JFK documentary - Ch5

[Spudulike]

Did anyone else watch the JFK documentary on Ch5 earlier in the week?

It was called: 'JFK: The Smoking Gun' and presented a new (to me) theory about JFK's death in Dallas. I won't spoil the documentary by explaining the theory but it's recommended and will be on Demand 5.

There is interesting detail in the account - considering the three spent bullet cases found in the Book Depositary, two were close to the window through which Oswald fired and one was some feet away. It's likely (given that Oswald didn't hang around after the shooting to re-arrange the cartridges) that the single cartridge was a magazine 'blank' - an empty case kept in the firing chamber to seal the mechanism against damp, dirt, etc. Oswald would have removed it before loading a clip of live ammunition. Therefore, he may have fired only two rounds. This ties into theories about how hard it is to fire three accurate rounds in a very short time using a bolt action carbine.

The film highlighted (and filled) holes in the official version of what happened. It's hard to understand why 50 years after the event a coherent official account is still awaited.

Edited November 15, 2013 by Spudulike

[Teritus]

Gah, been saddled with lots of other things of late and I'm sorry to say I missed this one.

 

The best work, imo, on this subject is JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass. Less to do with who pulled the trigger but it addresses very well who ordered his killing and why. Worth a read to anyone particularly interested in the topic.

Edited November 15, 2013 by Teritus

[shedpensioner]

It was a good documentary, definately put a new angle on matters.

[Mike Carefree]

yep ill go along with the new theory of death by FRIENDLY FIRE....it makes sense and ties up all those loose ends also explains the actions of the secret service doin what they did...............................................................................................................................................................................or did they

[Spudulike]

yep ill go along with the new theory of death by FRIENDLY FIRE....it makes sense and ties up all those loose ends also explains the actions of the secret service doin what they did...............................................................................................................................................................................or did they

It does make sense...since learning about JFK the strange part to me was Oswald (even though he was a former US Marine) firing 3 rounds in something like 6 seconds using an (even in '63) old and not very accurate carbine. You fire, pull back the bolt - releasing the spent case - push the bolt forward - chambering the new round, re-sight, fire, etc. Two accurate and one missed shots in 6 seconds?

[Spudulike]

Interesting tho' a bit technical.

[Mike Carefree]

i was hooked on the theory of the secret service agent accidently firing from car 2 because they admitted dumdum bullets were loaded and the fragmented head and brain were, lets sy, made to disappear sos not to leave any proof of this fact...oswald was a patsy...AND lyndon johnson (imo) hired him to do the job and paid RUBY to dispose of oswald.........moon landings.....assasinations.....kaufman being alive...........theres more riviting stuff to come

[Teritus]

It does make sense...since learning about JFK the strange part to me was Oswald (even though he was a former US Marine) firing 3 rounds in something like 6 seconds using an (even in '63) old and not very accurate carbine. You fire, pull back the bolt - releasing the spent case - push the bolt forward - chambering the new round, re-sight, fire, etc. Two accurate and one missed shots in 6 seconds?

 

Definitely another theory worth consideration. Some time ago I read another book on the subject (can't recall its name) that seemed to pretty much tie-up everything perfectly (in my opinion). 'At last,' I thought, 'This is the truth about what happened.' But after reading the reviews I found out just how many flaws the book had - 'coincidentally' all the alleged culprits named are now dead (and so they couldn't defend themselves, let alone sue the two authors); all of them were wildcards - either Mafia-controlled Intelligence men or deceased Mob figures; and, in effect, the book absolved Intelligence agencies of practically all blame*. It turned out that one of the authors had a CIA past... it just goes to show how deep a subject the assassination is: even when one is convinced that the answers have been revealed, the source should always be investigated. That quote from the film JFK about the assassination rings true: 'It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.'

 

*I'm not at all claiming that the Intelligence services were definitely involved in any plot to kill Kennedy; I simply don't know and, like most people, am bound to make, at best, educated guesses regarding what led to his death.

Edited November 16, 2013 by Teritus

[Spudulike]

A different view of the rifle issue. The only caveat imo is that the volunteers are familiar with rifles (from their profession) and are not under the stress that LHO was.

