I’m amazed people can say this with a straight face.
First let me say I believe Oswald acted alone. However just because he did make the shot twice doesn’t mean it was easy (and just because Penn claimed he was aiming doesn’t mean he really was). The shooting trajectory was downward and I’m sure the gun was ‘sighted in’ (so to speak) for level shooting. The target was moving. The target was a human. The human was the president of the US. And so on…
I’m not saying it was impossible, clearly it was. But calling it easy is ridiculous.
While looking for a link to the lateral x-ray I found something better. The second image shows an attempt to orient the x-ray with the anatomical position. Presuming this effort is accurate, I’m now obliged to say that the bullet trajectory did indeed range slightly upward with reference to the vertical axis of the body. (The debris trail is the various speckles in the top quarter of the photo).
The autopsy finding I mentioned last night is called “coagulation necrosis of the tissues”, and it does indeed apply to the head wound. No better way to explain this than to quote from Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (p. 393), wherein he quotes a letter he received from Dr. Cyril Wecht, the pet pathologist of the conspiracy set. Sez Wecht of coagulation necrosis:
In looking that up I was reminded of a bonus observation: the HSCA autopsy panel also found signs of an abrasion collar around the back-of-the-head wound. Yet more proof that it was a wound of entry.
(Side note to Magiver: I see what you’re saying now. Consider the above to be aimed at all those folks who still buy into the idea that the fatal shot came from the grassy knoll. Maybe that program last night, by graphically showing the damage a grassy knoll shot would have produced, will help to put that notion to rest. And thanks for your observation last night about what that program showed about the damage a really good rifle would have caused. It hadn’t occurred to me to apply that to the Mortal Error scenario. Given that Hickey was brandishing an AK-47 or somesuch, we can now argue that if he had accidentally shot Kennedy, the damage would have been considerably greater).
So lemme see if I’ve got this conspiracy thingy right…
Oswald (the fall guy) was shooting ineffectually from the 6th floor window. Meanwhile, a secret service agent was shooting from his following car. And diverse other co-conspirators were also firing from vantage points in and around the square.
They all managed to fire within the same 8 second window of time. Nobody saw any of them lining up their shots and tracking their targets (except the witness who saw Oswald). And no one saw the flag wave or heard the whistle blow to signal “commence firing”. Still, they all managed to be on target and get off their own shot or shots within that brief period.
And, despite all those rounds whizzing around, nothing (buildings, windows, vehicles) and no person of all those gathered in and around the square (excepting, of course, Conolly and Kennedy) were hit.
And since we don’t have an actual, HD video of Oswald taking the aimed shots, and immediate cut to close up video from inside the Kennedy car, then the explanation above outweighs all other evidence to the contrary.
The Discovery channel showed the blood splatter and skull fragments are only consistent from a shot from the 6th floor depository. The shots from other sites would have been clearly and unmistakably different.
I don’t often agree with gonzo, but yeah…seemed pretty conclusive to me. The questions that remain are all minor points…all of the big questions, IMHO, have been answered.
All of the big questions about who shot whom have been answered. There are still even bigger questions about who motivated whom, i.e. whether Oswald had any co-conspirators. I think the evidence is pretty strong that he was the proverbial lone nut, but at least we can entertain discussion around that big question.
Not quite. They showed a shot from behind that is consistent with Oswald’s type of weapon. The path (angle) of the bullet wasn’t well addressed as it pertained to Kennedy’s entry/exit wounds which were poorly defined by the Warren Commission.
The show was a compelling display of how the damage could be replicated from Oswald’s position and type of weapon. It dispels the premise of the book Mortal Error that a thin-walled bullet created the exit wound. When they used such a weapon for the “grassy knoll” shot it completely destroyed the skull. There was never a good premise for the grassy knoll scenario because the entry wound was clearly identifiable. The bone fragmented around the hole in normal fashion.
AFAIK it was the best attempt at duplicating the shots from Oswald’s location using the correct weapon. I don’t know if they used the correct cartridge (no longer available) but it was probably close enough to be an accurate depiction.
It wasn’t a matter of what a “good” weapon would do, the premise of the book was that a thin-walled high velocity bullet would fragment and the heavy jacketed bullet that Oswald fired would not. I didn’t catch what the guy was firing in the show but it looked like a high powered thin jacketed bullet similar to an AR-15 round except the tip was exposed. It might have produced more fragmentation than an AR-15 round but I think it’s reasonable to assume the AR-15 would produce more than the carcano round and this program demonstrated what a carcano round would do.
I’ll take a stab at that (though after my AK-47 gaffe my opinion might not count for much for awhile. . . .).
About a year back I found the Warren Commission’s Hearings and Exhibits volumes online (AARC Public Library) and have been plowing through them ever since. I’m about 150 pages into volume 12, which means I’ve just finished the four or five volumes devoted to Oswald’s background (gawd, talk about tedious).
Oswald was little more than a young loser with several chips on his shoulders. Why any serious group of conspirators would pick him for such an important task is beyond me. Surely Conspiracy, Inc. had the names of more qualified and seasoned people in their Rolodex. And how would they have found him anyway? Even the FBI had trouble keeping up with Oswald’s wanderings.
Also, it is clear that Oswald simply wasn’t the sort who would cooperate with anyone on anything. There was room in his odd little world for just one person - himself.
