I know the JFK assassination conspiracy theories have been beaten to death but...

Great Debates
161

From the JFK errors site:

"More importantly, perhaps, only a total of four witnesses, out of 178 tabulated, reported shots coming from more than one direction. (Not surprisingly, these witnesses are commonly cited in conspiracy books – and in Oliver Stone’s JFK – despite the fact that they are the exceptions, not the rule.)

But even the vast majority of conspiracy believers acknowledge that at least some shots came from behind the President, if not specifically from the Texas School Book Depository.

Also, an overwhelming majority of the witnesses – 80.8% – reported hearing two or three shots, with the next largest group – 10.5% – reporting a total of one or two shots, and a mere 8.7% reporting four or more shots.(3)"

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IANA conspiracy theorist, but there are a couple of things about the first shot that I don’t get:

  1. Why did Oswald shoot through a tree? Why didn’t he wait for the car to emerge from behind it?
  2. Despite firing presumably at JFK from quite close range, the first shot not only missed him, it missed the car completely. Is it plausible that the tree deflected the bullet that much?

Honest questions both, I know nothing whatsoever about guns.

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Usram – if you read that Warren Commission Report Link that minty green posted you’ll find that the report does not definitely state what happened. They leave a number of possibilities open.

I am absolutely convinced, after seeing a show in which Connally spoke about the shooting, that he was NOT hit by the first shot. I also believe that the 2nd shot hit Kennedy and Connally. So, in trying to explain how this could be, I read the link and learned that one Secret Service agent (Bennett) says he heard the first shot before Kennedy was hit the first time. Many didn’t hear this shot but I believe Bennett was correct.

Reading on in the report about the minimum time required between shots then it becomes necessary to believe that an earlier shot must have been fired either just before the limo disappeared from partial view behind the tree, or perhaps, when it reappeared briefly through a gap in the tree. More likely the former. When tracking a target through a scope, if you suddenly see a tree coming into view you might well make a hasty shot and your movement of the rifle in tracking the target might have the shot going into the area occupied by the tree. This is all my speculation, of course.

I DO have some knowledge of HP rifles and it is not unreasonable to assume that a bullet could be slightly deflected by a limb and that small (in terms of angle) deflection could cause the bullet to miss the vehicle entirely.

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I’m not an expert on shooting of any kind, but I would guess he thought he had an opening. The car would’ve been slightly closer to him at the time of the first shot, since it was moving away, so perhaps he miscalculated and thought this was his best chance.

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Was James Tague hit by a bullet? Which bullet was it?

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Tague (who was standing under teh triple underpass) was hit and on the cheek by a fragment of something or other, probably a piece of concrete from where a bullet or bullet fragment hit the curb nearby. It was most likely caused by the first shot, deflected by the oak tree in Oswald’s line of sight. The second shot is accounted for by the “magic bullet.” While it’s possible that a fragment from the head shot exited Kennedy’s head before striking the concrete and causing Tague’s wound, the fragments recovered from the limo account for most of the round, meaning that any fragment that flew towards Tague likely had too little mass to send the concrete flying.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/tague.htm

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The report actually left unresolved the question of which bullet missed:

Although more and more evidence over the years points to the first shot missing.

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A new, complete analysis by an independant radiologist, with access to the National Archvie material, concluded that one shot came from the front:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/120703cookevilledoctor.html

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akrako: You’ll have to do better than uncorroborated bloviating on a conspiracist website. The radiologist ignores much of the evidence that has been discussed in this very thread (and why is radiology a particularly useful credential for this exercise, anyway?)

The website you link to is related to Alex Jones, a notable conspiracy crank. I remember the guy from public access TV back when I was in law school in Austin. He’s entertaining in a car wreck kind of way, but he is not, to put it mildly, a credible source.

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Dr. Robertson’s paper was rejected by the journal Radiology. Their criticisms of it here (bottom of page):

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The last two posts appear dangerously close to being ad-hominem.

Thoughts that occur to me.

  1. This radiologist must be well-thought-of to have been given the unique access that he was given.

  2. It’s not significant that his report was put up on the Conspiracy Theory site. Of course they would post it – that shouldn’t reflect on the validity of his report.

