Did the limo driver shoot JFK?

Great Debates
21

What I don’t understand is:

  1. If two bullets could have caused all of the damage, and
  2. The trajectories appear to be from shots fired from above and behind and
  3. If it was clear that Oswald shot two or three bullets from above and behind and
  4. Oswald had time to shoot two or three bullets and
  5. Oswald had a clear shot and
  6. The temporal course matches from both the Zapruder and other films along with AP photographs, then

Why is this still a conspiracy theory? Don’t we believe in “beyond reasonable doubt” anymore?

I have been to Dealey Plaza, it is much smaller than it looks on TV. It appears that Oswald was a good shot or perhaps just 2/3 lucky, but it wasn’t an impossible shot. This whole conspiracy thing is just a circus.

22

I read a news story a little while back about some scientists studying the audio recorded during the assasination. They checked out the echoes and all sorts of stuff, and came to the conlusion that there were definitely two different locations that the bullets came from.

Because this is the Great Debates forum, and because I hate posting claims like this without evidence, I’ve done the best I can to find the story again. I dug up the following:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/grassyknoll010326.html

It’s not the one I’d read; it’s a bit more dumbed down and has a lot of “You said this but we say this” in it, but it’s something at least.

If anyone has heard more, either confirming or debunking it, I’d like to know.

Dirx

23

That was one of the pieces of evidence that puzzled me as well, but from what I understand it has been debunked. The audio came from a stuck microphone, and people assumed it was from the moments around the assassination, but apparently it’s actually from sounds picked up quite a while after the fact.

The House Select Committee on assassinations used that as one of their main pieces of evidence to conclude that there was probably a conspiracy.

24

I believe the problem with the geocities link is that geocities does not allow a direct link to a photo from outside, it has to be from a page hosted by geocities. If you go to http://www.geocities.com/jfkinfo/wcexlink.htm and scroll down, you will find the link: 346, Photograph of the Presidential limousine, depicting interior. That link should work.

25

I just wanted to post a thank you to Sam Stone for this information.

Although the JFK conspiracy isn’t my pet one (that’s the ‘moon landing hoax’ hoax), the whole issue of the way conspiracy theorists go against logic in most cases by digging up small ‘facts’ and blowing them out of all proportion against the masses of competing facts, interests me greatly.

This is the sort of posting that defines ‘fighting ignorance’.

26

Because it is big business and people who beleive in a conspiracy have devoted large portions of their entire lives to this bugaboo.

One summary put it best: The worst crime in the 20th century(the holocost) was perpetrated by the worst criminals (Nazis). But when you look at the scale of the president being shot and the criminal side has this complete dejected loser (Oswald), for some folks it just can’t be that simple. So they seek something more sinister no matter how hard they have to bend the facts.

You can always twist more facts in the wind and get another conspiracy book… “So and so who was a realtive of a guy who was in Dealy the day before said on his deathbed that he saw a big van marked ‘CIA conspiracy vehicle, please ignore’…howdya account for that huh MrOSwalddiditalone, huh?”

Reasonable doubt has a rather loose definition for JFK conspriacists and Mumia supporters. They just want to beleive.

27

I once had a routine I would do for some friends.

The crux of it was a mob hitman that someone hired to kill Jackie because she had Marilyn Monroe killed. He’s on the grassly knoll, aiming, and when Oswald opens fire, he gets distracted and hits JFK instead.

28

Mr. Miskatonic has it right, in my opinion.

Think about it- the President is one of the most powerful men in the entire world. By his orders, the army marches, laws are approved or vetoed, rules are enforced, the button is pressed. We have an entire division of the government devoted to protecting him (well, that and stopping counterfeiters).

And yet some loser with a mail-order rifle can kill him.
What does that say about our security? If the President can get taken down, how likely are we to get knocked off in a random shooting? What does that say about our government, when we realize it is only by social convention that it actually works, and that were a few hundred people so suicidally determined, they could off the entire Senate?

