And not just the limo occupants, I mention as an afterthought, but the minor injury suffered by James Tague.
I didn’t say Oswald was guilty. I said the only theory that is consistent with the evidence is the one where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from the Book Depository.
So maybe Lee didn’t do it. He was hit on the head by the real assassin, who had stolen Oswald’s gun somehow. When Oswald came to and wandered outside he realized he had been set up and tried to get away, then paniced when he saw a Tibbit.
But there is no evidence to support that. Or any other theory. If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, the evidence to support that is lost or has never been found.
Based on the existing evidence, and the lack of reasonable doubt, I personally consider him guilty though.
That’s nice, so what? My point was the “he knows how to shoot” isn’t evidence that he’s the killer. At no point did I imply that he couldn’t shoot, or couldn’t have done this particular act of shooting due to incompetence, rather someone else suggested his competence was in some way incriminating.
Let me rephrase it: he was in a room called the lunch room, at a time during which people commonly eat their lunch, indulging in the intake of what may loosely be termed refreshments.
You seem to be mistaking me for someone with an alternate narrative, rather than someone simply applying scepticism to the government account. There is evidence of more impacts than there ought to be, one in the car windscreen, one in the frame around same, one in the grass, than there ought to be.
If you’d watched the testimony of the blow-hard cop, you’d see that the documentary make has laid the sound, at one point, over footage from scene which shows two rifles there.
I have no specific position on that issue.
You have no position on why the point you raised is worth paying attention to? Here’s my position: memories are faulty and people see what they expect to see. The police officer was familiar with Mausers, thought he recognized the gun as a Mauser, and his mind added details to support his own opinion. This kind of thing happens to us all the time.
Except the ‘second rifle’ is a Remington Shotgun. The kind police used. I doubt a shotgun was used in a sniper attack.
What evidence is that, please?
Because I found this -
at the invaluable MacAdams Kennedy assassination site, which is to JFK conspiracy theories as Talk Origins is to creationism.
Regards,
Shodan
Such skepticism is cheap and easy and inevitable as multiple witnesses, even if all honest and truthful, will produce contradictions based on faulty human memory and with the primitive video technology of the day producing artifacts when images are enlarged.
Actually coming up with an alternate theory - that’s hard.
So you’re speculating at least three additional bullets, now, with (I assume) the attendant conspiracy to downplay or remove evidence of same?
(sorry for spelling errors - stupid smart phone)
You can’t just handwave away basic facts with unsubstantied rumors, like the only evidence that there is to connect Oswald to the rifle is some “CIA” housewife. The reason we know Oswald bought the gun is because he did so through a mail order catalogue, and so there’s paperwork verifying the transaction (to say nothing of the fact that there’s a photograph his wife took of him holding it!)
The JFK assisantion was a real “forest for the trees” moment for me, as it’s the big, unavoidable details that most persuasively establish Oswald’s conduct. CTers, though, subsist in nibbling on the edges of each fact, endlessly debating how it could have happened, without ever stopping to realize that, since it DID happen, you have to be able to plausibly explain it.
Take the fact that Oswald brought a long, paper bag to work that day. You’d probably prefer not, since it undermines your woo-woo theories. Or, if you must tackle it, it’s only to debate the size of the bag, down to the very inch, to “raise doubts” in the official story that it was used to bring a rifle to work.
But, that doesn’t change your obligation, if you wish to exonerate Oswald, of explaining it! Oswald said he had curtain rods, but there’s no evidence that he eve purchased curtain rods, no evidence of where he obtained curtain rods, no evidence that he was talking about or intending to buy curtain rods, and no place in his residence in town to put them.
When the bag was later found, it was on the same floor as a rifle, and near a maekshift sniper’s nest, where spent gun shells were found. No other object - curtain rods or otherwise - were EVER located as an alternative theory to what, besides the rifle, might have been in the bag.
Now, couple this with another incontrovertible fact. Oswald did leave the scene (he was, after all, arrested elsewhere, and we know he obtained a bus pass) and did go get a revolver (it was on him when he was arrested, and it was not holstered or secure, so he didn’t have it with him at work). I’ll wait why you explain some reason why, if Oswald had no involvement with the crime, he did so.
