# Reelz Channel's JFK: The Smoking Gun **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 4, 2013, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028 "2013-11-04T04:14:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2013, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/41 "2013-11-15T19:11:00Z")
> [@spifflog](#): > > Wow. I won’t even touch the Simpson thing. (I didn’t think there were still people that thought he was innocent.) You need to read more carefully. I don’t believe OJ Simpson is innocent and never have (though of course there are people who do: in the early '00s I worked with a disabled black guy who constantly watched BET, and OJ would come on these chat shows and hang out and gab like any other guest that comes on “The View” or “Ellen” or whatever). I’m saying that it looks likely that members of the LAPD, including Mark Fuhrman, had a strong–and correct–hunch that OJ did it, but felt the need to kind of juice the investigation and plant evidence to make sure it was pinned on him. My point was that maybe it is \*coincidentally \*the truth that Oswald acted alone, \*and \*that this was the only conclusion the Warren Commission would steer their investigation toward. > [@](#): > > Can you explain how an 889 page, 26 volume report by among others a sitting Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, US Senators and Representatives including a future US President constitutes a “whitewash?” Do you have any proof or specifics that this report is “a joke?” The fact that it stands up to almost 50 years worth of scrutiny will prove that it wasn’t a “whitewash” and is pretty accurate. The number of pages or volumes are absolutely irrelevant. The membership of that panel being a bunch of politicos is not reassuring either. Had it been just top notch detectives and prosecutors, that would be more impressive to me. Their mission was to reassure the public (backfire though it did), not get to the truth. There are countless testimonials from people that they tried to tell the Warren Commission their accounts but were rebuffed because they did not fit the official narrative. Saying that it stands up to almost 50 years worth of scrutiny…huh? > **[Table of Contents](https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report)** > > Have a question about JFK Assassination Records? Ask it on HistoryHub! Title Page, Commission Members, Transmittal Letter Summary of Findings and Recommendations Introduction I. Findings of the Select Committee on Assassination in the assassination... > [@](#): > > The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy > Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. the conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive > **[Inconsistencies Haunt Official Record Of Kennedy's Death](https://www.npr.org/2013/11/10/243981006/inconsistencies-haunt-official-record-of-kennedys-death)** > > Some three decades after the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a board was established that declassified thousands of documents. Congress hoped it would clear up lingering conspiracy theories, but it... > [@](#): > > Immediately after the [Warren Commission] report, nearly 90 percent of the public believed it. But by 1966, only 36 percent of Americans believed Oswald acted alone. Today, just 24 percent think so. I got the numbers slightly wrong upthread, sorry. > [@](#): > > When Gunn showed her the official [autopsy] photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing. > […] > When he was arrested after a scuffle at a demonstration, he asked to meet with the FBI. > > “Why would Oswald ask to see someone from the FBI?” Gunn asks. “But an FBI agent went and interviewed Oswald, came back and wrote a memo on it, put it in the file.” > > A few days later, Gunn says, someone at headquarters in Washington saw that Oswald was engaged in pro-Fidel Castro activities and instructed the field office to interview him. But the FBI field office didn’t reply that it had already interviewed him. Instead, it said that it would see what it could do. > > All the FBI files were in order, Gunn says. Nothing seemed to be missing, so why wouldn’t they mention the previous interview? “It doesn’t make sense,” Gunn says. > > Oswald’s trip to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination also raises unanswered questions. > > “Mexico City in the 1960s was probably the spy capital of the Western Hemisphere,” Gunn says. Naturally, the CIA had operations watching all the embassies in Mexico, tapping their phones and photographing comings and goings. > > While he was there, Oswald attempted to obtain visas from the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy. In one taped conversation, Oswald — or someone saying he was Oswald — called the Soviet embassy. > > Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover listened to the tape and told President Lyndon Johnson that it wasn’t Oswald’s voice. > > Whose voice was it? No one knows. The tape has disappeared. > > Nor are there any photos of the Soviet embassy the day Oswald supposedly went there. The CIA told the Warren Commission that its camera wasn’t working that day. Yeah, none of that is fishy at all. ---
**Author:** ![scabpicker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scabpicker/32/8268_2.png) [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/42 "2013-11-16T03:49:13Z")
> [@control-z](#): > > And, did he take the rifle with him? If he had just shot the president and was trying to get away I would think he would want to carry a rifle that’s ready to fire. Good lord, why? It would only serve to make you the most obvious suspect for miles. He was thinking along the same lines, though. He went home to get his pistol. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2013, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/43 "2013-11-17T15:29:59Z")
> [@ThelmaLou](#): > > I watched the show and it does make a good case. (So did Oliver Stone’s _JFK_.) > > The point wasn’t that no one \*heard \*the third shot-- in fact eleven witnesses told the police that they \*did \*hear it \*and \*smelled gunpowder at street level. The POINT was that the Warren Commission did not call these people as witnesses. > > Also the procedures for handling the body and the evidence were a mess. Too many people in the ER in Dallas, and too many in the room in DC when the autopsy was done. > > I’d really like some of the skeptics who posted to watch the WHOLE program (it’s on again tonight) instead of just dismissing the idea out of hand without having seen the case presented. > > It’s pretty compelling. I’m not saying it’s obviously true… but it’s a compelling story. Compelling enough to where I promptly went to Amazon and bought both Bonar Menninger’s book and Colin McLaren’s book. There is even more data in the books that didn’t make it into the documentary. The theory makes sense, especially when the ballistics support it they way they do. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2013, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/44 "2013-11-17T17:45:29Z")
In broad response: I’ve read many nominally historical novels that were utterly compelling. All such fabrications have to be is consistent in between the front and rear covers. If you can ignore real history and facts and make up your own to support sketchy assumptions, you can make an airtight case for your contentions. Fabrications purporting to _be_ history have to be consistent with every validated and credible piece of evidence in the real world, and continue to be consistent even when new evidence, data and interpretations arise. I have yet to read a JFK “alternate” theory that even comes close; most can be blown out of the water by no more than one or two absolute inarguable points of fact the theorizer has chosen to ignore. Most end up more like Bugs Moran’s crew: completely full of holes. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/45 "2013-11-17T21:55:29Z")
But so can the Warren Report. The House committee said it best: essentially, that someone else besides Oswald had to be involved, but who/how/why is unknown and probably unknowable. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2013, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028/46 "2013-11-17T22:03:22Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > But so can the Warren Report. The House committee said it best: essentially, that someone else besides Oswald had to be involved, but who/how/why is unknown and probably unknowable. The House investigation \*is \*everything the CTers say the Warren Commission investigation was: a panicky, anything-goes attempt to throw a sop to public opinion. Its “gosh, we guess anything could have happened” conclusions are a politically-driven embarrassment on every possible level, beginning with the deep disservice it did their predecessors. The unanswered questions and qualified judgments of the Commission are almost wholly over minor points and issues that would not change the overall verdict. Those who pick at those nits are those who see evidence as a chain in which any weak or broken link completely undoes the conclusions, which is nonsense. (Evidence is a rope made up of many overlapping strands. A few weak, or even wholly faulty strands do not invalidate the ‘rope.’) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reelz-channels-jfk-the-smoking-gun/673028.md?page=2)