Customer Reviews

Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death Of Jfk

The Film Is As Real As The Conspiracy, April 16 2004

By	C. Chow (Leesburg VA) - See all my reviews

Fetzer's premise is that the government fabricated the Zapruder film to fool the public. The obvious fallacy here is that the government worked hard to conceal the film because IT PROVES A CONSPIRACY. The film was only shown to the public in 1975 by Geraldo Revera on 'Good Night America' using Robert Groden's bootleg copy. Time Life paid $150,000 for it but never showed it.

1. Film Proves A Conspiracy: If the government wanted to forge a film they would have forged one that didn't show Kennedy and Connally being hit from different angles. As any conspiracy buff will tell you, the film proves a conspiracy. In frame 225 Kennedy is shot in the throat, but Connally still waves to the crowd with his hat in his right hand, this shows had they were hit by separate bullets. In frame 256 Kennedy jerks sharply forward probably when he is shot from behind. We see Connally hit later as he turns to his right to see the president and then cries out and falls back onto his wife's lap. In frame 313 we see JFK's head jerk sharply backwards; being shot from the front.

2. Witnesses Didn't React: One of Fetzer's arguments the film was faked is the fact that witnesses don't react, they stand still or wave to the car. Of course anyone who read the Warren Commission testimony knows this is what witnesses have said all along. Many said they didn't understand what was happening because the motorcycles were making so much noise or they thought the shots were firecrackers.

3. Film Doesn't Show Left Temple Wound: Another criticism Fetzer has of the film is that it doesn't show JFK being shot in the head from the left as Fetzer believes he was. Fetzer's theory is based on exhibit 392 which states, "massive head and brain trauma due to gunshot to left temple" however that doctor later clarified that statement and agreed with the other doctors that they saw a massive head wound to the RIGHT temple. Hence the film correctly shows JFK being hit from the front right. If the Warren Commission wanted to fake a film they would have shown JFK being hit from behind as they claimed.

4. Different Versions of Films Conflict: Fetzer's main argument is showing massive conflicts between different versions of the film. The Robert Groden version, the David Lifton version, and the MPI version. Fetzer ignore the obvious conclusion that the conflicts were cause because the three openly used radically different versions of the film. Groden's version was made in the 1970s from a poor copy obtained by Jim Garrison. The MPI version was made on a computer in 1997 by scanning the original frames, MPI openly altered the film by adding color to cover static. Conflict between these versions is to be expected.

In summary, Fetzer blows inconsistencies way out of proportion and fails to see that even in the JFK assassination the simplest solutions are sometimes correct. He also never explains why the government would go to such lengths to forge a film which hurt their lone assassin case and favors a conspiracy.

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From an email review from Steve Summers, Mar 11 2004

<<The Z-film hoax book is also both interesting & disappointing. The stuff by
Jack White is so embarassingly drivelsome I skipped it entirely. Others are
so disorganized as to be unreadable--much like David's long-ago Ramparts
article on the possibility of 3 shooters (which I personally rate the most
soporific essay since the Book of Mormon).

The John Costella article is interesting only in it's odd combination of
scientific rigor juxtaposed with far-fetched theories and excessive

detailing of shadowy figures who follow him about--not only in Dallas, but
in Melbourne, Australia. Alas, like Mark Lane and Jim Fetzer, he shares
their instinct for the capillaries, giving extraordinary lengths of print to
photographic artifacts so obsessively minute and muddy that the reader
begins to wonder if perhaps the really obvious & glaring things aren't
figments of a hypercritical perspective. There is also an oddly revealing
passage where he describes hearing Lifton describe Abe Zapruder as a lucky
bystander with a movie camera--a novel perspective he'd never before
considered, so automatically did he (Costella) assume that Abe was a
prepositioned agent of the CIA.

There's a very interesting appendix item in the back, a book review by one
George Costello (obviously no relation to Costella) from the 5/2000 issue of
Federal Lawyer explaining the salient points of Fetzer's Murder in Dealey
Plaza for guvmint lawyers in clear, straight-to-the-point terms that I'm
sure Jim Fetzer never used. The concise summary at the end was dynamite in
print. You wish that all books on the JFK debacle had been written by such
writers. I wonder how many people read this review.

The only other part I found readable and informative was David's. It's
amazing how far his writing has come since Ramparts. It covers nothing
remarkably new as it is mostly a historical narrative told in a series of
very illuminating anecdotes. Hey, didja know that Livingstone tried to sue
David for $50,000,000 for being part of a conspiracy to kill him?

The contrast between David's stuff & the others is also interesting in that
he seems the only person in this book with any active interest in or
knowledge of psychology & human nature. None of these other writers seem to
see the limits of extrapolating vast conspiracies from single pieces of
suspicious evidence, a common failing which I think probably accounts for
the odd fact that most Americans vest little more confidence in conspiracy
theorists than they do in the Warren Report--despite the obvious logic that
some theory of conspiracy is a virtually mandatory alternative.

