Final Guyana body count 911

O.K. I need help with this one.

It may just be me, but I fail to understand Air Force Information Officer Maj. Robert Groom's main point---that the process of fingerprint identification---or not---can make a body count vary in any way.

If you took either a haystack-sized tangled pile, or a football field laid out in orderly rows, of unidentified corpses in a state of advanced decomposition, and by some arithmetic process you don't have to go into because it's really none of our business, you establish a count of 912 whole-bodies in a state of mixed identification present, and you announce the fact publically, since it's your job; and only then begin the seemingly hopeless task of identifying some actual percentage of these "remains" forensically, how would any  identification cause the total volume of raw material to shift, numerically speaking, up or down?

Maj. Groom is very careful in saying "the fingerprinting process," and not "the successful process," or "the unsuccessful fingerprinting process," since by implication, whichever one he is referring to that caused the count to drop by one could mean that an opposite outcome would have caused the count rise.

November 29, 1978, Ukiah Daily Journal, page 1, Final Guyana body count 911,


No, this "fluctuating all along" just won't do. Cyanide and gunshot doesn't fracture or dismember a corpse. Putrefying tropical heat wouldn't corrupt even two small infant's flesh into a field misidentification as being a puddle of one, to be sorted out later in the laboratory (which of course, would only make the count rise.)

Nor is this September the 11th, (despite the eerie numerological similarity,) when Dover promised America that every shard of holy victim flesh was identified by advanced DNA analysis, so as not to be mixed in for eternity with the remains of the Satanic perpetrators.

If the dead are asking for a pass, you should see the living,

This list put out by the UPI but holding "KRON-TV" in San Francisco responsible, looks like it was made by monkeys who were taught phonics, with chimpanzees doing the data entry.

Put [Jonestown "Treston Wade"] into Google and a single return comes back--to this newspaper issue. This is a list of living expatriate survivors, remember--no wounded need apply.

Could someone not ask "Alharay Latterwhite" how she spelled her name, and how old she was? Or short of that, couldn't officials consult one of the 805 modern American passports with photographs in their possession?

How could they get both Robin Tauchette and Mike Tauchette's names wrong? If they didn't personally provide that spelling, and it didn't come off a genuine passport, who, or what, did provide it? Does anybody even in France have a name like "Louieroyente"? (Google doesn't think so.)


November 27, 1978, Ukiah Daily Journal - UPI, page 2, List of 75 survivors reported by KRON-TV,