MR. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you for inviting me. Also, I think it is terribly important that these hearings are open, and it is a very good thing that you have done this.
I a best selling author. I have written four books on the assassination of President Kennedy, two of them were best sellers, the fourth one will be published in the spring. I represent the Association of Assassination Researchers, which is new and just forming.
I think everything that people have discussed here today is quite important in various areas in terms of the records that they want to obtain, but I think you need priorities, and those priorities should start with certain facts in the evidence of the assassination.
In other words, where we are in our criminal investigation today, I do have the help of law enforcement on their own time. We do a great deal of many trips to Dallas, and very intense investigation. The focus of my personal investigation is in the medical evidence and the forgery of the autopsy photographs, the forgery of the X-rays. I am responsible for that, and we have basically broken the case. You need to take some time to study just where that is at because your priorities should include making every available document and piece of physical evidence connected with those forgeries, and the faking of the autopsy in President Kennedy's murder your primary responsibility.
As for your problem with defining just what is documents in this case, does that include the physical evidence, the Bullet 399, for instance, the rifle, the windshield as has been mentioned here. This will lead in a moment to the problems that I am having with the National Archives right now, an agency that you need to be sure that they are making documents and materials available, and they are not.
With 399, for very many years no one has been able to get access to it. Josiah Thompson described his efforts in Six Seconds in Dallas trying to obtain access with a set of very fine scales to weigh 399 and perform other examinations.
I am trying to get to see this material with trained police, forensic experts, police officers, to see this material, and I have been given a royal runaround, and have even been framed by staffers at the National Archives for saying and doing things that I could not have done because they don't want to show this material.
The reason why this is important to you is that if you look at the photographs of 399 published by the Warren Commission and have engineering drawings made of them, which I have submitted to the National Archives, that bullet is entirely incompatible with the alleged murder weapon, the rifle. The lands and grooves are not of the same count.
With regards to the autopsy photographs and X-rays, you need to examine the whole business of the agreement with the Kennedy family which has put this material out of your reach and out of our reach and where people have to go and get permission from Burke Marshall at Yale.
I understand the reasons at the time in 1963 for protecting the sensibilities of the Kennedy family. I am very aware of that. I worked for Senator Tydings who is very close to the Kennedy family. But at this point, 30 years later, people certainly have gotten over their grief, and we have to make this material available to it.
Your next priority is, you have to see what the forgery of that evidence means, and what the evidence is there for, and then all records connected with Bethesda Naval Hospital, with the development of the alleged autopsy photographs, with the X-rays, all military personnel records of every single person that might have had any connection with that autopsy or anything else, we need that material. We need to know where General Charles Cabell was on that day. We need to know everything there is that can be found out about Admiral Burkley, about Admiral Galloway, and all the rest.
Very briefly, before I get to two other problems here, if you, yourself, take the time to look at the interviews conducted by the House of Representatives with the autopsy doctors, they insisted that the autopsy photographs to not show the wounds on the body that they had, and the House of Representatives, as I pointed out in my first book, commented on the fact of the persistent disparity between the findings of the autopsy pathologist and what we see in the autopsy pictures. The wounds have moved quite a bit.
No, the body wasn't stolen; no, it wasn't altered; but, yes, all of the physical evidence in this case was faked, and this is the core of the mystery of what happened to John Kennedy.
Now we hear here today and with these organizations a lot of finger-pointing at everybody's favorite scapegoat, which is the CIA, and I am not here to protect the CIA, but the point is that all the attention is being directed away from the military, away from Bethesda Naval Hospital, away from the Office of Naval Intelligence, away from Army Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and this has been a common thing in this case for many years with attention being drawn to the Mafia, to Castro, to Russia -- Krushchev did it, everybody and his brother.
But the bottom line of it is that the medical evidence in this case is a fraud and a lie. If your priority should be, if you have an investigative capacity, to take a look at that and start dealing with it and make damned sure that every possible interview, every possible document that might be remotely with that coverup that began that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital that that material be made available.
The agreement with the Kennedy family is clearly an illegal agreement with regard to the autopsy pictures and X-rays and other materials because this is evidence in a criminal case and it cannot be sequestered and taken out of the public jurisdiction. It seems to me that you do have jurisdiction over that matter.
There was a suit here in Federal court which was dismissed to try to overturn that agreement. I hope that if you want, you will get in touch with me in the future on that matter.
Another issue that I want to briefly talk about is, what is going on at the National Archives, an agency. Presumably you are dealing with "agencies," so far we hear about the CIA and the FBI and so on, but the National Archives is an agency and there is a kind of surveillance going on now that these documents are being made available that is unconscionable. It is way over the line between reasonable need to protect these materials and deliberate harassment of researchers.
[Applause.]
MR. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you. Anna Marie stormed out of here a little while ago, she was driven to the point of hysteria in the National Archives, and staffers are attaching themselves to researchers and will not go away. The engage you in long conversations, and I clocked one of these conversations for five hours, and researchers flew from California and a staffer devoted himself to distracting that researcher from why he had spent all the money to come here. So he didn't get what he was after. He was engaged in a social discussion, a political discussion, and so on. The staffers are finding out what people are researching. It seems to be floating around and being reported to other people.
Before going any further, I want to say that this does not mean Steve Tilley because he has been nothing but nice to me and everybody that I know, but we also know of other cases there where the exact opposite is happening, and I have personal knowledge of people actually being framed for things in order to get rid of them. Anna Marie was threatened with the loss of her research privileges, and so on.
So it is a conflict between reasonable surveillance for the protection of the documents in the National Archives and where does it cross the line into harassment.
Now you need to define, is this physical material, the bullet, the rifle, the windshield, and all that, is this -- I don't know -- I don't think it is specifically defined in the Act, so in my view you need to define that as part of "documents," or whatever.
My final quick point is just, the National Archives should be encouraged to make slides of each and every frame of all the other films that might be available, such as the Nix film, the Hughes film, the Bronson film especially, and to do blow-ups of this, and the Secret Service copies of the Zapruder film which is badly damaged, you should inquire as to why it is so badly damaged with the Secret Service. It is broken and ruined in a lot of places. How could this have happened? How could they take such critical evidence in this tragedy and it be ruined? But this visual evidence in this case is the key to the murder of John Kennedy because it is all fake, and I mean the Zapruder film is a fake.
The autopsy photographs are a fake. The autopsy X-rays are a fake. We first determined this in 1979. In September Dr. David Mantik proved it with a test in physics. My best friend is a chief radiologist, we have been examining this for many years. We went to college together, and he is going to take that study to the next step. The photographs have been wildly denounced by the autopsy doctors themselves, but those documents are clearly edited. The documents that were released here last fall are clearly edited.
At some other time, I will be glad to discuss that with you. I won't take any more of your time.
CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Thank you, Dr. Livingstone.
[Applause.]
MR. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: We appreciate you coming today.