Oh yeah, almost forgot:
Oswald’s palmprint was found on the rifle. You’re also wrong about the gunpowder residue–Oswald’s hands tested positive.
the only thing that remains in doubt are the motives for Oswald shooting and Oswald being shot. but they have very little bearing on who shot Kennedy.
First, you may have misunderstood what I said. I said the bullet entered the center of the back of JFK’s head, not the top.
This would be above the cerebellum, so it doesn’t surprise me if the cerebellum wasn’t damaged.
Other than that all I can say is that I Am Not A Doctor, BUT…I somehow can’t find it in myself to be surprised that someone who was shot in the head in such a way as to “remove” part of the brain died. True, some people do survive shots to the head, but a great many also die. Exactly why some live and others die I can’t say.
Just a sort of personal note on this one. I’ve never taken the whole “magic bullet” business seriously and the reason why is that I read and collect books on big game hunting in Africa. These big game hunters are real fanatics about their bullets. After they shoot an elephant (or what have you) they always try to recover the bullet to see how it performed. Then they take pictures of it for the book that they all seem to eventually write.
If your really interested see if you can lay your hands on “Elephant Hunting in Portuguese East Africa” by Jose Pardal. In the picture section he has pictures of 68 bullets that have been used to shoot elephants and in my opinion 38 of them look as good or better than the “magic bullet.” And that’s after shooting elephants! And one of them he even reloaded, so it was used to shoot two elephants! So bullets surviving in good shape probably aren’t all that rare.
A reasonable motive for Oswald does exist: that he was trying to shoot Connally and missed. Connally was Sec of the Navy, and his signature was on a letter refusing to change Oswald’s discharge from the Marines, which was less than honorable, as I recall. So he had a personal motive for shooting him.
Either Kennedy got hit accidentally, or he almost literally decided to kill two birds with one stone. In either case, we have a lone gunman with the means, the motive, and the opportunity, and that lone gunman was Oswald.
This string of well-researched cites mixed with unsupported assertions supporting the lone-gunman theory are all well and good, but they aren’t the least bit responsive to the question stated in the OP, and in fact the somewhat consistent mocking tone and dogmatic refusal to acknowledge any other possibility than the One True Theory really just supports the poster’s thesis. For better or worse, it’s currently quite fashionable to incorrectly apply the term “skeptic” and blindly follow the lead of such brilliant paragons of dispassionate critical thinking as Penn and Teller :rolleyes:, for example. Debunking is great, especially since the human capacity for self-delusion has been demonstrated over and over again throughout history, but debunking while admitting absolutely zero possibilities other than that which your own equally fallible mind has chosen to believe is foolish in the extreme.
It’s as if a “canon of acceptable thought and occurrences” is being fashioned from whole cloth - in part as a reaction against the New Age movement of the decade past, I suspect, which was certainly accompanied by a proliferation of real wackos who needed some serious debunking; but now we have otherwise intelligent people going around applying the ugly term “tinfoil hat” to everybody that doesn’t agree in the strictest terms with their personal belief system. It’s an insulting, inflammatory, prejudicial term, deceptive in the way it calls to mind familiar cartoonish images. In more genteel conversations, the word “buff” is substituted, as kind of a condescending distinction between a “serious scholar” and a “hobbyist who got carried away”. Either way, it reduces intelligent discussion to a smarmy, pretentious, pseudointellectual level.
The crime that deserves such treatment? Remaining open to the possibility of other explanations. Remember people, it is one thing to believe fervently in an alternate, even unlikely theory in this or any other matter; it is quite another thing to remain open to the possibility that another theory will turn out to be correct. And guess what - to believe fervently in even the most likely theory, to the exclusion of all else, is to place the tinfoil hat on your own head in defense against flexible thinking.
So sure you’re right? Imagine the widespread shock and embarrassment when Newtonian Physics turned out to be wrong.
You misunderstand. No one here is saying, “It’s impossible that there was a conspiracy.” What we’re saying is that the burden of proof is on the conspiracy theorists, and they simply haven’t met it. You are free to hold whatever theory you want, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You may not be saying that, but at least one or two of the other posters in this thread are saying exactly that. And quite rudely, to boot.
Also, since when is the claim that “two or more people discussed the assassination and agreed to keep it a secret” (the definition of “conspiracy” offered in the OP) an “extraordinary claim”? That’s an entirely subjective value-judgement made by you - it makes a nice snappy sound bite, but it’s meaningless in this debate. Nobody is suggesting that giant blue monsters from the planet Xeros killed Kennedy or anything. On the contrary; many emminently reasonable people, and people having orders of magnitude more information on the subject than anybody here, have considered some type of collusion in the matter to be a possibility, or even a likelihood.
It’s an extraordinary claim because there is no evidence of it. There are no memos, no whistle blowers, no documentary evidence at all.