  3. I don’t know why radiology is considered the appropriate speciality to be looking at the head wound – perhaps an M.D. could answer this. BUT, it appears that it might well be. You notice that the other M.D.s didn’t say it was inappropriate for him to be reviewing the autopsy – they just argued the evidence.

  4. I didn’t see that the challenge to his report explained the confusion about placing the entrance wound 4 inches too low.

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Sorry, I meant to say Dewey Cheatem Undhow’s post – not the last two posts.

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Sorry, I screwed that one up. The Commission leaned strongly towards the first shot hitting and the second missing, but did not draw a firm conclusion on it. Reading the accounts of “The First Shot” and “The Second Shot” in that linked section of the report shows they clearly favored the first as a hit and the second as a miss.

174

I haven’t read that book but I have read a book by David E. Scheim that I found extremely good called ‘The Mafia Killed President Kennedy’ (The name is a bit sensationalist but the authors original choice was ‘Contract on America’). I am an university student and this is the most diligently referenced book that I have ever read, with all most all (> 95%) references quoted from direct sources (predominantly the HSAC). My summary (sorry it is so long) of the standout facts listed is:

The dictaphone evidence submitted by two independent labs claiming 95% probability that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll (subsequently confirmed by Thomas, D.B. 2001 ‘Echo correlation analysis and the acoustic evidence in the Kenedy assasination revisited’ in Science & Justice, 41: 21-32 to a confidence level p < 0.037 or 99.963%)

Jack Ruby (a strip joint manager) had many connections with known mafia members and there is a mountain of circumstansial evidence that he was employed as a pay-off man to the Dallas police. More startling, is that for a man who is supposed to have put himself at risk of lifetime imprisonment by killing Oswald in a fit of patriotic rage is that he hated JFK, (sorry can’t find the quote but it is in there, I promise)

Scheim lists in great detail the motives for killing JFK and the professed desired (caught on bugs that were the restult of RFK’s crackdown on the mafia) of key mafia bosses.

Memos sent out by J. E. Hoover instructing is FBI staff the day after the shooting to reach the finding of a lone gunman.

Chief justice Warren’s stifling of Jack Ruby’s final testomy (Scheim proposes that this was after he realised that he was being left out to dry by the mafia), get out the manuscript of Warren’s interrogation of Ruby in the commision.

These are just some of many well argued points that have made it impossible for me to believe anything other than that the Mafia conspired to kill JFK

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When I said ‘after he realised that he was being left out to dry by the mafia’ I meant Ruby.

An intriguiging side note was that Chief Justice Warren had a meeting with LBJ before the commission from which he was witnessed leaving in tears…

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Did this book mention that the acoustic evidence-based conclusion has been completely vacated, because it’s now known that it was recorded a few minutes after the assassination?

Did it mention the complete implausibility of a planned Ruby rub-out of Oswald, because at the time Oswald was scheduled to be transported, Ruby was running a personal errand, and that the only reason Ruby was even there is that Oswald was late? Did it mention that Ruby left his “baby,” his pet dachshund, in the car? I guess he did these to make it seem like a spontaneous fit of poor judgment to us years later.

Seriously, if your book didn’t mention these little details, then it was lying by omission.

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Speculation. I am not sure how much “unique access” he had but I DO know that I have heard all manner of cranks claim to have had such access adn come to the same conclusions. Of couse the claims are either unspoorted or outright falsified(even in this very thread).

Wrong. When dealing with evidence of an anecdotal or not-empirically supported nature, we scrutinise the credibility of the source(often the only thing we HAVE to scrutinise when presented with such evidence). A flat-earther who presents his thesis within a fanzine aimed at religionists or somesuch, but does NOT publish this in a scientifically peer-reviewed journal, need not be taken seriously. If he had actual SCIENTIFIC information which was well supported, plausible and/or subject to scientific methodology(falsification, controlled testing etc.) then there is no reason this information should not appear in a peer-reviewed journal.
A conspiracy theorist web site is not credible because such sources are motivated by a belief-driven agenda and dogma and the mount of truthful informatiuon is far outweighed by the amount of easily refuted, misinformation.

They didn’t just argue the evidence they thoroughly debunked it! Besides, arguing the evidence is exactly what they SHOULD be doing. If they simply argued that a radiologist should not be called upon to examine such things, who will take thneir position seriously? It would sound as though they were dodging the hard questions/facts/evidence.