David apparently has been working heavily on assembling material on the WC's
bogus evidence incriminating Oswald, a fact which fills me with some hope,
since I think that this material is the most flagrantly-exposable jugular of
the No-Conspiracy dogma. I think one clearly-written book on this subject
could mean the end to this embarrassing 40 year coverup. I wonder if he
could be persuaded to work with George Costello.

Another point of disappointment is the astonishing number of typos and whole
sentences rendered meaningless by missing words. I'd bet that an errata
sheet for David's essay alone would run to half-dozen pages. Oswald's name
is misspelled, Langley (CIA hometown) is consistently spelled Langely, and
even you are once renamed "Newomb".>>

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We all know what happened..., Nov 21 2003

By	James C. Darling (Burbank, CA) - See all my reviews

Anyone who still believes in the findings on the Warren Commission is either fooling themself, or is truly blind to the truth.

Massive exit wound eminating from the rear of Kennedy's head = shot from the front.

Oswald was the patsy.

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File Under Fiction, Nov 20 2003

By	Mark Janovec "mjanovec" (Hudson, WI United States) - See all my reviews

Throughout the years, the conspiracy buffs often cited the Zapruder film as definitive evidence that Kennedy was not killed from shots fired from the rear. The film was their "smoking gun," supposedly proving there was a conspiracy. As more scientific analysis was applied to the film and understanding of how a head reacts to a gunshot wound was understood, it became clear that the film establishes that all three shots fired by Oswald match the evidence shown on the film. So, in order to keep the conspiracy theory alive, they have now turned to discrediting the film that was the backbone to their theory these many years.

The detail at which Fetzer claims the film was edited is surely more complex than any conspiracy would want to undertake. Surely, the conspirators, instead of altering the film, would have been better suited by destroying the film before it achieved mass circulation. After all, lack of evidence would surely make a conspiracy harder to prove, would it not?

If you want to know where the fatal shot made its exit from Kennedy's skull, look at the DVD from MPI called "Image of the Assassination." You don't even have to study the film. Look at the television interview Abraham Zapruder gave within an hour of the assassination. In the interview, Zapruder takes all five fingers of his right hand to encircle an area of his head above and in front of his right ear. He makes a motion to show how the brain material was blown out of Kennedy's skull. Even if Zapruder wasn't aware of it at the time, he was demonstrating the results of an exit wound. As an eyewitness to the tragedy with perhaps the best vantage point, the image of Kennedy's head wound was surely burned into his memory until the day he died. And his historic film backs up his description of the head wound that he gave before the film was even developed. (plus the MPI DVD directly establishes the chain of custody of the film, including copies that were made on the night of November 22, 1963).

Who will you believe...Abraham Zapruder, the man who witnessed and filmed the shooting first hand, accurately describing the location of the head exit wound before his film could even be developed to back him up? Or will you believe Fetzer, a man whose connection to the case in tenuous and is mostly based on profiting from his multiple books and lectures on the subject? While a healthy skepticism of the government is a good thing, does one really want to buy the complex web of details necessary to prove the case of altering the film. After all, Fetzer shows his true conspiracy zeal on his web site, in which he recently claims the Space Shuttle Columbia was likely shot down by the government using EMP weaponry. Consider your source before you consider this book for your library.

I await the day Fetzer and his like directly implicate Zapruder as the shooter in order to sell another book. Let those cash registers ring.

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The smoke is gone but the mirrors remain., Nov 18 2003

In their recent release, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, the Fetzer Team discloses and meticulously documents their monumental discovery that the Zapruder Film was actually concocted in a film lab. This key revelation is shown to be a clear example of the sophisticated and yet paradoxical methods the gov't has used to continue the cover up and even advance it. The Team has shown conclusively that even now, years and years after the Warren Commission delivered its conclusions, the gov't and media instituted cover up continues.

The Team's first book in the series, Assassination Science, was a blockbuster that systematically proved for the first time ever, that the autopsy X-rays had been altered and that another brain had been substituted for that of JFK, which meant that previous gov't investigations had been based on faked evidence. It also proved that Arlen Spector's magic bullet theory was indefensible. And these findings by the Team were entirely based on meticulous scientific studies and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the gov't itself instituted the cover up.

The Team's second book, Murder in Dealy Plaza, also a blockbuster, showed conclusively, also with very strong scientific evidence, that the Warren Commission was but one part of a carefully crafted conspiratorial gov't cover up of the truth that the assassination involved at least two shooters and more than three bullets. Convincing circumstantial evidence was also presented suggesting that in addition to the gov't instituting a cover up, it planned and orchestrated the assassination as a sophisticated domestic covert operation.

