Nov. 22, 1963 - conspiracy or not

I've never been a big believer in conspiracy theories, but one thing that I've noticed is that a conspiracy is far easier to explain than the possibility of someone getting unbelievably lucky.

For example, for Oswald to have assassinated Kennedy, he would have had to have fired the two luckiest shots of his life. Hitting a moving target from the 6th floor window isn't impossible, but for him to be the lone shooter required him to have pulled the trigger at the exact right moment.

I lived 2 miles from the Pentagon on 9/11, and while I don't subscribe to the missile theory, I know just how lucky the pilot of that flight would have needed to be to hit the Pentagon. If he'd made even the slightest mistake, he would have brought the plane down well short of the building. Instead, he managed to keep a jumbo jet on full throttle just high enough off the ground to hit the Pentagon dead on. Even some extremely skilled and experienced pilots would have found that damned near impossible. Again, it may or may not have been a conspiracy, but an unbelievable amount of luck (good for him, bad for the rest of the world) was necessary to pull it off.

Sorry to threadjack; I just saw some similarities between the two incidents.

 

Oswald acted alone.

The shots (and I have stood at the window in question) are not particularly difficult for a sharpshooter and marksman as scored by the Marine Corps. These scores would have put Oswald in the range for sniper training. They wouldn't be extremely difficult for thousands of avid hunters throughout the United States.

Gerald Posner's 1994 book "Case Closed" was a relatively thorough thrashing of the Conspiracy Theory and has received little significant criticism outside the JFK conspiracy cottage industry. And it is a cottage industry.

Ockham's Razor, people. The simplest solution is the best. One crack shot crackpot got off two good rounds.

World in turmoil. Innocence lost. Yadda-yadda-yadda. The end.

 

But, Kleeda, why would he wait until he was moving away and not taking the easier, close-up shot?

Posner doesn't come without question marks. Vincent Bugliosi commented that Posner would 'avoid or deceive' when faced with something that didn't fit in with his story.

Just to offer up the other side of the coin, "High Treason" by Harrison Livingstone and Robert Groden makes a good case for the conspiracy side.

 

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/10/discovery_goes_inside_the_targ.php

This is a writeup on the Discovery Channel show I watched on Sunday night. In essence, they concentrated on the "debris field" of what happened to Kennedy's skull at the point of impact on the kill shot.

They had what they believe to be model heads made in some Australian lab that makes replicas of human heads -- brain, skull, tissue -- then fired shots from a range where they replicated the shooting position from the two different grassy knolls (right and left of the street), one other location and the sixth floor. The shot from the sixth floor is the one where the debris field exactly replicated what you see happening to Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film.

They also surmise that the guy who ordered the limo cleaned blew the investigation because they would have been able to tell a lot about where the shot came from based on the splatterings in the limo. But they did talk to two people who looked into the limo at Parkland before it was cleaned and before the Secret Service cordoned off the limo to gawkers.

But based on the splatterings from the test shots, the two guys looked at the pictures and said they matched up well.

It's the second show I've seen using modern forensics technology that to me proves that Oswald was the shooter on the kill shot. The other show used another anatomically correct type of dummy that would simulate a human body, and completely replicated what the 'magic' bullet did as far as passing through the Kennedy and Connelly dummies.

 

of course, tony. your government would never cover anything up.

 

That tree would have been a lot shorter 45 years ago.

We'll obviously never know, but maybe he meant to shoot at the better angle but couldn't make himself pull the trigger just then.

 

I just caught the last 20 or so minutes, but one of the points was Jackie would have been shot if the gunman was on the grassy knoll.

Also:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/fc4862897068618d

http://dsc.discovery.com/video/player.html?bclid=1915439383

 

I think they've done some tests and determined that another shooter couldn't have hidden in the drain.

While I think there's a conspiracy involved in the JFK shooting, I think Oswald was a shooter. I just think that there were other people involved.

 

I am not a big believer in conspiracies. It would be very, very, very hard to cover something up on that grand of a scale. There are too many people who would need to be taken out and people eventually talk. Or documents would come out.

Lets say someone was involved in a JFK conspiracy. If he wrote a book about it and it was credible - backed by events and information already known to the public - that book would outsell the Bible. Publishing houses would be murdering competitors to get their hands on it. Yet no one has stepped forward. No credible death bed confessions either.

The Warren Commission, as inept as it may have been, got to the essential truth of what happened. Oswald acted alone. What grand conspiracy would have hired a dead-ender like Oswald to be the patsy and a two-bit wannabe like Ruby to take him out? If Oswald hadn't asked to change his shirt, he would have never been running late and Ruby would have never been in a position to get a shot at him. A conspiracy so well done that no one can offer incontrovertible proof that existed, even 45 years later, is not going to rely on that kind of dumb luck.

 

The American public didn't want to believe one man could kill Kennedy. They wanted to believe there was a conspiracy. The same phenomenon exists over 9/11 (thankfully to a lesser degree). Now there are enough people making money in the Kennedy conspiracy industry they have a financial interest on keeping conspiracy hopes alive. Oliver Stone's JFK, for example, was a monumental setback for intellectual honesty. Stone lionized a man who was an insane crackpot by all accounts.

The ABC documentary by Peter Jennings convinced me there was no conspiracy. C-SPAN has also had some good programming on it, one being a Q&A with writer Vincent Bugliosi. Check out the links if at all interested in JFK.

http://www.c-span.org/apa/jfk.asp

http://www.amazon.com/ABC-News-Presents-Kennedy-Assassination/dp/B0001BFDKU

 

Forensics make it seem pretty clear Oswald was the shooter. Like SC, I just think Oswald wasn't alone in the plan. There's just no good explanation for Ruby.

 

no. really?