Cassette tapes were first released for sale in August 1963. Tapes before that were reel-to-reel. Those were much larger and more fiddly. I don’t know what the state of microphone technology was then, but I remember in that a couple of years earlier, the inbuilt mic on a home reel-to-reel wouldn’t pick up my voice unless I spoke directly into it. (I was a quiet child.)
I’m not surprised that most police departments had not invested the money and space necessary to tape interrogations.
On Dragnet they interrogated a suspect without taking notes, but when the perp cracked and confessed, then they would go get a stenographer to make it all official.
If you can’t trust Joe Friday, just who can you trust?!
Did I say I believed in a conspiracy, or any particular conspiracy? No, I maintain that there are enough errors in the WC Report, or the one lone nut theory, to make me doubt the integrity and the thoroughness of the Report and the theory. I want these discrepancies clarified, worked out, explained, and nailed down, as opposed to hand-waved away.
People are demanding that I produce an alternate (and completely satisfactory) version of the WC Report, and then boasting that since I haven’t done that, and refuse to try, I should shut up and go away, which is declaring victory in a war that was never fought.
You might. My idea about Kennedy committing suicide while he was behind the sign for two seconds also might be correct.
That elements of the mob wanted RFK and the pressure he was placing on their operations to go away. Clipping RFK would have left the mob as a prime suspect. It also would have left JFK po’ed about a murdered family member and ripe for revenge with all the powers of the presidency at his command and the country united behind his efforts to find the killers.
The latter.
I doubt I could assess the reliability of those witnesses even if I knew who they were. Nor do I feel confident in concluding that Fed surveillance of the period would necessarily have revealed any contacts between Oswald and mob go-betweens. As such, I have a reasonable doubt about whether Oswald was or was not in contact with them.
As I’ve already mentioned, I don’t believe Oswald was aware he was being used by the mob, and plotters took care to insulate themselves from any connection to him. As such and by design, there is no direct evidence to support the connection. There are precedents which establish the mob successfully used this same strategy for other hits.
Let us take a moment to ponder the underworld perspective. The mob is an organization devoted to operating outside public and gov’t perception, with vast experience at evading (a lot of) surveillance and with a long, enforced tradition of keeping secrets over decades (seen Mr. Hoffa lately? I hear he’s not looking so good).
In the case of the JFK hit, all the pieces were in place for them to have carried off the operation while leaving no trail that could be legally tied back to the plotters. In the absence of coordination and presence of many suggestions of mob involvement, we must assume all this was coincidental. I have trouble digesting that in the face of what I know about mob history.
I want to believe Oswald acted alone. I really do. As you and others have pointed out, it’s the simplest theory and the one that best fits the established facts. Nevertheless, I am unable to commit to it on the basis of doubts, reasonable and otherwise. Like the SCR, I am left believing the mob could have gotten away with it; and with no way of proving or disproving that, I cannot preclude it as a possibility in this case.
There are people here (Moriarty, bless him) who clarified, worked out, explained and nailed down the bullet chain of custody discrepancy for you. Did all the leg work, found photos of the various documents, and it all boils down to one person noting the incorrect time on a document months after the assassination.
You then handwaved that explanation away as though “wrote down the wrong time” is simply too ridiculous to fathom.
This is mere handwaving, as well as highly inaccurate. The documents in question recorded the incorrect times on the 22nd and 23rd of November.
But even if it were weeks or months afterwards, which it wasn’t, this wasn’t a casual event among thousands of casual events which might explain why someone would make an error of recording the time incorrectly–this was the assassination of the sitting President, which federal employees highly trained in recording precisely the details of their work, FBI agents and Secret Service personnel and the like, were noting details that they understood would be a part of history. I find it highly improbable that any one of them goofed, and absurd that so many errors would crop up and go unquestioned by the WC Report.
In any case, it’s silly for us to adjudicate these matters here. As blessed as Moriarty may be, I doubt he is remotely qualified to argue the WC’s virtues, and I’m certainly totally unqualified to make the countercase–either demands that trained experts in ballistics, the law, and a few dozen other fields take up this discussion, which I assume you think unnecessary because it’s all (to your mind) been studied exhaustively already and your conclusion is the one that Earl Warren (according to Senator Russell’s notes) had reached by the first meeting of the Commission: Oswald is guilty, so let’s wrap up this mess right now.