[Droogba]

Did anyone else watch the JFK documentary on Ch5 earlier in the week?

It was called: 'JFK: The Smoking Gun' and presented a new (to me) theory about JFK's death in Dallas. I won't spoil the documentary by explaining the theory but it's recommended and will be on Demand 5.

There is interesting detail in the account - considering the three spent bullet cases found in the Book Depositary, two were close to the window through which Oswald fired and one was some feet away. It's likely (given that Oswald didn't hang around after the shooting to re-arrange the cartridges) that the single cartridge was a magazine 'blank' - an empty case kept in the firing chamber to seal the mechanism against damp, dirt, etc. Oswald would have removed it before loading a clip of live ammunition. Therefore, he may have fired only two rounds. This ties into theories about how hard it is to fire three accurate rounds in a very short time using a bolt action carbine.

The film highlighted (and filled) holes in the official version of what happened. It's hard to understand why 50 years after the event a coherent official account is still awaited.

No, I didn't, but my daughter did and has bombarded me with questions ever since...

[youlots]

Definitely another theory worth consideration....

 

McLaren's theory, initially attractive on first blush, doesn't really hold up though. Probably one of the better recent critiques of same:

 

 

Unusual suspects in the endless theories about JFK's assassination

 

FIFTY years after John F. Kennedy was murdered, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of witnesses and the most famous 8mm camera ever wielded, is it possible to say with certainty who shot him?

 

If we hesitate before replying that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, it may not be because we have too little information. It may be because we have too much. Don DeLillo, in his formidable assassination novel Libra (1988), called it the "data-spew" - "an incredible haul of human utterance". November 22, 1963, must be the most documented day in history.  

 

The deluge of paperwork started with the report of the Warren Commission, the inquiry ordered by Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson. The commission found Oswald acted alone. From the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository he fired three shots at Kennedy's motorcade. One bullet missed and hit a kerb. A second round, the much scoffed at "magic bullet", hit Kennedy's back and exited his throat before hitting the back, wrist and thigh of Texas governor John Connally, who was sitting in front of him. The bullet later turned up on Connally's hospital gurney in remarkably undamaged condition. Oswald's remaining shot entered the back of Kennedy's skull and blew out a gaping mortal wound above his ear.  

 

Convened in haste, and well aware a lone gunman verdict would be the best result for national security, the commission seemed to bend over backwards to reach that finding. The early cliche was its report was a whitewash. For a long time, no self-respecting free-thinker would be caught dead believing Oswald had acted alone, or perhaps at all. Woody Allen used to joke, in the mid-1960s, that he was writing "a nonfiction version of the Warren report".  

 

In the cracks of the official story, the conspiracy theories flourished like weeds. Oswald was in league with, or had been framed by, the CIA, the FBI, rogue or non-rogue Cubans, the Mafia.   The best overview of these theories has always been Anthony Summers's Conspiracy, first published in 1980, and now updated and re-released as Not in Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK. Summers has high standards of scholarship and he has never been rash enough to commit himself to a particular thesis. Those two virtues, I think, explain each other. Put together, they explain why his panoramic book remains the Big Daddy of the conspiracy works.  

 

It seems significant, though, that in 50 years no single conspiracy theory has emerged as the dominant one, let alone acquired the ring of truth. After a half-century of fevered effort, the theorists still haven't cracked the mystery. Perhaps it's time to admit there isn't one. The more you read about Oswald, the harder it is to stave off the conclusion that he was guilty as sin, a sphinx without a secret.  

 

The magic bullet remains unfalsified by science. Enhancements of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm film have proved Oswald had more time to fire his three shots than originally thought - something like eight seconds rather than six. The Warren Commission had its deficiencies, but its central findings look sounder as time goes by.   None of this means the lone gunman narrative is easy to believe. It's merely the least unbelievable explanation we have. We must live with its anomalies, flukes, loose ends. Oswald got amazingly lucky. And then Jack Ruby, the maudlin self-dramatist who shot Oswald two days later, got lucky too, as Larry Sabato reminds us in his capable and lucid The Kennedy Half-Century. "Thirty seconds one way or the other," Ruby said, and he would have missed his chance. But he didn't. A ratbag shot the president, then a joker shot the ratbag.  

