Sorry for the hijack, but this thread reads like an AA meeting*:
DocCathode: “Hi, my name is Doc and I’m a JFK Conspiracy Believer. My last odd belief was 2 years, three months, and six days ago.”
Group: “Hi Doc!”
This argument is made all the time by conspiracy believers, but I’ve never once heard anyone actually use the rationalization “our government would never do something like that!” as disproof of a JFK/moon landing/9/11 conspiracy theory. CTers frequently bring it up, ascribing that belief to the folks they argue with, then calling them naive and knocking the straw man down with examples of our government doing other, ostensibly terrible things.
I believe Oswald was the lone gunman not because I just love believing everything “the government” says, but because there’s no evidence otherwise. Plenty of evidence indicates Oswald shot JFK. A conspiracy is plausible, but unsupported, thus I reject it.
Those are also examples of how hard it is to keep a secret, and of what the evidence looks like when there is a conspiracy. Read about the Glomar Explorer, a ship built to recover a sunken Soviet submarine under the cover of doing undersea mining. The government had every reason to keep that a secret, but it came out in the press, anyway. (That liberal bastion of government hatred, the New York Times, delayed publication until after the operation was over, but it did come out.)
The “government”? Who was the government? John Kennedy was President and part of the government you’re saying him. Did he order himself to be killed?
Besides if this “government” wanted to kill Kennedy, why did they do it by shooting him in the middle of a public street in front of a few hundred witnesses? Sloppy work for a secret conspiracy that controls everything. Why didn’t they just inject him with poison one night while he was sleeping in the White House and then report the next day that the President had died of a heart attack during the night?
This map shows the layout of the area. As you can see, the Dallas County Records Building and the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building have a good view of the Texas School Book Depository Building.
As with the 9/11 CT, skepticism in the CT is not a matter of ‘belief’, but a matter of overwhelming evidence against the CT vs a few scattered anomalies and a equal mountain of bullshit, skewed ‘facts’, misunderstandings and deliberate false or misleading statements by the CT ‘experts’. Using ones own bullshit detector and a healthy does of Occam it’s pretty much a no brainer. Nothing really to see here…this dead horse has been beaten to the point that, to paraphrase a saying from The Matrix, there IS no horse…
-XT
Not to mention Vince Foster’s “suicide”.
He was going to blow the whole lid off that Lewinsky affair and Whitewater, he was…
Wow.
I asked and received!
I am not going to be convinced just yet. I think, though, that the lack of support for a CT here should give me pause. Obviously, when one sets their mind to an outcome, information that comes in begins to be filtered into the categories that reenforce the particular outcome. I seem to have fallen into the CT tank on this one.
I will add some specific questions tomorrow (I am pretty tired and want to make sure they are worded properly), however I did want to ask… Did many of you come to the conclusion of a non CT after reading Posner?
For those of you who are shooters and believe that the shot wasn’t that difficult, I do have one question. If Oswald was the lone gunman, why not shoot at him as the car heads directly toward the TSBD, instead of waiting for the car to take the sharp left turn and head toward the triple overpass? Would that not only give him an easier shot, but the chance at multiple straight on shots?
Also, how does Posner (or any of you if Posner doesn’t address it) explain where the missing film went? There are a number of people who are seen taking home movies in the crowd, and the one that holds my interest is the woman standing directly opposite the grassy knoll at the head shot. She claims that some government agent took her film. Why would she lie about that?
LHO was a shooter and killed the president. But I don’t believe he it is conclusive that he acted alone. Witnesses heard shots from other locations and saw suspicious people. Oswald certainly looks like he was set up to take all the blame, and said that he was the patsy. Assassinations by lone gunmen of popular figures take place in public when done by a lone nut, with the nut proudly taking credit. If LHO was the lone gunman nut assassin, he didn’t behave that way. He behaved as though he was a nut recruited and then hung out to dry. Frankly, the whole thing screams organized assassination. FWIW, I don’t think the Warren Commission was “in on it” but trying to provide certainty that simply could not be provided.