Moderating:
@slicedalone, your posts continue to drip sarcasm, snark and a perennially insulting tone. This is not what we strive for in Great Debates. You have been warned and suspended for this behavior several times. Yet it continues. You seem unwilling to learn the lesson.
Further, if you are not prepared to offer citations and evidence for the positions you take, you have no place in the discussion. If what is being discussed is and can only be speculative in nature, accept that, acknowledge it and demonstrate a modicum of civility in the discussion, because you have no better argument than anyone else in the debate.
This thread is closed until I can discuss further sanctions with moderation staff.
Reopened.
Moderating:
After discussion in the mod loop, this is a formal warning for the above-referenced conduct outlined in this post:
6 posts were split to a new topic: Megburns Troll posts
Such as?
Now this is absurd.
In 1960, the GOP candidate for President was the sitting Vice President. And before that, the last Democratic president had entered the job having been Vice President.
So the clearest path to that job was serving as Vice President; which is what LBJ was doing.
Being Veep gave him a clear path to the presidency. And at the time of JFK’s death, he has just reaffirmed that he was keeping Johnson on the ticket. Moreover, he had double downed on that decision by bringing Johnson with him to Texas (Johnson’s home state) to campaign. There was no realistic reason to believe that Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket.
But, according to your theorizing, LBJ was too impatient to wait 4 years, so he has the president of the United States killed instead.
As I said, that’s absurd.
As I’ve said upthread, I don’t believe the Warren Commission because of who helped prepare it. I accept it due to the evidence.
Please re-read my OP. Count how many times I cite the “Warren Report”. If you want to debate this topic, spare me your criticism of the Report. I’m discussing the evidence.
So - its wrong to call the theory that a veteran establishment politician conspired with the CIA to kill the president out of sheer ambition a conspiracy theory.
Karl Popper would like to have a word with you.
Popper criticized what he termed the “conspiracy theory of society”, the view that powerful people or groups, godlike in their efficacy, are responsible for purposely bringing about all the ills of society. This view cannot be right, Popper argued, because “nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.”
Full article: Conspiracy theory as heresy (tandfonline.com)
Ever since the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was first popularised by the philosopher Sir Karl Popper in the 1950s, conspiracy theories have had a bad reputation.
As long as we’re seeking historical accuracy…
Cite?
I need a cite to that too @megburns, a search showed to me that it is likely originated from a report from the Daily Fail Mail, around 2011 declaring that ABC was going to reveal that allegation, and more, from Jackie. Only for ABC to come with the report that she overheard JFK not wanting Johnson to run for the presidency and that she did not trust him for other reasons. Not that he killed Kennedy.
Of course, the Daly Mail and others that cut and pasted the allegations from the tabloid did not do much to correct the record. So who was your source megburns?
So it’s your contention that the official story is a crock of shit because Oswald could not have completed the feat?
Is that correct?
Is it because Oswald didn’t have the ability to do so, because the rifle wasn’t capable, or because the ballistics or wounds didn’t match? Or am I missing some other reason for this fact free statement.
I love a genuine debate. But your opaque dismissal is lacking detail.
Oh, I’m going to enjoy this.
It’s not only possible, but also not even remotely remarkable. Three shots in six seconds starts from when he pulled the trigger the first time, meaning he only needed to work the bolt and pull the trigger two more times in six seconds. That’s remarkably average firing speed for a bolt action rifle. The British Army expected and trained it soldiers to fire at least 20 aimed shots a minute with bolt action rifles prior to WWI. That includes not only working the bolt, taking proper aim and firing, but reloading the 10-round magazine of the Lee-Enfield with 5-round stripper clips. Note the rate of fire listed:
20–30 aimed shots per minute
That’s what was both expected and required by average, rank and file infantrymen. Actual record holding speed and accuracy with a bolt action rifle is substantially faster. Mad minute:
The term ‘Mad Minute’ was also used to describe a regular demonstration, by instructors at the School of Musketry at Hythe, Kent that was intended to show officer trainees the maximum rate of accurate fire that could be achieved by an expert with a service rifle.
The first Mad Minute record was set by Sergeant Major Jesse Wallingford in 1908, scoring 36 hits on a 48-inch target at 300 yards (4.5 mils/ 15.3 moa).