the government, not satisfied with Oswald being merely the assassin at the rear, was seeking to have him firing from the front as well. Two days after the assassination, Julia Mercer was watching television with her family when she saw the live telecast of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald in the stomach. She yelled to her family that this was the fellow who had been driving the pickup truck whick had unloaded the young man with the rifle. Even if the FBI had found her story unbelievable, which apparently was not the case since the agents produced his picture before he exploded into public view, certainly by noon Sunday Jack Ruby's action at police headquar- ters should have aroused some interest. The government's response, however, was not to take action on her state- ment, but instead, to alter her statement so as to make it meaningless. First of all, her statement was changed to have it say that she was unable to recognize the driver of the truck. Had this alteration not been made, it would have been obvious to the world that the government had refrained from arresting Ruby until he had the opportunity to kill Lee Oswald. Had it been your picture and had you shot a duck out of season you would have been arrested in short order. Ruby, however, was not bothered. Like Ferrie, he possessed a special status in the eyes of the government agents. Then her statement was altered further to have it say that the plain green truck was, intead, a green truck with "AIR CONDITIONING" printed in black on the sides. Of course, in the world of reality black print is not used on green trucks because it is then very nearly invisible, but in the world of illusion in which the federal government was con- ducting its investigation, one color was as good as another. The result was that many men wasted many hours trying to find a nonexistent "air-conditioning" truck. Then the government's agents wrote up a "supplemen- tary investigative report" dated November 28 to make it appear that on that later date Julia Ann Mercer was shown a photograph of Jack Ruby and could not identify him as the driver. The FBI understandably was modest about its speedy guess, 24 hours before he killed Oswald, that Ruby might have been more than a mere nightclub owner. Con- sequently, it changed the date when it showed her this photograph to five days later, thus altering the fact of its extremely unusual inaction with regard to Ruby. It is ob- vious that the bureau, undeniably efficient in ordinary mat- ters, was cooperating meticulously with some unseen force. The only entity which can cause the bureau to depart from its religious devotion to efficiency is another govern- ment agency. By protocol government agencies are espe- cially cooperative with each other. In a coup d'etat where a government agency is involved, it can be expected that such routine protocol will be followed to an exaggerated extent. The surviving department heads will be more in- terested in pleasing the authorities above then than in serving a dead man in a box. To shore up the careful construction seeking to undo what Julia Mercer saw, seeking to remove Ruby's name from connection with the President's assassination, an af- fidavit was drawn up ostensibly given by Julia Ann Mercer to the Sheriff's office, and her name was signed to the affi- davit. It was not, however, Julia Ann Mercer's signature. It was not even close to being her signature. The affidavit, which purports to confirm the altered FBI statement, is a government forgery...... ----------------------------------------------- It's happened an easy dozen times. A witness who tells a particularly "interesting" story years after the assassination is confronted with documents showing a much less "interesting" story at the time of the assassination. The reponse: "the documents were forged." Note that Garrison claims the forgery not only of the FBI reports, but of the Sheriff's affidavit! If one is going to take this claim seriously, one has to also charge Officer Murphy (whose account of what happened is in CD 205) with perjury. Further, Mercer's credibility can't be judged apart from the extreme boneheadedness of the scenario she suggests. .John