Again, I am interested in just how powerful the Mafia is/was. It seems to me that the CIA was hopelessly compromised-when they made the plan to use the Mob to hit Castro, they were making a deal with the devil-how could you trust a mobster like Narcello or Trafficante? And the corruption of the Teamsters Union-Hoffa was the man the mob wanted , because he fed the pension fund millions to Mob-owned resorts and casinos. So we have a popular president (JFK), who is hopelessly mixed up with unsavory and corrupt Mob characters. We also have a VP (LBJ) who is himseld enmeshed in scandal and corruption (Billie Sol estes,Bobby Baker, the 6.5 billion$ F-11 contract (awarded to GD of Texas). Then we have Stty. General Bobby Kennedy, attempting to trein in some of the corruption.
I’d say they Mob was pretty involved with the Kennedy administration, and wheterh for good or ill, I think we desrve to know the gory details. Again, are the CIA files on people like Ginacana, Trafficante, open to the public?
Ah, then here’s your research material!
On that fateful day in Dallas, JFK is the target of five separate assassins, each serving a different organization, and each unaware of the others’ existence – except for John Dillinger, who knows about a couple of them and actually came to save JFK’s life. When he scopes out the situation he finally decides there’s no way he can take out all the others in time; so he shoots JFK himself, just to try to keep the Forces of Evil as baffled as the rest of us.
As stated before there is little proof to show a round the clock survaillance of Giancana aside from some hearsay and the word of relatives which may have been biased or misinformed.
He was supposed to speak in a senet hearing on the CIA/Mafia Castro assassination plots. That though, wasn’t the reason for the hit alone.
Instead, it was the fact he had pissed off enough people in his day and was becoming known for being too talkative.
As stated no one really retires from the Mob. His history was one of being too greedy and too flashy. He loved hanging out with Stars and being a big shot. That was why he was forced into retirment.
It is most likely a few people were fearing he’d finger them one day with his loose talk and boasting, so they decided to interced before he said too much.
Well, I never said I believed the guy—it was just a BS session over a few beers. I didn’t know about the Mythbuster thing; thanks for the info.
Here I am, out-“conservativing” an arch-conservative!
I agree with your guess and go much farther. There’s no way that anyone would have hired or even asked Oswald to do anything! He was the ultimate loser who was pitied and despised by just about everyone he knew, including his wife. He was almost certainly mentally ill and had serious problems ever since childhood. He was about as unstable as you can get. Hell, the Soviets didn’t even want to make use of him and tried to throw him out just days after his defection! In order to get the Sovs to take pity on him (and remember, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears), he melodramatically slit his wrists in a laughably deranged manner just to make himself more important and to induce pathological pathos. Even then the Soviets did not keep him long because he was such a drunk and a loser and soon threw him out for good. When he arrived home at Love Field, he was thunderstruck that no reporters were there to interview him!
And let’s not forget that there is zero doubt that Oswald acted alone in trying to assassinate General Walker (the general got lucky; Oswald was an exceptional shot, but the bullet just barely grazed a window frame, deflecting it).
No, every single fact and every single intelligent analysis has proven conclusively – utterly beyond all reasonable doubt – that Oswald acted entirely alone and that he was the only shooter in Dealy Plaza that tragic day.
Over the years, I have usually seen just segments of the Zapruder film. Jackie crawling over the trunk toward the back of the car, to get away I supposed. Quite a natural reaction, but it still bothered me for reasons I can’t quite explain.
But lately I have seen more of the film. (Here’s a copy on YouTube .) When you watch more of it, it’s plain (at least to me) that she is trying to help the Secret Service man on board to assist her husband. Makes me feel a lot better.
Your wily username suggests that you too were part of the Grand Conspiracy.
Bastid.
No, my wily username is supposed to indicate that I was one of the intended targets!
Well, the threade is petering out, so I have one last question: are there any more documents (CIA, FBI, or other) which are still classified? I would like to read the FBI files on Giancana-it would answer some questions. :smack:
Good question. I recall in Oliver Stone’s JFK, when Jim Garrison makes his closing statement he speaks of the day when his son will finally have the chance to read the sealed records of the investigation – but I forget what year they were to be unsealed. Does anybody know?
Ah! From the above link:
I guess we just have to be patient . . . but why were the records sealed in the first place?! If there was no conspiracy, how could publication of them affect national security?!
Well, I suppose it possible that some information was classified because it discussed security techniques for the president, exposed potential weaknesses, or made recommendations for Presidential security that they didn’t want released to the public. For example, one of the publically-known outcomes was that it was decided that the President should never ride in a convertible again. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the classified documents go into details like recommendations for Secret Service sweeps of a neighborhood the president will be in, monitoring and surveillance techniques to look for snipers, etc.
Also, the government’s standard response tends to be to classify records and work product. It’s part of government culture, and has been for a while, that the default option is to restrict access.
Even so, where’s the harm in releasing that information now? We’re talking about Secret Service procedures from 1963!
IIRC, part of the reasoning for it was that they wanted to protect the Kennedy family as well. Not from assassinations, but from the emotional pain of the whole incident. (The conspiracy theories started from almost the moment JFK died.) And it’s not uncommon for the government to classify things for an absurd amount of time. I’ve got an uncle who was an aide to MacArthur in WWII and he still can’t talk about some things because they’re classified and the war ended sixty years ago!
Why would you think basic procedures would change since then? I’m talking about things like sweeping rooftops, determining vulnerable points, pre-scouting locations and planning entry/exit in case of an emergency, etc. Now, I have no idea if that’s the kind of info that’s in the classified stuff, but if it was, and if the procedures were extremely well thought out, I see no reason why they wouldn’t still be in place today.
If those same procedures had been in place for 43 years, I doubt they would be very well-kept secrets any more. Anyone who wanted to study them probably could find something in the library.
Not necessarily. There’s ancient religious rituals of the Greeks that we know very little about because folks kept them secret. The Secret Service folks take their job very seriously (and having been around them when they were guarding Reagan in '84, I speak from experience), so I doubt that they’d let too much get out. Not to mention that in addition to protecting POTUS and the VP, they also carry things like “the football” and communication devices so that if there’s an emergency while the POTUS is out somewhere they can put him in touch with the people he needs to speak to.
BTW, did anyone catch Oliver Stone’s “fuck you” in Wild Palms? His cameo in the series was appearing in a clip on a TV talkshow, where the host says, “It’s been 50 years and with the release of the classified JFK assassination papers it appears that you right all along. How does that make you feel?” To which Stone replies, “Well, if Jack Valanti were still alive, I’d be the first one to extend an olive branch to him.” 
Those are plausible explanations . . . but I can’t help being just a liiiiitle suspicious that the remaining records are sealed until 2017 to give certain parties who might be embarrassed by them time to die!
I forget, who’s Jack Valanti?