The entrance wound was just one of many things that got messed up upon the initial examination. These M.E.s had never examined such a victim(of bullet-head wounds) before and they made mistakes(which have been subsequently cleared up). For one, they assumed the entrance wound was in the front because blood had pooled at the base of Kennedy’s skull from him being laid on his back. They failed to match the entrance hole in JFK’s jacket with the entrance wound in his throat because they did not realize the actual position of his body and arms at the time the bullet struck.

You guys are really struggling to hold onto this bit of revisionist history aren’t you?

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Speculation. I am not sure how much “unique access” he had but I DO know that I have heard all manner of cranks claim to have had such access and come to the same conclusions. Of couse the claims are either unspported or outright falsified(even in this very thread).

Wrong. When dealing with evidence of an anecdotal or not-empirically supported nature, we scrutinise the credibility of the source(often the only thing we HAVE to scrutinise when presented with such evidence). A flat-earther who presents his thesis within a fanzine aimed at religionists or somesuch, but does NOT publish this in a scientifically peer-reviewed journal, need not be taken seriously. If he had actual SCIENTIFIC information which was well supported, plausible and/or subject to scientific methodology(falsification, controlled testing etc.) then there is no reason this information should not appear in a peer-reviewed journal.
A conspiracy theorist web site is not credible because such sources are motivated by a belief-driven agenda and dogma and the mount of truthful informatiuon is far outweighed by the amount of easily refuted, misinformation.

They didn’t just argue the evidence they thoroughly debunked it! Besides, arguing the evidence is exactly what they SHOULD be doing. If they simply argued that a radiologist should not be called upon to examine such things, who will take thneir position seriously? It would sound as though they were dodging the hard questions/facts/evidence.

The entrance wound was just one of many things that got messed up upon the initial examination. These M.E.s had never examined such a victim(of bullet-head wounds) before and they made mistakes(which have been subsequently cleared up). For one, they assumed the entrance wound was in the front because blood had pooled at the base of Kennedy’s skull from him being laid on his back. They failed to match the entrance hole in JFK’s jacket with the entrance wound in his throat because they did not realize the actual position of his body and arms at the time the bullet struck.

You guys are really struggling to hold onto this bit of revisionist history aren’t you?

179

Just a warning, this is a long response

The book doesn’t mention the NRC finding that the acoustical evidence was void. However the paper by D. B. Thomas refutes the NRC finding as it claims the NRC uses a less reliable (with regards to the timing of) voice transmission to synchronise the timing of the possible ‘gunshot’ sounds with the assassination. It also determines the possibility that the ‘gunshot’ sounds were attributable to random background or electromagnetic noise to be vanishingly small.

To quote the summary of the paper ‘There was a further incongruity in the arguments of the NRC panel, and perhaps irony, in that a broadcast over the police radio sent one minute after the assassination giving orders to search behind the Grassy Knoll for an assassin, was invoked as evidence that there was no assassin on the Grassy Knoll’. Now you can dispute the papers findings but it is a peer reviewed paper and I am just concluding an electrical engineering degree specializing in signal processing and I found it to be a convincing examination.

As to Ruby’s whereabouts before the assassination, the book goes into them in painstaking detail, starting a few months before when there is evidence that Ruby started making a lot of trips around the country to see serious mafia players including Carlos Marcello (New Orleans mafia boss, for reference see Scheim). It also details Ruby’s complete movements from the days preceding the JFK assassination to the Oswald shooting and presents evidence that contradicts Ruby’s version of events for that morning.

I don’t think that it is implausible that, if he was in effect carrying out a mob hit with a premeditated story, that he took deliberate steps to make it look that way. And I don’t think a dog in his car, if you say it was there, blows the whole theory. Now, I understand conspiracies naturally justify themselves but you can drop the condescending tone. Scheim is at pains to show Ruby’s cosiness with the Dallas police of which there are many independent eye witness reports from his strip joint, so if they are to be believed then it is possible that the timing of the shooting was coordinated with the police.