On the other hand, we have a nutbar with marine training, associated with all sorts of radical causes, photographed holding the murder weapon, with the murder weapon’s purchase traced to him. This same guy bolted out of the building and went downtown to a theater for no apparent purpose, and shot a cop along the way. When he was approached in the theater, he tried to pull his gun and shoot. Not the actions of an innocent man.
Against massive amounts of evidence pointing to Oswald, we have… years of analysis of the Zapruder film, with about a half a dozen different ‘conspiracy scenarios’ coming out of it. We have a photo with odd looking shadows. We have a a confused ER staff remembering slightly different things. And a few other bits and pieces that people have tried to piece together into some conspiracy.
The thing is, if you took any other event that was documented as well as the Kennedy assassination and went through every scrap with the zeal the Kennedy conspiracy theorists have, and you could find plenty of discrepencies and odd coincidences. That is not proof of anything other than ingenuity of the people doing the data mining and correlation-fitting.
I think they have a great deal of bearing on the issue. Not really wanting to get into this, but just had to say I was listening to the radio reports as it happened.
After the limo went to the hospital, reporters were asking anyone if they saw what happened. At least three people said they saw shots being fired from the grassy knowl. One said he saw a person run and jump into a car waiting close by. Another said they could see the smoke from the shots and another said she saw a lone man with a handgun shooting in the direction of the president. This was reported by people on the scene, moments after it happened. When the Warren report was published only about one in ten people believed it. That is why there are so many conspiracy stories today.
I agree. But how about if we forget about the “magic bullets,” the puffs of smoke from rifles that use smokeless powder, the exit wounds that lack entrance wounds, etc, etc
How about if we concentrate on a real possibility, such as a man who…
1……Was born in Russia
2……Spent time in Poland
3……In 1942 was labeled by the State Department as an “Alleged Nazi Agent”
4……Also in 1942 was thrown out of Mexico after being labeled a “persona non grata.”
5……Both his cousin and uncle were suspected of having ties to the Nazis
6……Was thrown out of Yugoslavia for “making sketches of military fortifications.”
7……Was one of Oswald’s best friends in the US.
8……Knew that Oswald owned a rifle.
9……After Oswald attemted to assassinate Genera Walker on April 10, 1963; according to Marina Oswald he rushed into the house and yelled “Lee, how did you miss General Walker?”. He admitted to the Warren Commision that he asked Oswald if he had shot at General Walker but claimed he was just joking.
10……Had in his possession a photograph of Oswald in Oswald’s backyard holding a rifle and a newspaper which was very similar to, but not identical to, the “famous” photo.
11……On the back of this photo was written, by Oswald: “To my friend George from Lee Oswald” and then in Russian: “Hunter of Fascists, Ha Ha Ha”
12……Admitted to connections with a French intelligence agent. (Ah Ha, those damn French again)
13……Who on May 7, 1963 telephoned the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence of the Army, whose duties included “human source collection of intelligence" and………“serving in a liaison capacity with the Central Intelligence Agency,” in order to arrange a meeting with a CIA agent.
14……Who left the country shortly before the assassination and never returned.
15……He committed suicide “on the day he was contacted by both an investigator from the committee and a writer about Oswald.”
How about George De Mohrenschildt?
I’ve always beleived that if there was any kind of conspiracy at all, he’s the one. But I don’t think you’ll ever find the evidence to actually pin it on him.
Just watch Oliver Stone’s JFK. It is not fiction, it is a documentary. Everything in that film is backed up by reams of documentation. Another good analysis is Peter Dale Scott’s book “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.” He doesn’t try to answer the question of who actually pulled the trigger, but he goes into the insanely complex and fractally connected web of intrigue in which the JFK assassination was inexplicably embedded. It is impossible to discuss it in this sort of forum where concision and denial have the upper hand.
Actually, I am working on a theory that Freepers are not humans but are a computer algorithm. It makes a sense when you look at the remarkable consistency of tone, illogic, and insult that the Freeper program engages in. It is no doubt programmed by the CIA to suppress dissent and enforce a Procrustean bed of undeviating discourse on the Internet. Trimming the oscillations of Foucault’s pendulum asymptotically to zero.
Now observe their predictable reaction.
What the hell is a “Freeper”?!
It sounds like you are positing that a computer algorithm trawls web-based message boards and composes responses to any proponent of a JFK assassination scenario other than lone- gunman-Oswald.
If this is your opinion, it makes believing that Oliver Stone’s JFK was a documentary positively well balanced by comparison.
Was that predictable?
You almost whooshed me with this one.
OK, Sentient Meat you pass the test, but hansel is a freeper-bot. Remember Blade Runner?
But seriously, you cannot give one example of something in JFK that was counterfactual. I can:
The scene where David Ferrie (played by Joe Pesci) says that the assassination was a “riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a mystery” (I think that is how it goes). That statement was attributed to Churchill, speaking about Russia.
