We’ve ground this to bits in several recent (last year or so) threads.
The CTers postulate a whole string of difficulties and false premises, so that they can pull the “See? He/One man couldn’t POSSIBLY have done it” rabbit out of the hat. Simple GIGO at work.
The “three shots in 5.6 seconds” bit is worked into their fabric by assuming someone yells “Go!” and THEN the shooter has to pull off three shots. That’s nonsense, because the actual timing is 5.6 seconds* from the first shot to the last*, meaning some little voice yelled “Go!” in Oswald’s head before the first shot - one second, ten seconds, whatever - and the rifle was ready to fire at that zero point. Some of the CT tests actually have the shooter waiting for “Go!” before he even cycles the bolt for the first shot. Under those limitations, yes, it is difficult for a skilled shooter to even get three shots off, much less three well-aimed shots. See!
As for targeting, it was both a short distance and the dynamics of the moving car (down a long, slight slope) made it even easier to hold a bead on the target. It was not at all like trying to pop off three shots at a clay pigeon.
The best evidence is that the shots were more like 8.4 seconds from first to last. That 5.6 was based on not knowing when the first shot was fired, and not knowing whether the first shot hit Kennedy and Connolly and the second shot missed, or vice-versa. It now looks like the first shot was the one that missed and happened a few seconds before the “magic bullet” shot, thus making it more like 8.4 seconds total.
In re the OP, the government will probably not go into the case again for a long time, if ever again. The crime was a state crime, and under the jurisdiction of Texas and Dallas. I can’t remember if the case is still open or if it was shut.
The feds only investigated the assassination because of the turmoil of the 60s and 70s and some people were raising questions and went to Congress about it, and it had popular support. The CIA and FBI were under fire, and the Congress needed to come up with something. The government will do as little as it takes to bring some program or investigation to a close, unless it is a moneymaker, i.e., war, social programs, etc…
Their time is better spent making deals for themselves and their districts, and don’t want to be bothered with a state crime.
HH, your grasp of the JFK case proves to be shaky as always, even in the simple facts.
The federal government did not wait for some kind of public outcry to act. The Warren Commission was formed on 29 November 1963, just seven days after the assassination. There was no question of it being a federal case - if only on the congressional level, federal law being somewhat muddled on the point - and there was never any serious consideration of leaving it to Texas to investigate. The battle over jurisdiction began before Kennedy’s body had completely cooled, with the US taking possession of the body to perform the autopsy.
Everyone’s time is better spent moving on, not freaking out over negligible discoveries fifty years later that change the established facts not one whit.
The controversy will never end…as long as the CIA files on this are not opened. In particular, the roles of Santos Trafficante (Florida mafia boss) and the plots on Fidel Castro’s life need to come to light.
[QUOTE=Sunstein and Vermeule]
Those who accept such theories believe that the agents of the conspiracy have unusual powers, so that apparently contrary evidence can usually be shown to be a product of the conspiracy itself.
[/Quote]
If you think anything will end the “controversy” about this, you’re nuts. The “controversy” has long since descended into the conspiracy theory realm, such that it only serves to help preening jackasses “prove” that they’re “more intelligent” than the educated people because the jackasses buy into some idiotic rehashed story with more plot holes and gross logical deficiencies than a Michael Bay movie.
It’s a somewhat more socially acceptable version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, something else debunked long ago which just refuses to die.
The only saving grace is that it has also passed into the realm of the hardcore true believer, the shadowy realm where conspiracy theories take on a permanent semi-life, not active and vibrant but not entirely forgotten, only kept around by the sad Renfields of the conspiracy world, who need something to give their lives meaning but who are too marginalized to re-introduce any theory into the mainstream on their own.
So keep moving those goalposts down the field. The rest of us will continue to not really care.
Yeah. If there was anything juicy in the CIA files, you know those pages will be redacted or never included in what is released to the public. Obviously. So it’s not going to make the CTs go to bed.
I also don’t think there is anything unclear about Oswald’s motives. He was an angry loser.
He took up Marxism in high school to get attention. He started building up the Soviet Union as a worker’s paradise, defected there, found it was a shithole where nobody liked him or considered him important any more than in the US. So he came back and started building up Cuba as the next paradise on earth. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he discovered that JFK was going to drive past the building he worked in, and decided he would become the important and historic figure he thought he should be all along.
Shooting Kennedy was pretty much the first thing he ever succeeded at in his life. And even then, Ruby shot him before LHO had a chance to strut thru the trial and spout half-baked revolutionary slogans.
He was a violent crackpot. Once in his life, he got lucky.