Thus, people invent and cling to conspiracy theories. Surely, someone as important, as guiding, as luminary as Kennedy simply couldn’t have been taken out by a random whacko; such is the path of nihilism. No, he must have been killed by powerful people, possibly as or more powerful than him, who opposed the good things he was doing. The Mob, the Russians, the CIA, etc., etc., etc.

Such theories have popped up around nearly every in-office Presidential death. Zachary Taylor was poisoned by arsenic in a scheme cooked up by influential Whigs to ensure the safety of the Compromise of 1850. John Wilkes Booth was in the pay of someone else, possibly the Confederate government, who hoped it would force a peace; possibly Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (who burned his personal papers regarding the investigation), who wished to force a coup and take over the government. Guiteau may have been crazy, but he was led on by anti-reform Republicans who wished to stop Garfield. Czolgoz was the first part of a vast Anarchist strike to cripple all of the Western governments. Harding was poisoned by his wife so that she would no longer be embarassed by revelations from the Teapot Dome Scandal.

I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William Henry Harrison are the only Presidents who died in office without someone later positing the theory of a conspiracy to murder them. Probably due to length- with Harrison in office for 30 days, no one knew him well enough to hate him; with Roosevelt in office for 13 years, anyone who wanted to kill him would have done so a lot earlier.

29

I prefer The Onion’s version in “Our Dumb Century”.

“CIA, FBI, KGB, Castro, NASA, Masons, Mafia Assasinate JFK”

With accompnaying picture of 50 or so bullet trajectories around a picture of the motorcade.

30

Within the last 4 years, I heard an interview on the local NPR station with the lawyer that represented Abe Zapruder. The guy swears that the movie that is currently refered to as the "Zapruder Film’ is not the same move that Abe originally brought to his office.

31

I’m not really a Mumia supporter, but now that there is a guy who has confessed to killing the cop that Mumia supposedly killed, and has passed a polygraph while doing so, it kinda looks like maybe he didn’t do it after all.

32

Just happened along this thread, when…

A gap of almost a year??? That has to be some sort of record!

And Kennedy shot himself, or so the writers of Red Dwarf posited.

:smiley:

33

Thankfully one lie detector test done on a person already on death row can coutneract several witnesses, physical evidence, damming testimonies and a total fantasy story Mumia came up with on the 11th hour, eh?

Mumia is guilty, and no fairy tale supported by a defense run polygraph will change that fact.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled, unhijacked GD topic. This should go under another topic if you wish to continue.

34

This is not entirely acurrate. The evidence was debunked, but recently the debunking was debunked. Is that a sentence?

Anyway, the cite below should take you to a more recent study, which concluded the original debunkers (don’t remember the story, but if asked I’ll look it up) were wrong, and that the original study was correct.

35

Is this just now becoming a popular theory in the State? I saw this in a program here in Japan about 10 years ago. They showed the file several times - and I’ll be damned as well if it didn’t look like the limo (lemo?!) driver wasn’t turning around to look back literally just before Kennedy gets pegged. Even looks like he has something in his left hand (he is turning around so that he is partially facing the camera - makes sense, considering where JFK was sitting).

The narration at the time suggested that Jackie wasn’t ‘going to pick up a piece of JFK’s brain’ - instead she was trying to escape the shooter - who was sitting right in front of her.

Crazy? Yep. Do I believe it? Not really - a shot that close would be too easy to detect (powder marks, etc.). I suppose someone could pull it off, since people aren’t really looking at the driver, are they?

I will say, however, that the film was fairly convincing - even though I don’t believe the theory, watching the film gave me goose bumps. Probably just a trick of the eye or something (which suggests we probably can’t trust anything on film). If it was doctored, someone did a damn good job.

36

You know – I’ll bet whole hordes of Conspiracy Theorists are going to analyze today’s (Tuesday’s) films of the airliner crashing into the World Trade Center tower, and determine that the whole thing was faked and that the World Trade Center actually blew itself up.