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

I mentioned last night that Denis Morissette has put those alleged new images of James Bookhout up on his JFK investigators website, and he's done so without qualification or reservation. There are no question marks this time, no disclaimers, no expressions of any doubt. But, consider that there is a qualitative difference between the two images. 

One occurs in a newspaper article in which it states that James Bookhout is in the picture. Of course, that isn't proof of anything. Newspapers can be wrong in their descriptions and designations, and often they are. But, at least it provides an argumentative basis to claim that it's Bookhout; that is: it provides a reference to him.

But, what about this image? It doesn't come with any reference.

How can one just be presumptive that that has to be James Bookhout? According to Morissette, it was found by Bart Kamp. So what. Is he God? Do we automatically accept the claims of Bart Kamp? Bart Kamp believes that this is Lee Harvey Oswald:

So, that establishes his photo-identifying skill and lack thereof. So, why should anyone accept his claims about Bookhout?

Furtheremore, we don't even know anything about this image.

It's a digital image, so presumably, Bart Kamp found it online somewhere. But where? How could it not show up in searches before now, say, in searches for images of Will Fritz? And what do we know about the time of that picture? How do we even know it's from the JFK assassination? And what basis is there to assume that that guy is Bookhout? He has a very gaunt face, and we know that in Bookhout's last image prior to the assassination, which unfortunately goes back to 1937, his face was very puffy.

 We see disparity of the ears, nose, face in general, eyebrows certainly, and even the hair is dubious. How could a man who was already showing signs of recession at age 23 have the exact same hairline at 49? Isn't hair loss progressive? 

And if you're going to use the newspaper image as verification for this other image, you can't because the man in the newspaper clipping was obviously very tall whereas this other man was not.

And there are other differences as well. There is the puffy face on the left and the gaunt face on the right. There is neat, normal looking hair on the left but a strange haircut on the right, with a big sweep on the side and then a crewcut in front, followed by unruly hair behind it. And, it's especially disconcerting because we know that all the FBI agents were very clean-cut with short tidy haircuts.

So, without explaining how and where he found it, Bart Kamp makes the extraordinary claim that that's James Bookhout, and the "research community" just accepts it carte blanche? Is that how it works? 

Denis: take those images down from your website. If you have a shred of decency and honesty, you will do so.