 

But the revisionists don't believe in luck on that scale and they will not cease exploring. Since Oswald is such a poor excuse for the criminal of the century (when arrested, he instantly whined "I know my rights!"), they crave a more diabolical culprit. Oswald wasn't ingenious, so they create ingenious theories to fill the void.  

 

The latest of these comes from Colin McLaren, a retired Australian police detective turned crime writer. Modestly, McLaren's JFK: The Smoking Gun purports to have solved history's "ultimate cold case".   In truth, as McLaren acknowledges throughout the book, his "solution" isn't new. It was previously advanced in the 1992 book Mortal Error, by Bonar Menninger. But McLaren believes he can definitively prove it.  

 

Oswald, according to McLaren's scenario, fully expected to be the afternoon's lone gunman. But he fired only two shots: one that missed, followed by the magic bullet. Kennedy was wounded, not necessarily fatally. At this point a Secret Service agent, George Hickey, stationed in the car behind JFK's, stumbled and accidentally blew off the President's head with an assault rifle. Before Oswald could complete the crime of the century, poor old Hickey perpetrated the cock-up of the millennium.  

 

If McLaren's hypothesis seems not just superfluous but absurd, that is not sufficient reason to dismiss it. After all, the conventional narrative requires us to believe improbable things too. Whatever happened that day, it was radically unusual. So one is ready to accept McLaren's startling conclusion - as long as the evidence compels it.   McLaren thinks it does. For one thing, he says, an impressive number of witnesses believed the final two shots were "close together" or even "simultaneous". There just wasn't enough time between them for Oswald to work the bolt on his creaky Carcano rifle, re-aim and pull the trigger.  

 

Moreover, says McLaren, the entrance wound in the back of JFK's head was only 6mm wide. Oswald's rounds were 6.5mm in diameter and a bullet can't make a hole smaller than itself.   Finally, McLaren believes the catastrophic damage to Kennedy's head was "the work of a frangible round, designed to explode on impact". If it was, the fatal shot can't have come from Oswald, who was firing full-metal jacket rounds "designed to pass cleanly through a target".  

 

If just one of these premises is correct, you have to believe there was a second shooter. Enter the hapless Hickey, located right behind Kennedy's car, packing an AR-15 rifle loaded with frangible 5.56mm rounds.  

 

Fortunately for Hickey, who died in 2011, McLaren's arguments crumble to the touch. Take his claim that the magic bullet and the fatal head shot were discharged almost simultaneously, meaning Oswald couldn't have fired both. This notion bizarrely flouts the evidence of the Zapruder film, the most famous resource in the whole case, which shows an excruciating lapse of time between the moment Kennedy was wounded and the moment of the head strike.  

 

Gerald Posner, author of the scrupulous and convincing Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), times the gap at 4.9 seconds. Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote the 1600-page conspiracy-nuker Reclaiming History (2007), puts it at 5.6. Not even the hardiest sceptic, as far as I know, has ever denied that Oswald's rifle could be fired twice in five seconds. The Warren Commission, on the basis of test-firings, found it conceivable that Oswald fired three rounds in this timeframe, with his missed shot falling between the two hits.  

 

Reading The Smoking Gun, you keep waiting for McLaren to raise and deal with the Zapruder evidence. Almost unbelievably, he never does. He just keeps repeating "forty-eight witnesses on the ground" heard two near-simultaneous sounds. Well, maybe they did. But whatever those sounds were, they can't have been the two shots that struck JFK. (One of the witnesses suggests, in a portion of testimony not quoted by McLaren, that the second sound was "probably" the crack of the bullet striking Kennedy's head.)  

 

What about Kennedy's suspiciously small entry wound? Oswald's ammunition was 6.5mm in diameter. Yet "the entry hole width to JFK's skull wound measured 6mm in width", writes McLaren. "A stunning fact!" McLaren derives this "fact" from testimony delivered to various inquiries by JFK's autopsy pathologists, who apparently failed to notice they were providing slam-dunk evidence of a second gunman.  

