JFK conspiracy... yes or no?

So, does anyone know if the driver was questioned about discharging his firearm?

D’uh, someone’s just fired a shot at the president; do you think anyone is going to be looking at the driver? What’s odd is the agent in the passenger seat wasn’t very surprised, because he didn’t even turn around by the looks of it. Still, I’m sure it’s been well debunked somewhere and you’ll be giving me a cite any minute.

You trust the official evidence and they couldn’t even keep hold of the president’s brain? Or has that been debunked too?

If he’s the guy who just shot the president? Yes. I can’t imagine how you would actually believe this because it is not just wrong, it’s hilariously implausible. You think the guy shot the president and the governor of Texas from five feet away, in front of a crowd, and nobody in the crowd, or in the car, noticed or heard where the shot came from?

If you were in a car and the driver shot someone sitting next to you, you think you wouldn’t be able to tell where the shot came from?

What’s really odd is that you didn’t answer my question about Connally. Tell me how the driver shot him in the back.

I’ve heard theories that the secret agent behind the limo killed Kennedy, by accident or on purpose. That one’s pretty funny, but it’s got nothing on this.

Yes, because the idea of a secret agent with access to a suppressor is ridiculous!

Who said the driver was the only one firing? To me, and from the accounts of witnesses, it sounds like a ‘triangle hit’ might have been set up, with the added insurance of a man or two onboard.

Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t claim the credit for it, so do you want to save some scorn for the creator?

Yeah, if you use a silencer on your gun, people five feet away from you won’t hear the shot, and also won’t notice you turning around and firing at them because you and the gun are magically rendered invisible from people next to you, and from hundreds of witnesses. It’s called a silencer but does not make the gun silent.

If the driver of the car is in on the conspiracy, it’s flat out moronic to have snipers shooting from hundreds of feet away. And that kind of overkill would increase the chances of a plot being found out.

Not really. You’re the one who brought it up here.

Well, as long as bullshit is infinite, scorn shall be as well, so there’s no need to dole it out carefully.

Let’s not second-guess people’s reactions and awareness in a moment of high terror and let’s just concentrate on the video. Did the driver turn around, and was he holding a gun in his hand? Do you want to address that instead of nit-picking about the plan?

Not if the perpetrators are investigating themselves.

Fair enough, I’ll take my knocks then.

Your theory is based around doing exactly that. And I already said I saw nothing that even vaguely looks like the agent turning around and shooting. (It’s also obvious in the Zapruder video that Kennedy was shot in the throat before he was killed. So you are either theorizing that Kennedy was shot by two people, and the one 200 feet away got off a shot before the one right next to him did, or else the driver actually shot him twice and somehow nobody saw THAT either.)

True, but your plot only works if Jackie and the Connallys, as well as most of the crowd in Dealey Plaza, have been blindfolded and their ears stuffed with cotton. This is a minor drawback.

What I remember from the museum was that you could look out the window Oswald used, just from several feet away (you could go right up to the neighboring window). The idea apparently is to preserve the actual shooting location from wear and tear and souvenir hunters (or maybe to obscure the Truth, if you’re a conspiracyphile).

Not only that, they’ve given him a number and taken away his name.

Wait a second here -

the person sitting in the driver’s seat turns around, shoots Kennedy and Connally from behind, twice - and nobody notices?

Or else it was a signal. A signal for what? Wouldn’t you think the sniper would actually be the best judge of when to shoot?

I have relatively little experience setting up conspiracies to shoot the President, but if I needed to signal to everyone “OK - go!” I would pick someone a little less conspicuous than the driver of the limousine. Like, say, Bozo the Clown with his nuts painted red.

And don’t you think they could come up with a subtler signal than pulling out a fucking gun?

I’ll give you this much - it’s a theory both entertaining, and unique. Plausible? Perhaps not so much.

Regards,
Shodan

Well, I think that’s a fair description. My recollection is that you couldn’t look out the actual window so as to see where Kennedy was shot, but you could get within a few feet of the window, and look out the next window several feet to the right.

That WAS the signal. Turn around and shoot Kennedy and Connally in order to signal someone else to shoot Kennedy and Connally. The brilliance is in its simplicity and the redundancies are built in!

Or have they gotten to you as well? And while I’m on this, where were you on November 22, 1963? Do you have an alibi?

I was nine when the assassination happened. I was a big fan of Kennedy, and was devastated by his death. I became fascinated by the investigation and stayed interested in every theory for a long time. I was a Warren Report skeptic for many years. I now firmly believe that LHO acted alone in killing the president.