I was never in the CT camp, mainly because the multiple conflicting theories never made real sense to me. PBS did an excellent documentary on the assassination that debunked a lot of crap as well. But what sealed the deal for me was actually visiting Dealey Plaza, standing next to where Oswald was, and thinking "I could have killed Kennedy from here.
The shots Oswald took were around 200 feet–around 65 yards. When I was in the army, they started training us to shoot at targets 100 yards away and moved them out to 400 yards, and it didn’t take long for me, who’d never fired a weapon before in his life, to get reasonably steady. The distance from Oswald to Kennedy was short by any standard when shooting a rifle.
The road leading towards the sharp left turn has two problems with it: it’s much shorter than Elm, leaving much less time for multiple shots; and shooting at Kennedy then, you can basically see only his head among five others. If the Kennedy assassination shooter simulation is at all accurate, you don’t even see his whole head when it first comes straight at you.
I think I’ve said it before, but: I think there may possibly have been an after the fact conspiracy insofar as Johnson and others probably were afraid to find out what really happened. What if you’re the new President and the Warren Commission finds conclusive evidence that the Soviets or the Cubans were directly behind our beloved leader’s death? The information is inevitably leaked to the press, the public is baying for blood–what exactly can you do now? Risk World War III less than two years after it had been narrowly averted?
And not only Johnson: probably anyone in higher levels of government were having just about the same thoughts, so no need for explicit instructions or anything written on paper–meaningful silences and meaningful looks across the conference room would do. And who would admit it after the fact, especially since the official after-the-fact theory conveniently turned out to be the true one.?
Why would the Russians or the Cubans risk WWIII to kill Kennedy?
An obvious question now, with the benefit of hindsight.
Although given Castro’s bizarre nonchalance about nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I’m not sure even now that would’ve been a big concern for him if he had been determined to try to kill Kennedy.
I dunno . . . I guess it’s not impossible. I would rate it more likely than monkeys flying out of my butt, but less likely than monkeys flying out of, say, Paris Hilton’s butt.
Which is not impossible? That Castro might be willing to kill Kennedy, or that there was some degree of “we think we know who did it, and we really don’t want to pursue this any further” in the US gov’t? Because I think you’ll find cases of the latter in almost every police department and prosecutor’s office in the land at some time or another. I don’t find it all that hard to imagine in this case, when the stakes were so high.
Oddly, I had the opposite reaction. Going to the Sixth Floor impressed upon me the difficulty of the shot because of the odd angle. Unfortunately, they had a fixed display of the “sniper’s nest” that prevented people from actually looking out thw window, but looking out the window next to it, it seemed to me that you would have to crane pretty hard to the right, sharply downward. Not impossible, I’m sure, but not easy.
Whether by accident or deliberately, it was the driver of the limo.
Doubters answer this question; what was the driver doing turning around in the first place? Or would a trained special agent designated as a driver really forget his orders at the sound of a gunshot? Unless it was a signal!
Acting like a surprised human being?
This is one of the things that makes me laugh at these theories. You get a combination of multiple clandestine organizations working together in brilliant concert, undiscovered, but then they do stupid things like turning secret service guys away from the presidential limo instead of just having them not show up at all, or - if I understand ivan astikov - having their assassin miss a shot on purpose in order to signal the limo driver to slow down. That makes much more sense than having the driver slow down at a prearranged point in the road or waiting for the assassin wait for a clearer shot!
Whatever. Pause at 26 seconds and decide whether the agent in the passenger seat has suddenly got a bald spot or if there is an object there being held by the driver. Did the driver admit to drawing his firearm at any point?
Oh good lord, I thought you were saying the driver was at fault for slowing down. Guess I gave you too much credit. You’re saying the driver shot Kennedy, and somehow nobody in the crowd, Jackie, or the Connallys, noticed him doing it? That’s quite a trick! If you can tell how he managed to shoot Kennedy in the back of the head while sitting in front of him, and make the bullet go into Connally, who was in front of Kennedy, you might have finally solved this case. (Alas, I don’t see the bald spot you mentioned.)