It doesn’t matter what is or isn’t in the CIA files either now, then, or any time in between. Whatever does get released publicly will not be believed by the CT true believers. Even if the released files contain massive “smoking guns”, they’ll be assumed to be just the tip of the much larger still-hidden “real story”. And they’ll definitely be deemed a whitewash if they contain no such smoking guns.
The thing I always find charming about CTers is their belief that any still-secret files are omnisciently complete and correct. Until they’re released, at which moment they become fakes riddled with inconsistencies & obvious redactions and omissions.
I wouldn’t argue at all, except that everything we know about his motivations is inferred from his personal history and the few who observed him closely. I don’t think we have ten words from the man that tell us anything about what he was thinking.
No, it doesn’t really matter in the end. But it would be interesting to know what he was really thinking, and more interesting to find out if there were those who were encouraging him and perhaps even enabling his plans, even at the lowest, barroom-buddy level.
You are correct that we don’t have anything that says “I intend to shoot Kennedy” but he didn’t have much of a chance to write - as mentioned, it was only a few days between the publishing of Kennedy’s motorcade route and the actual shooting.
But his disillusionment with the USSR, his infatuation with Cuba, and so forth, are a matter of public record.
One didn’t have to observe Oswald all that closely to find out what he thought politically -
LHO’s mental issues which led to what he did are far from mysterious. He thought he was a great man with a destiny. Reality didn’t comply. He took things into his own hands. This is a typical mentality for someone who commits such infamous crimes.
(Which is also why LHO being part of a super-secret conspiracy makes no sense. No organization would trust this loser.)
There are a few odd things about his actions, esp. post-shooting.
What was his getaway plan? He barely had any money. He knew he was going to be IDed as the shooter. (He left the gun, etc. where he worked.) But other than going home and changing clothes, he didn’t act like a guy on the run until stopped by Tippit. Even after he shot Tippit, he didn’t do much.
While in custody he seemed uninterested in taking credit, OTOH, he tried to get in touch with a famous leftist lawyer who he thought would help attract publicity to his cause. Was he looking for fame or not at this point?
The Warren Commission elided over many of LHO’s issues, which got better documented by the HSCA. But the latter went off the deep end on a lot of stuff.
The problem is the mainstream media keep returning to the Dallas Police Dept.dicabelt recordings/accounstic noises. Why did so many police converge on the grassy knoll area?
OK The Warren Commission carried out its investigation and made its conclusions. No one other than a lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination. But the media won’t let it go.
Based on statistical probabilities, including the observation that the locations of the microphones that picked up the matching impulse patterns tended to cluster along a line on the graph that approximated the speed of the motorcycle, Barger estimated there was 50 percent chance that anyone of the matches was invalid. (40) Consequently, Barger testified before the committee in September 1978 that the probability of there having been a shot from the grassy knoll was only 50 percent.(41) He based this estimate on there being only one match for impulse three, combined with his conclusion that there was a 50-50 chance that any one match, including the one for impulse pattern three, had been caused by random noise. and was invalid. (42)(Barger was also saying, however, that if the match for impulse pattern three was valid, it meant that a shot was fired at President Kennedy from the grassy knoll.) 9 …
Barger independently reviewed the analysis performed by Weiss and Aschkenasy and concluded that their analytical procedures were correct. (57) Barger and the staff at BBN also confirmed that there was a 95 percent chance that at the time of the assassination a noise as loud as a rifle shot was produced at the grassy knoll. When questioned about what could cause such a noise if it were not a shot, Barger noted it had to be something capable of causing a very loud noise–greater than a single firecracker.(58) Further, given the echo patterns obtained, the noise had to have originated at the very spot behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll that had been identified,(59) indicating that it could not have been a backfire from a motorcycle in the motorcade. (60)
Study: Shot Was Fired From ‘Grassy Knoll’
There may indeed have been a shot fired from the legendary grassy knoll 38 years ago, and it could likely have been the bullet that killed President John F. Kennedy, according to a new acoustical study.
“[T]he gunshot-like sounds occur exactly synchronous with the time of the shooting,” writes Donald Thomas, author of the report which was peer-reviewed and published in Science and Justice, a journal of Britain’s Forensic Science Society.
Why is “maybe there was a second guy shooting from the grassy knoll who escaped justice?” a conspiracy theory? It wouldn’t require a conspiracy, just Oswald had a buddy the cops never found also shooting at the president, or by incredible coincidence, at the exact same time, another assassin was trying to kill the President.
Nobody in the U.S. government had to be “in on it”, it could have just been 1 more individual with a gun out there in Dallas that day. Kennedy had a lot of enemies I guess. I’m not in favor of the theory, just saying it doesn’t have to be anything crazy even if it were true.