The first thing that began to change my mind was a book called Best Evidence, by David Lifton. His theory of the assassination involves the idea that Kennedy’s body was altered surgically after death, on the plane or during the ride from Andrews AFB to the hospital where the autopsy was performed. Reading this book made me realize that Lifton was basically nuts. He took one sentence from one FBI agent’s report describing the opening of the casket in the Bethesda hospital and spun it into an amazing fantasy. Along the way, he did what every CT believer seems to do: he ignored or discounted everything that didn’t agree with his theory, and he misinterpreted or exaggerated every little thing that supported it, or that could be twisted to support it. I began to see all of the theorists in a different light.

Then I read Case Closed, by Gerald Posner. There are some errors in the book, but they are minor and inconsequential. There is, for me, no escaping its conclusion. Oswald did it on his own.

In 1999, I visited Dealey Plaza while on a business trip to Dallas. Being there clarified a lot of things. It is hard to appreciate how close together everything is until you see it and walk around. The idea of other shooters being present and escaping seems ludicrous when you experience the scene in person. Standing at the window next to the one Oswald shot from is especially illuminating. My first thought was “I could have hit him in the head with a baseball from here!” Any moderately competent shooter could have made the shots.

Folks like ivan astikov serve to confirm my belief. There is no end to the evidence that the CT believers will believe anything, as long as it’s not the Warren Commission. I feel pretty confident in believing whatever they are on the other side of.

ivan, take a look at this YouTube clip of the Zapruder film, with commentary. Can you still claim that Greer had a gun in his hand?

The “shooter’s nest” is enclosed in a glass or Plexiglas room. You can see the actual windows, but you can’t get into a position that will allow you to see the relevant part of the street from those windows.

But that is true of any theory using the witness statements. It can hardly be otherwise. This is as inescapable an obstacle for the pro-conspiracy writers as it is for their opponents.

The witness statements are simply too various for them ever to be reconciled with each other. They cannot all be correct. Which is exactly what one would expect in a case where large numbers of individuals witnessed a sudden, unexpected and shocking event. To use them at all therefore necessarily involves judgments about which of them are likely to be more reliable. One of Posner’s strengths is actually that, unlike most writers on the subject, he recognises that such evidence needs to be weighed against the evidence that might contradict it. Source mining is not enough.

It would have worked, too - if it weren’t for you meddling kids!

Regards,
Fidel Castro/LBJ/the CIA/the Mafia/the Illuminati/Captain Zurkoff from the Planet Bleen/them

No, he behaved exactly the way you’d expect a lone nut to behave. He was mentally ill, he had political obsessions, he had a long history of threatening people, he bought a rifle (which was found at the crime scene with his fingerprints on it), he cleared out his bank accounts and left all his money, his wedding ring, and a letter to his wife on the kitchen table on the morning of November 22.

Some witnesses said they heard shots from other areas. The majority of witnesses say they heard shots coming from where Oswald was. Do you believe the majority of witnesses who were closest to the scene or the minority that was farther away? The people who said they heard shots coming from other directions were most likely just hearing echoes. Or maybe they were just wrong. The “alternative” witnesses tell stories that contradict each other.

As for seeing “suspicious people” as I’ve already written, there were numerous people who saw Oswald shooting a rifle. That’s pretty suspicious behavior reight there. A lot more suspicious anyway than holding an umbrella or wearing a shawl.

The problem is that most people who have “theories” about this haven’t bother to look at the actual evidence that’s available. What they have is uninformed speculations.

What? All seven members of the Warren Commission were hiding in the trunk of Kennedy’s limo? I should point out that Hale Boggs was a pretty hefty guy and Allen Dulles had bad breath.

I was already leaning that way before Posner, but I wasn’t that familiar with it all. I never read Case Closed, but I heard Posner interviewed at least a couple of times on radio talk shows. That triggered my looking into it more.

There are so many possible answers here it’s impossible to say. Maybe he didn’t like the shot like hansel mentioned, or maybe Oswald was just not quite ready when the limo came around the previous corner and needed a little more time. We don’t know.

It doesn’t look to me like she has a camera, it looks like she’s holding her hand to keep the sun from shining on her sunglasses (the sun was behind her and to her left).

Surely no one would claim anything that ridiculous!

Doh!

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

I’m just not sure that’s true about Posner - at least not from what I’ve read. I have not yet read Case Closed. I have read a number of critiques that make me somewhat dubious about how well Posner mastered any bias, and how comprehensively he conducted his research or as you suggest, considered alternatives.

Here’s a sample of the kind of thing I’ve found when looking for critiques of Case Closed:

From: Review of Gerald Posner, Case Closed, by Wrone

And just for grins, here’s something new I’d never heard before about the backyard photographs, which suggests that the margins of the papers in the photo are quite a bit larger than the actual papers, and appear to be more consistent with the width of standard newspapers at the time.