by SwineForkbeard » Sat Apr 01, 2006 1:55 pm
Some of you might want to check out a contentious exchange when the Warren Commission tried to resolve a disagreement between two witnesses. Even though it was only tangentially relevant to the assassination, it seems to expose a journalistic hoax in the immediate aftermath. It concerns a story that appeared in the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Dallas Times Herald</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> the following Monday, where the reporter, Hunter Schmidt, claimed to have interviewed Dial Ryder, a 20 year-old employee from a gun shop in Irving, who may have worked on Oswald's rifle. Ryder later denied having spoken to this reporter, and stubbornly repeated that denial in his testimony. He admitted receiving a phone call from a reporter, presumably Schmidt, but said he had no comment and hung up the phone. Schmidt insisted that the interview took place, and appeared indignant that his integrity was being questioned. Wesley Liebeler, the whitewasher who questioned both of them, seemed to share my suspicion that Hunter Schmidt was acting as a mouthpiece for the FBI, who had interviewed Ryder on the weekend after the assassination. Liebeler wondered whether the FBI passed along the content from their interview to Schmidt, who then went ahead with the story as though he had interviewed Ryder himself. Clearly, one of them had to be lying, and Schmidt was the only one with any clear motive for doing so, if he was caught having engaged in journalistic fraud. Had that interview taken place, Ryder would have had no apparent reason to lie about it under oath.<br><br>The controversy took another turn when Jim Lehrer, then a cub reporter for the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Times Herald</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, was brought in to bolster Schmidt's testimony. <br><br>Lehrer: I happened to be sitting over there. I do not normally work physically on the city desk, but all of us had been working on the assassination aspects and it had been a lot of my responsibility in particular, because so much of it was on my beat at the time, and somebody said they got this guy and they gave it to Hunter to check out and I was sitting right next to Hunter when he checked it out.<br><br>This raises all kinds of questions. What are the odds that Lehrer would remember overhearing a conversation a fellow reporter had on the telephone several months before? Didn't he have any work of his own to do? He just happened to be sitting next to Hunter Schmidt, doing nothing, which conveniently allowed him to corroborate the interview Dial Ryder claimed never happened? If Hunter Schmidt was lying, as I think he was, then Lehrer was also lying. Does Lehrer's willingness to commit perjury on behalf of Hunter Schmidt have anything to do with his subsequent meteoric rise as a news anchor? Is it possible that, like Gerald Ford, Lehrer and Schmidt were both shills for the FBI and Lehrer was brought in to support Schmidt's lie and prevent that connection from being exposed?<br><br>By the way, was it just a freak accident when Wesley Liebeler's plane dropped like a stone into Lake Winnipesaukee a few years ago? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=swineforkbeard>SwineForkbeard</A> at: 4/11/06 12:09 am<br></i>
