[Ben Holmes]

Quote:...Conversely, a person who has recently fired a weapon may not show a positive reaction to the paraffin test, particularly if the weapon was a rifle. - WCR, pg 561

Unfortunately for the honesty of the Warren Commission, they decided to completely bury the NAA testing (which is far more sensitive than a diphenylamine test of the paraffin casting) conducted by Dr. Guinn... and reported to Gallagher (who was not questioned on NAA the test results, even though he'd been in charge of them!)

Quote:At the end of February 1964 Dr. Vincent P. Guinn, head of the NAA Section of General Atomic Division, of the General Dynamics Corporation, called Gallagher about the research his division was undertaking for the Atomic Energy Commission. For the past few years, Guinn reported, he and his colleagues had been using NAA to test the powder residues from discharged firearms. He sought out Gallagher to report the results of their tests on a "rifle similar to the one reportedly owned by Lee Harvey Oswald." The triple firing of the rifle, Guinn advised, "leaves unambiguous positive tests every time on the paraffin casts." Because of the inferior construction of the Mannlicher-Carcano, the Italian army's World War II assault rifle, Guinn noted that the blowback from one or three shots deposited powder residue "on both cheeks" of the shooter." (Breach of Trust - Gerald McKnight, pg 211)

These comparison tests were in direct contradiction to the tests that the Warren Commission reported on by the FBI. It's a near certainty, however, that the Warren Commission was referring to spectrographic testing of paraffin casts by the FBI. The far more sensitive NAA tests always came back positive, according to Dr. Guinn. Because this was exculpatory, these results were buried by the WC, and indeed, they lied by omission.

THEY LIED BY OMISSION...

Gallagher was nearly the last witness called to testify, despite the fact that he'd been in charge of the NAA testing... as McKnight puts it:

Quote:If Gallagher could have testified that NAA testing disclosed that all this lead had exactly the same chemical composition, then the Commission would have had an airtight, scientifically rock-hard, incontestable case that the fatal bullet had been fired from Oswald's rifle. Had the Commission had the scientific proof to state this case with confidence, then Gallagher would have been one of its first witnesses rather than slipped in at the fag end of the investigation. (ibid. pg 210)

The Warren Commission lied... and they knew it. Anyone care to defend the Warren Commission's burying of direct testing data that was exculpatory, and their assertion of data instead that was favorable to their hypothesis?