Just like I’d like to know why Oswald left all of his money (except a few dollars for himself) for his wife, along with his wedding ring, when he was notoriously stingy about ever giving her anything. I’d argue that this is evidence of premeditation. You?
When acting as a juror in a trial, you’d be reminded not to leave your common sense at the door. Behaviors tending to suggest some event should be given great weight, when other circumstances suggest that’s what happened. Even if one or two details must ge guessed at, we can’t ignore the totality of the evidence.
Another problem, I think, with CTers is that they start with Kennedy and extrapolate out. I think the evidence is more cogent if you instead focus on Oswald, and see where he leads. If this was a murder trial, the prosecution would identify an accused, and develop evidence against him. Not focusing on the case from Oswald’s pespective, IMHO, makes it too easy to ignore, or miss, things he did to demonstrate his complicity.
First, you have to come up with an alternate explanation because there is an explanation which fits all of the available evidence.
Second, there is not evidence of additional impacts. The initial evidence of additional shots has been examined, and in every case it turns out not to be unsubstantiated. So there is no longer any evidence of additional impacts.
If you don’t have new evidence or an alternative explanation, you have nothing.
There WERE curtain rods.
Government agents took them to a secret prison.
And hung them.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up for the conspiracy theorists.
I had begrudgingly accepted Oswald’s singular guilt for a while. However, the thing that cemented it in my mind was one of the aforementioned authors* talking on the radio about how, psychologically, it’s hard to believe a public figure with the historic weight of Kennedy, a unifying national hero, could be brought down by such a pathetic loser as Oswald. The scales of history aren’t supposed to be so unbalanced, it should have taken a massive conspiracy to kill JFK. But, no, it was just one asshole with a rifle.
*: Not sure which one, but one of those guys (probably Posner), I’m pretty sure.
Actually, looking over the list of successful and attempted presidential assassins, this ain’t exactly a major brain trust. Was Charles Guiteau a loser? Leon Czolgosz? Squeaky Fromme? John Hinckley? Of all the assassins and would-be assassins on this page, who is least loser-ish? Oswald is actually above average, in that his plan was somewhat better than the typical “walk up with a pistol and start shooting”.
Other than using a working rifle, in what way would it be better?
Well, he got away from the scene, however temporarily. That’s unusual for a presidential assassin. I’d have to go down the list, but only Booth comes to mind as doing something comparable. Aren’t the vast majority, successful or otherwise, arrested or killed on the spot?
In addition to what’s been posted (possibly the supreme JFK assassination site on the web, namely McAdams), there’s another site that’s of awfully good use as well:
Dale Myers’ computer animation has been used in different documentaries about the assassination, and I bring it up just as another source to be used, showing Oswald was the lone gunman. Pay particular attention to his “badge man” analysis.
Kind of grasping at straws there aren’t you? Oswald was nowhere close on the assassins scale to whoever killed Olof Palme.
Thing is, most of these assassins were borderline if not outright crazy. So at least we can say that say that the President was killed by a lunatic. But Oswald, while beset with more issues than National Geographic, was still mostly sane. That turned him from a lunatic into, as Jackie Kennedy put it, a ‘silly little communist’.
Olaf had no bodyguards. Kinda changes the scenario a bit.
How can it be grasping at straws when I’m specifically citing people who killed or tried to kill U.S. Presidents and you invoke a PM of Sweden? Got any other world leaders you want to throw in? Maybe a Bhutto or a Gandhi?
I’d guess that the sanest of the U.S. Presidential killers and would-be killers were Torresola and Collazo, the Puerto Rican nationalists who made an attempt on Harry Truman in 1950. Some of their grievances had actual merit, though their method of petition was a tad extreme. Oswald is, at best, a distant third (maybe a close peer to Booth) and the rest of the rabble is various degrees of nutso.
I suppose one could easily compile a list and make ad-hoc evaluations of how many assassins and attempted assassins were clearly delusional (most, I guess), how many were just pathetic, and how many were just assholes. The categories overlap, I grant.