Every other detail in JFK I have found in one of the assassination books.
You see, Sam, you’re not a TRUE skeptic 
The end-on photo is of the base of the bullet, not the nose. It shows the exposed lead core and copper jacket typical of a military rifle bullet. It would be easy to miss the slight flattening of the side of the bullet in a single side view and the erosion to the lead core (probably caused mostly by the hot, high pressure gasses in the barrel) are completely hidden in the other photo. I have no problem believing they are photos of the same bullet. The modest damage is easily explained by it slowing in soft tissue in Kennedy’s body before hitting bone in Connaly’s.
What the Kennedy Assasination, not to mention his brother’s assasination, the MLK killing, the OJ Simpson case, the… ect etc etc shows is that any case, any situation, any investigation- no matter how clear & obvious it was- will have holes in the investigation, unanswered questions, and simply botched procedures on the part of the all-too-human investigators.
ANY case will show the same if looked at closely enough- looka t what happens when they start going over some “open & shut, the just was out for 15 minutes” type of capital murder cases. Holes. Gaps. Questions. Blunders . The Kennedy assasination has been looked at more than just about anything else- so, yes- more questions will come out. It is inevitable. My god, dudes- we have the assasination of his brother on FILM… and there are still conspiracy theoryists out there.
Now- the one big hole in the JFK killing is not whether Oswald shot him- he did. Oswald was indeed- the lone “gunman”. But WHY? That is the big question which has plenty of fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. KGB? Cuba? Mafia? CIA? Lone Looney? And of course- Jack Ruby stopped that line of questioning before it got really started- which can legitimately lead to: “Did Ruby shoot Oswald to shut him up”?
Darn it- “open & shut- the JURY was out for 15 minutes”. Oh for an edit function!
---- posted by TCLOUIE -----------------------
Who would have ever believed Watergate was possible? Or Iran-Contra, or Enron, or the Tuskegee Experiment, or the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, or the CIA’s experiments with LSD, or the Fascist coup foiled by General Smedley Butler in the 30’s? These are all documented conspiracies. Why are they plausible, while Area 51, PROMIS software, black helicopters, programmed assassins, and government complicity in 9/11 are all considered totally implausible??? Is it because one set of conspiracies has been proven, and the other hasn’t? Why, then, shouldn’t the second set be thoroughly investigated
We debunkers and skeptics have never denied that the world is filled with bad people who are morally capable of all kinds of evils, including criminal conspiracies. We simply recognize, as you do not, that high-level conspiracies are extremely difficult to pull off, and even MORE difficult to keep hidden.
Moreover, in most of the other cases, the conspiracy unravelled, and in short order, we had a host of people eager to spill their guts!
Watergate was a fiasco that ended with Nixon’s resignation and the imprisonment of the leading conspirators, most of whom were EAGER to spill the beans, in hopes of saving their own behinds. If Richard Nixon couldn’t pull off this “third-rate burglary” and get away with it, what makes you think the government could stage a perfect, flawless assassination and get away with it?
DrDeth brings up a good point: That any investigation is going to have blank spots. And, if you are of a mind for this sort of thing, you can make a lot out of it.
A lot of what? Well, very often conspiracists are what someone (maybe Dr. Carroll of The Skeptic’s Dictionary) called “significance junkies”. This view is, obviously, that everything is significant. There are no accidents, no mistakes, no happenstance and error and all witnesses are to be taken at face value.
If you check John McAdams site (he and I go way back to arguing against conspiracists on alt.conspiracy.jfk) you will see the same chestnuts come up again and again:
The location of Kennedy’s head wound–Front? Back? Side? THe confusion is caused by doctors at Parkland hospital casually noting flayed skull and brain without close examination of the loacation of the wound. They were trying to save his life, not do an autopsy.
The “Pristine” Magic Bullet–First off, it’s not “pristine” it has been flattened on one side and lead extruded from the base, which is not surprising with a full metal jacket bullet. Secondly, as someone noted, the path of the bullet is not erratic is you show some fidelity to the positions Kennedy and Connally were in when they were shot.
The Rifle–Was it a Mannlicher-Carcano or a Mauser? One of the cops that found it thought it was a Mauser. The two rifles bear a superficial similarity, but a perfectly reasonable misidentification becomes a “switched rifle”.
Back and to the Left—Means a shot from the front, right? No, because as Dr. Latimer showed, human heads are not billiard balls.
And so one and so on. In each of these cases, and many more from the conspiracy camp, you get significance junkies either treating common misperception as significance or putting a spin on things to make it seem significant when it is not. It’s the only way you can call it a “pristine bullet”.
Something McAdams has pointed out again and again and again, is that all the dubious and in some cases, forged evidence comes from the conspiracy side. Which reminds me of the skeptical maxim coined by Martin Gardener, that before you start explaining anything, make sure there is something to explain.