I predict that the Team's third book, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, will be an even bigger blockbuster than the first two in the series due to its shocking and well documented discoveries. This book goes further in breaking new ground to expose the cover up than any other book so far and its revelations are explosive. The Team has again carefully applied the scientific method to conclusively prove just how extreme the measures are that various gov't entities have taken in order to fabricate evidence to confuse the truth and generate a contradictory evidence trail. The team has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the Zapruder film was created in a film lab to generate cognitive dissonance among assassination researchers to neutralize any real progress uncovering the true facts of the assassination. This book tells me that the Z film was concocted to exaggerate the JFK head snap backward to convince that JFK was hit with a high velocity hard hitting shot to his right temple from the right front. Paradoxically then while the gov't created the Z film to provide false evidence proving a conspiracy of more than one shooter, it was also simultaneously continuing to support the "king's new clothes" hypothesis of the Warren Commission. The Team's ability to clearly prove by the scientific method that the cover up involved the systematic use of sophisticated misinformation tactics as well as the controlled release of faked evidence, illustrates just how advanced the cover up operation has been as a continuing covert operation.

Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist would have understood that "knowing truth" in our contemporary society can only occur when the "moral density" of the mass media is used to reflect truth back to a public that trusts it in mass because it supports their actual beliefs. This can never happen in our society at present because of the massive amount of cognitive dissonance which has been generated by the gov't and media by habitually telling the public a lie and forcing them to operate as if it was true and then allowing them to see evidence compelling them to believe it is really a lie.
Much of this "evidence" is at least partially based on falsities which can later be exposed to discredit the "truth" if desired. Pretty soon the citizen trusts nothing the gov't or media states even though he or she must carry on in society as if it is true to avoid being labeled and discredited. The citizen must continue to acknowledge the "king's new clothes" just to be able to exist and function normally in society. Surveys have shown that most of the public have come to believe that JFK was killed by more than one shooter, thus by a conspiracy, and most also believe that at a minimum the gov't instituted a cover up of this conspiracy. Many believe that the gov't itself could have orchestrated the assassination. Although citizens believe these things in mass they can never know them in mass because of the sophisticated misinformation ops that have been employed against them by the gov't and the media. Thus the citizens have become deeply alienated from themselves, each other and their society.

What reasonable person (unless they are knowledgeable about "trade craft") could ever conceive that gov't misinformation ops are so sophisticated that contradictory evidence from both sides of the argument has been and continues to be concocted by the gov't and espoused by a willing media? Who would ever guess that the gov't would desire to elicit true thinking that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy by concocting and releasing dramatic false evidence? These types of practices have been referred to as black politics, the black arts, Machiavellian ops, the art of low intensity warfare, fifth column tactics, or the practice of deceiving by equivocation which is the arguing that black is white and white is black by emphasizing flimsy common threads.

Are the gov't entities responsible for instituting this continuing and most sophisticated cover up op aware that the average citizen believes that the gov't conspired to cover up the JFK assassination? After reading this book
one is compelled to believe that these gov't entities understand that the public generally believes there was a conspiracy to kill the President. It also becomes clear that this is what they want the public to believe and have conducted sophisticated activities to insure this. What they don't want is for the public to know this to an absolute certainty which would be characterized by the mass media clearly regurgitating the facts supporting this belief, thereby allowing mass society in general to know this as being factually true. Public knowing cannot exist without the mass media serving up the facts supporting this belief back to the public on a regular basis. The gov't has known for a long time that if it controls the mainstream mass media, the public can be prevented from knowing that the king is actually naked. It is also aware that it can then feed the public a certain selection of "facts" for eliciting the type of believing or limited knowing which it allows.

What would the gov't have to gain by making sure that the public believed in the conspiracy without knowing it to exist with absolute certainty? In simple terms, quite a lot! Such a condition provides a clear statement to the public that gov't departments and agencies have attained enough absolute Caesarian power to rule over the citizen, Congress and the mass media, and that they have been able to maintain it over many different administrations regardless of who is elected to political office from the citizenry. Those who enter gov't (elected or appointed) come to know quickly that even though the king is naked, they must pay homage by acting as if they believe that he is clothed with the finest fashions. And they come to know quickly what will happen to them if they don't pay such homage, that the full force of Caesarian authority will be brought against them "with prejudice".

"With prejudice" is a legal term which means that a judgment is absolute and final and cannot be challenged. Caesarian power is unlimited "with-prejudice" authority that uses legal and extra-legal means at its disposal consisting of overt and covert acts of varying viciousness as judged necessary to attain the desired outcome (end justifies the means value system). Of course this was the same authority which authorized the assassination of JFK in the first place and ordered the cover up. Certainly it would be reasonable to view the murder of a U.S. President as an act of extreme viciousness, just as the various "with prejudice" terminations instituted during the first twenty years of the cover up should be viewed. Such terminations "with extreme prejudice" are no longer necessary as a part of the assassination cover up, since the continuing misinformation ops have been successful beyond the gov't's wildest expectations and can withstand any "assaults" from independent assassination researchers. The gov't entities which hold and exercise this absolute Caesarian power believe and know that if necessary they must be willing to act with much more viciousness than any of those who might challenge their authority, if they want to maintain rule over them. But most of the time it is only necessary to keep the gov't misinformation machine dispensing contradictory "facts".

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