The Last Word on the Assassination

I have read all of Mark Lane's books; Jim Garrison's ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS; read Peter Janny's MARY'S MOSAIC. . . and others. I know a lot about the assassination. Those who got their information about the JFK killing from corporate radio and tv know nothing about the truth. I had no idea John Barbour was this well informed or motivated about the assassination. Mr. Barbour has done a wonderful service to the search for the truth. This movie proves clearly that shots came from the famous grassy knoll. You see the witnesses telling their story very clearly. The rifle first discovered in the school book depository was definitely a German Mauser, not the Italian gun owned by Oswald. The involvement of Clay Shaw is clear, as well as Ruby's. Critics of the conspiracy concept say that it's all circumstantial evidence. No, the perps will not voluntarily step forward, but the evidence is so conclusive that, for the government to deny it, you know there's a coverup. People have gone to the gas chamber on circumstantial evidence.The truth in this film can only be denied by those who are afraid to face its implications. The truth challenges our complacency, it challenges the superficiality that so many citizens are immersed in, it calls out to each of us to do our part in bringing to justice the military/intelligence cabal that has infested this country at least since the Kennedy assassination. Look around you. This is what it looks and feels like to live under a coup, American style. Not so bad you say? No, not if integrity means nothing to you. Not if you care little for the constitution, not if you don't care about justice, not if you don't mind living a sham.Get this film and share it. If you try to show it at town hall meetings - as I intend doing - you will have to fend off those who say: "Eh, that's old news. Peter Jennings told us Oswald did it. That's good enough for me." Will you let ignorant people discourage you? Will you risk looking like kook? I wear black clothing most of the time, not for morbid reasons but because I like to. But when someone asks me why I wear black, I tell them that I'm mourning the death of the republic. That sometimes gets a good discussion going.

Of the many reasons to recommend John Barbour’s The Last Word on the Assassination, one stands out. I’ve watched a number of documentaries on the JFK assassination, and this is the only one to match the Dicta belt recording of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza to the Zapruder film. Now, admittedly, I’ve never fired any weapon more powerful than a squirt gun, but I believe I know enough to understand that no bolt-action rifle can fire two consecutive rounds in such quick succession as indicated by the Dicta belt recording. And when matched with the Zapruder film, that cluster of two gun-shots (the second of which strikes JFK in the temple and kills him) settles the matter of conspiracy once and for all: Pow . . . pow-pow!—more than one shooter. Setting aside the unlikeliness of any single shooter’s ability to hit a target from the TSBD, Barbour’s film makes clear that two weapons were fired in quick succession.But beyond that revelatory moment, The Last Word on the Assassination provides new depth and context to the film clips and images that have become so familiar that they tempt their viewers to predict filmmakers’ narration. Barbour’s film defies this convention. His insights go deeper and, as a result, express the courage of his convictions without sounding dogmatic. Warren Commission apologists will almost certainly scream of the “bias” that informs his narration. What they fail to understand, though, is that bias toward the truth should never bend toward lesser truth, much less total fantasy and falsehood, for the sake of appeasing those who are uncomfortable with bias. The Warren Commission—with the assistance of the media and all of the other usual suspects—set in motion a collective psychological delusion that would have us believe that the sky is green. Mr. Barbour is not biased because he’s telling us that the sky is in fact blue.He does this most powerfully in his portrayal of Jim Garrison, whose sky was turned green by the same forces that, by their own admission, successfully manipulated public opinion, electoral processes, and economies to effect regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua…need I go on? Those with real institutional power don’t call these processes ‘conspiracy’—they reserve that pejorative for those of us who understand that Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Gulf War II are products of THEIR cynicism. By successfully aligning ‘conspiracy’ with ‘paranoia’ and/or ‘obsession,’ the institutionally powerful have successfully marginalized those who have ferreted out so many of the realities of assassinations and other transformative events. We have more polite euphemisms to describe such processes, but inasmuch as they are based in manipulation and involve many people to carry them out, they are certainly conspiratorial. Whether the composite character played by Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone’s JFK or the now-deceased David Atlee Phillips, who appears in this film, the purveyors of regime-change and assassination admit as much in trumpeting their exploits. And those who appear in Barbour’s film unintentionally, indirectly, ipso facto, and indubitably vindicate Jim Garrison.This is an important film. But if we can’t wake up to the realities of imminent catastrophic climate change, I have little faith that we’ll awaken to the realities of what JFK’s assassination ushered in for us all back in 1963. John Barbour’s intellectual honesty is an exhortation to us to recognize that until we recognize that we were lied to back in 1963 we will continue to be complicit in our own subjugation.