Inside the Assassination Records Review Board
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Thirteen years in the making, Douglas Horne's five-volume magnum opus is soon to be published, and will be available for sale here at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.
Douglas Horne headed the
Military Records Team on
the ARRB staff.
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK is a detailed insider's account of the amazing revelations related to JFK's autopsy which the Board uncovered, and his analysis of what those revelations mean.
This book has been eagerly anticipated. The wait will not be much longer - publication is expected in December of this year.
The following statement was written by Douglas Horne and is on his new blog at insidethearrb.livejournal.com.
I felt compelled to attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding the medical evidence by taking a serious look at how much evidence was destroyed in 1963, and which evidence in the official record is likely tainted, and cannot be trusted (and why). It was no easy task; but neither was it an impossible endeavor. Additionally, I closely examined the statements and testimony of key Parkland hospital and Bethesda autopsy witnesses over the years to see who had been consistent in describing events, and who had changed his testimony as time passed. I acted as a very curious citizen-detective, and made no starting assumptions about the presumed authenticity of any particular item of evidence. What one believes about JFK’s assassination depends upon which data base one relies upon; there is so much conflicted evidence that one can “cherry pick” the evidence in the official record and come to almost any conclusion about the facts of the shooting. I attempted to examine the broad range of virtually all of the medical evidence, and tried very hard to avoid the limited and selective use of evidence, a mistake made by both the Warren Commission and the HSCA. My conclusions are that neither the autopsy report (a document rewritten at least twice), nor the autopsy photographs and x-rays (which present dishonest and intentionally misleading images of the head wounds), can be relied upon to determine the reality of the event in Dealey Plaza, and that the original observations of the treating physicians and nurses at Parkland hospital remain the best single guide to the actual wounds sustained by President Kennedy---but that they still must be judiciously married to certain other key facts, to ascertain what likely happened. Once one accepts that JFK was killed by a crossfire, the focus shifts to the who and the why, and my book attempts to deal with this subject as well, for the assassination can only be understood in terms of the context in which it took place: at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. For more information on my book, please reference my blog: insidethearrb.livejournal.com.
-- Douglas Horne