Take Ruby’s own testimony to the Warren commission (click here for original transcript, http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh5/contents.htm, I have double checked this and subsequent quotes for their context. I recommend that everyone interested should read it because if we are all conspiracy crackpots then so was Ruby. Most of the tangents that Ruby goes off on Scheim has chased up and found that they implicate Ruby with the mob or give hints to what might have happened),

‘Who else could have timed it [the Oswald shooting] so perfectly by seconds? If it were timed that way, then someone in the police department is guilty of giving the information as to when Lee Harvey Oswald was coming down’. (Ruby, J. 1964, Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol 5. p 206)

Now this may seem at first to be implying that the notion is ridiculous, but when placed in the context of the rest of his testimony where he constantly (> 4) asked Warren to transport him to Washington because he didn’t feel safe in Dallas and he didn’t trust his attorney (Joe Tonahill, who had represented known mafia men before, see Scheim) and he repeatedly asked for a lie detector test (Scheim proposes that this is because he realises that the mafia isn’t going to pull any strings to get him off).

‘All I want is a lie detector test, and you refuse to give it to me… And they will not give it to me, because I want to tell the truth. And then I want to leave this world…’ (Ruby, J. 1964, Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 5, page 211)

‘maybe I was put here as a front of the underworld and sooner or later they will get something out of me that they want done to their advantage’ (Ruby, J. 1964, Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol 14 pp 566). This could be a desperate ploy to get himself off the hook but with the amount of evidence suggesting his connections to the mafia I believe that it is very plausible.

Now Ruby would have had to have been absolutely infuriated at JFK’s shooting in order to put himself at risk of life-time imprisonment by shooting Oswald. However this does not gel with witness reports of his manner at the police station the night of JFK’s shooting. Bearing in mind at this time Ruby told police that he was in mourning, television newsman Vic Robertson, Jr. relayed that

‘Ruby appeared to be anything but under stress or strain’, ‘He seem jovial, was joking and laughing’ (Warren Commission Hearings, Robertson Exhibit 2{http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh21/contents.htm}) and at radio station KLIF on Saturday morning DF Russ Knight said that Ruby’s face when talking about Oswald didn’t ‘express any bitterness against the man’ ( Moore R. L. (Knight), Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol 15 pp 257{http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh15/html/WC_Vol15_0131a.htm}). In a note to Joe Tonahill (his attorney) that made its way in to Newsweek in 1967 then to the house assignations committee, Ruby wrote

‘Joe, you should know this. Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t have to come to Dallas to testify. OK?’ (Newsweek, March 27, 1967, p.21; House Assassinations Committee Report, pp. 158)

In addition Ruby was not patriotic, his gambling partner Harry Hall said to the FBI ‘Ruby was the type who was interested in any way to make money’ (Warren Commissions Exhibit (CE) 1753{http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh23/contents.htm}), he ‘could not conceive of Ruby doing anything out of patriotism’ (ibid) and he ‘scoffed at the idea of a patriotic motive being involved by Ruby in the slaying of Oswald’ (CE 1245{http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/contents.htm}). This is backed up by a friend of Ruby’s Paul Roland who was paraphrased by FBI interviews as affirming

‘from his acquaintance with Ruby he doubted that [Ruby] would have become emotionally upset and killed Oswald on the spur of the moment. He felt that Ruby would have done it for money’ (CE 1184 {http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/contents.htm})

Finally (I promise) Ruby said in his polygraph hearing in 1964 ‘Oh yes; they didn’t ask me another question if I loved the president so much then why wasn’t I at the parade? Is that an important question to ask?’ (Ruby, J. 1964, Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 14, pp. 564)

I would just like to stress again how impressed I am with this book, Scheim D. E. 1988, ‘The Mafia Killed JFK’, WH Allen & Co. (first published as ‘Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F Kennedy’ and no I am not its publicist in disguise) and the stuff I have mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg. If you believe the preface, it took 10 years to write (and I believe that due to the extensive research of the HSAC, Warren Commission and police files he would have had to have done) then it is hardly a good way to make a quick buck and more like the dedicated effort of a citizen who is appalled at the state of play in his own country.

One last thing, that is a nice Voltaire quote Godless Sceptic but what is more absurd? That a strip joint owner risked life in jail just to save Jacky Kennedy from the trauma of giving evidence or that the mafia set up Oswald to take the fall and the job fell to that strip joint owner to silence him. I’ll stop writing now.

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Fourth paragraph, first sentence, I meant ‘make it look like the premeditated story’. Remember the mafia are professionals (literally) at this, so I believe that it is reasonable that they would have thought of some of the smaller details.