Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

The 1981 exhumation of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald was provoked by a British investigator who was convinced that the Oswald who went to Russia was swapped for a Russian agent who assumed his identity. And even though it did not concern the work of John Armstrong, which had not materialized yet, it was still used years later to try to refute Harvey and Lee. 

I want to talk about it, but first I want to note that the whole process was GOVERNMENT-CONTROLLED. Did you know that they had helicopters hovering above the hearse as it transported Oswald's body to Baylor? That is: government helicopters. The whole process was government-controlled from start to finish.

But, why should it have been? At that point, what legal right did the U.S. government have to Oswald's remains? Marina Oswald should have taken Oswald's body out of this country to have it exhumed. Oh, but just imagine if she had tried to do that. I don't know what legal basis they would have resorted to to stop her, but I guarantee you that they would have come up with something.  

And the biggest thing in this second autopsy, if we can call it that, was, reportedly, the finding of Oswald's mastoidectomy scar from when he was 6 years old. But, it's very unsettling because Oswald's first autopsist, Dallas coroner Dr. Earl Rose, didn't find it. And he performed an intermastoid incision in order to open the skull to examine the brain, and yet he didn't notice a large scar? And remember that the mastoid process is large bump of bone. And depending on how much mastoid tissue you remove, you basically flatten it. So, it's not just a scar in the skin; we're talking about a defect in the bone; the loss of bone. 

So, Dr. Rose didn't notice it, and keep in mind that he searched Oswald's body for scars, reporting scars that were as small as 1/16 of an inch. For example: "a pale, white, oblong, 1/4 inch scar." 

Here's a picture of a guy showing off his mastoidectomy scar.

Wow. That looks to be about 3 inches. Now, you tell me how either Dr. Rose or Mr. Groody could have missed seeing that.

Oswald enlisted in the Marines in 1956 at age 17, and he underwent a physical in which he was reported to have a 3 inch mastoidectomy scar on his left side. Three inches, just like the one above! And, in Oswald's case it was after 11 years. And when he was discharged from the Marines in 1959, it was noted again. 

Also note that Oswald's mortician Paul Groody had to do a lot of work on Oswald to make him presentable for an open casket, and he reported finding no mastoidectomy scar either. And, he undoubtedly had to dress up the intermastoid incision that Dr. Rose made.

And note that the Oswald at Atsugi in Japan accidentally shot himself in the left arm, so he had a scar there too. Neither Rose nor Groody reported any such arm scar on the dead Oswald.

So, let's look at the Norton Report to find out exactly what the exhumation doctors found.

They wrote ONE SENTENCE about the mastoid issue:

The mastoid prominence of the left temporal bone revealed an irregularly ovoid 1.0- by 0.5-cm defect pene­trating to the interior of the mastoid bone with the defect edges rounded and smooth.

It sounds to me like they found a depression that was 1 centimeter by half a centimeter. I suppose you could call it a hole, except it wasn't a round hole; it was twice as long as it was wide. But, it was still very small. A centimeter is a little less than 4/10 of an inch. So, a half centimeter is a little less than 2/10 of an inch. In someone who was buried in the ground for 18 years, does that meet the threshold of identifying a post-surgical effect? 

And what about the inexorable process of decay that takes place? This is from a Science page: 

Bones aren’t that different from our flesh and blood. We think of bones as solid and firm parts of our skeleton, that can snap like a piece of chalk when we are injured badly. The truth is that bones are living tissues, just like our other organ systems, containing blood vessels and nerves. Bones are largely composed of collagen, which creates a strong porous matrix, rather than a solid structure. Therefore, the same chemical, physical, and micro-organic processes that break down tissues will also cause bones to decompose!

Some bones do manage to achieve true immortality, and you’ve probably seen dozens of them over the course of your life – most likely in museums! Fossils are bones that were so rapidly encased in sediment that air was completely shut out, making it impossible for any decomposition to occur. This is the case in volcanic eruptions, and other catastrophic events that displace large amounts of sediment in the earth.

Only an extremely small fraction of living organisms manage to be fossilized, and even then, we call them “bones”, but that isn’t actually the case. Fossils were bones that never decomposed, but over time, minerals in the surrounding materials began leeching from the living tissue, replacing living cells with rock! So, when we talk about dinosaur bones being dug up after millions of years, we’re just digging up ancient rocks that are shaped precisely as the original bones once were.

Bones that remain intact for thousands of years without remineralization (the process that turns bones into fossils) are quite rare, and the oldest ones that humans have discovered are roughly 2.8 million years old, and were found in Ethiopia.

The most famous examples of ancient bones remaining intact comes from Egypt, where the mysterious practice of mummification prevented bones from decomposing in certain cases. When powerful drying salts, like natron, were used to clear the body of any liquids, it prevented bacteria and fungus from starting the decomposition process. Furthermore, once the mummy was sealed in linen and a sarcophagus, the lack of oxygen and moisture prevented the breakdown of tissue and bone.

So, it takes very special circumstances for bones to last. Most of the time, they don't. And thank God because otherwise the world would be covered with bones. 

The Norton team also included an image with their one-sentence claim: 

So, presumably, the central dark spot on the right is what they're talking about. But notice that on the left there is plenty of dark too, and of the same consistency. The locations are different, but the size of area affected is about the same. What really is the difference? What is definitive about this?

We are dealing here with a great controversy, and it deserved far more attention and elaboration than they gave it. Why didn't they substantiate the basis for calling a very small defect in a bone that had been decomposing under the ground for 18 years evidence of surgery?

LIFE magazine published this photo of Oswald with a missing tooth, reportedly knocked out in a fight in the 8th grade. They loved doing it because it implied that even as a child that Oswald was prone to violence. 

Here are Oswald's teeth from the exhumation. None were missing.

I say that wear and tear from 18 years of being dead under the ground and the decaying, decomposing process that invariably takes place was fraudulently attributed to mastoid surgery. They certainly did NOT prove their claim, and the burden of proof was on them, and it still is.