I just remembered: a few weeks back there was a Staff Report that included an extensive list of characteristics of a psychopath. It damn near fit Oswald to a T. Excuse me while I go hunt it up.
I seem to have a vague recollection from long time ago that the entry wound in the back of Kennedy’s head only showed up after the fact in doctored autopsy photos and that it was not observed by doctors at Parkland. Does anyone have any knowledge in this regard?
Also as I said before, I’m not particularly wedded to any conspiracy theory but much of the thinking at the time was that Kennedy was assassinated by the Russians due to his having embarrassed and thwarted them with the Cuban missle blockade, and that if the Soviet Union’s complicity were to become public knowledge war would be the inevitable result, thus deliberate efforts were made by the government to obfuscate and/or manipulate evidence to support Oswald as the lone assassin in an effort to avoid nuclear war between the two countries.
Given the fact that so much evidence has disappeared, and that so many other things haven’t appeared to add up (such as the movement of Kennedy’s body after the head shot) I don’t think it strains credulity to have doubted the government’s official version of events.
I haven’t seen the Discovery program yet but I did record it. It’ll be interesting to see what it shows.
(Don Adams aside, not so much the wrong gun as the fact that the AK-47 is the iconic Commie assault rifle. I was visualizing everyone wearing fuzzy hats with the hammer and sickle on them.)
I don’t feel up to a full-blown discussion this morning, so just a few notes.
Real photograpic experts (as oppossed to guys like Robert Groden and Jack White who illustrate the old saw about knowing just enough to be dangerous) who have examined the autopsy photos and x-rays have said there is no evidence of tampering or doctoring. That’s enough for me.
I can’t recall the details, but available evidence shows no sign that the Soviets were in any way involved. Certainly they didn’t use Oswald for such a purpose. They had sized him up as a “nut” from the get-go and didn’t want anything to do with the callow twerp.
I’m rather confident that precious little important evidence has “disappeared” over the years. That seems to be no more than one of the many Conspiracy Memes out there. (Have any specific examples?) And as I pointed out earlier, it just doesn’t matter now if some of the evidence has gone a-fluking over the years, because it was availible when the serious investigations were done and has already told its story.
As far as “trusting the government” goes, I’ll just repeat my old observation that the government is merely made up of people who are just like the rest of us - good, bad, indifferent, whatever.
How the hell do you read this without eye strain? It’s HTML’d copies of documents. Did you change your screen size?
Fun conspiracy stuff to add. Oswald had a fascination for Hitler’s rise to power so I would imagine him wanting to be someone who lead others. He was really involved in politics at the time. There is some indication that 2 people were involved when he tried to shoot General Walker with the same gun (and missed a sitting target at close range). Looking back at the picture of the book repository (where it looks like he’s standing in the doorway) I can imagine him setting up the sniper site for someone else who was a better shot. And if somehow I could insert Elvis in this somewhere that would be great.
But seriously, how did you make it so far reading the HTML’s?
Actually, I’ve been downloading and printing the PDFs, which are good enough for my weary old eyes and suit my preferred reading style (stretched out in bed, without glasses - I have to wear an old pair when I’m on line because with my current prescription, the only way I can read a CRT is with my head in what I call The Whiplash Position; this also gives me a hard copy I can refer to at leisure). If I remember, hitting the Printible Version link gives you a GIF of the page, which I think were readable (haven’t actually seen one in a year, so no promises). Anyway, if your system doesn’t choke on PDFs, try that (the PDF links are the icons to the right of the HTML links).
I don’t recall Oswald mentioning Hitler much, but now that you mention it, I seem to recall that he had read Mein Kampf. He certainly thought he was destined for, and deserving of, great things. There’s some thought that part of his psychological motivation for going after prominent and successful guys like Walker and Kennedy was the desparity between his actual chickenshit life and the grand life he thought he merited.
I’m not aware of any decent evidence of a second person being involved in the Walker shooting. The bullet that was fired hit the window sash and was deflected. It is, of course, impossible to way whether or not the bullet would otherwise have hit Walker.
Here we go again with the Depository photo. (This is what keeps debunkers like me in business 'til we go bonkers - no matter how often we stomp out these little brush fires, a few embers will waft away and rekindle.) The guy in the Altgens photo who looks like Oswald was in fact fellow employ Billy Lovelady (who actually did resemble Oswald). This has been demonstrated every way imaginable. Hell, Lovelady himself swore it was him, as did his buddies standing next to him.
I just stopped by AARC to see what you were talking about. Were you trying to read the Warren Report? It’s a bit crappier than the evidence volumes I’ve been plowing through, but I found it readable enough, though it isn’t the best of scans. So unless your browser is trying to cram the whole page onto the screen, it might be time to visit the optomatrist (or hunt up a pair of old glasses). Or perhaps the resolution on your monitor doesn’t play nice with the resolution they used to scan the stuff.
It looks like the “printible” GIFs are identical to the GIFs on the HTML page.
Conversely, to me, it seems to make a lot of sense.
One man acting alone, unexpectedly, with no regards for his own safety afterwards, surely has a much better chance of success than a group dedicated to secrecy and possibly given to infighting.
From what I’ve read and seen on TV, Oswald craved attention, he campaigned for normal relations between the US and Cuba, defected to the USSR for a while.
Isn’t the infamy he would gain, as valid as reason as someone else wanting Jodie Foster’s attention decades later.