[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

Commission would also raise questions about the accuracy of Brennan’s testimony and
even his eyesight. In comparison, the Commission rejected Sylvia Odio’s testimony that
a man she believed to be Oswald visited her apartment with anti-Castro activists two
months before the assassination. Odio’s sister corroborated the testimony and Odio stuck
by her testimony, but the Commission “concluded that Oswald could not have been in
Dallas on the evening of either September 26 or 27, 1963” when the encounter allegedly
took place. 96
There was also what economists call “an opportunity cost” in what the
Commission chose to investigate and describe in its report and what it chose not to
devote time to and leave out. For example, a biographical sketch of Oswald’s murderer,
Jack Ruby, contains a section about Ruby’s “Affection for Dogs” that is almost as long as
the section called “Underworld Ties.” (For the record, the Commission claimed “the
evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”) 97
The Commission consistently spent more time investigating Oswald and his alleged left-
wing views rather than organized crime or right-wingers. Perhaps that is understandable
since the report relied heavily on the FBI investigation of the assassination, and FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover notoriously denied the existence of the mafia for many years,
while focusing on the “Red Menace.”
Some of the details divulged about Oswald’s life also verge on the absurd. For
example, we learn that while in Mexico City, Oswald “ate the soup of the day, rice, and
96 WC Report, 322.
97 WC Report, 801.
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