 

But the transcripts of these inquiries, which can be read online, make it plain the pathologists are talking about the hole in JFK's scalp, not his skull. One of these doctors explains, in a stretch of testimony McLaren doesn't quote, that scalp tissue is elastic, meaning it is "not infrequent" that "the measured wound is slightly smaller than the calibre of the missile that traversed it". The underlying wound in JFK's skull was wider, indicating the bullet had a maximum diameter of 7mm.  

 

Like many a revisionist, McLaren has a habit of airily implying that most of his forerunners in the field, including trained scientists, were chumps. Repeatedly, tirelessly, he asserts that fully jacketed bullets such as Oswald's do not fragment on impact. The explosive wound in Kennedy's head could only have been caused by a soft-nosed or frangible bullet. But if this is so self-evident, you wonder why the experts have never considered the notion before.  

 

They have. They just haven't found it persuasive. You wouldn't know this from McLaren's book. "There was no frangible bullet fired," a forensic pathologist told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.   Nor did Kennedy's autopsy pathologists have trouble believing Oswald's ammunition inflicted the head wound. One told the Warren Commission it was "quite common" for such bullets to fragment after hitting "bony structures". Another testified that a soft-nosed bullet would have inflicted a "much more disruptive" entry wound than the neat 6mm hole that McLaren, in another context, finds so suggestive.  

 

The commission also hired an expert on wound ballistics, Alfred Olivier, to fire Oswald's rifle into 10 human skulls from an appropriate distance, to see if his ammunition was indeed capable of blowing a huge exit wound in a head. Olivier found it was.  

 

McLaren acknowledges Olivier's testimony but finds it sinister that the commission dwelt on just one of the 10 skulls. "The blatant absence of evidence on the missing nine bullets strongly suggests the rounds passed cleanly through the skulls."  

 

By now McLaren is thinking more like a conspiracy theorist than a cop. "Absence of evidence" has become meaningful in itself; it "strongly suggests" one is on to something big. But how many skulls need to explode before he'll ditch his belief that Oswald's ammunition was incapable of exploding a skull? One out of 10 should be enough, but apparently it isn't. "A burning fascination as to what happened to the other nine skulls remains."  

 

Well, that burning fascination can be readily doused. It isn't hard to Google Olivier's written report of the experiments: "Ten skulls were shot at this range and extensive damage was produced in each instance. The bullets broke up to a greater or lesser degree in at least nine of the skulls." The commission no doubt believed putting one skull into evidence was enough to make the point. They didn't know what they'd be up against.  

 

By now we're running out of reasons to believe Hickey shot JFK, unless of course somebody saw him do it. But nobody did, and a pretty vast crowd was looking in his direction at the time. Did anybody even see the gun in his hands before the fatal shot? McLaren thinks people did. But he engages in some brawny massaging of the evidence to prove it.  

 

We're told Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent perched on the running-board of Hickey's car, "recalled George Hickey being in possession of the AR-15 ... Their vehicle ... 'lurched forward' and Hickey lost his footing." But Hill's testimony can be checked: it doesn't mention the AR-15 at all, except to say it was kept in the back seat. Hill indeed says the car "lurched forward" - after the fatal shot. He mentions losing his own footing at that point but says nothing about Hickey's.  

 

Then there is the statement of Agent Glen Bennett, which, in McLaren's view, "places the AR-15 assault weapon in the hands of Hickey prior to the final and fatal shot". But Bennett merely says when he reached for the gun after the terminal shot, Hickey had already picked it up.  

 

McLaren doesn't mention, but must surely know, that Bennett also made some handwritten notes on the night of the shooting, in which he described the moment following the head shot less ambiguously. "I immediately hollered to Special Agent Hickey, seated in the same seat, to get the AR-15." That was an odd thing to holler if Hickey was holding the weapon already.  

 

Here is McLaren's smoking gun, then: still lying on the floor after the fatal shot, not just unsmoking but untouched.   Why, in any case, does McLaren take the statements of Hickey's fellow agents at face value? Elsewhere he alleges the Secret Service covered up the accident. So shouldn't he want these men to protest, loudly, that the weapon wasn't within a country mile of Hickey at the fatal moment?  

 

McLaren's narrative is fundamentally incoherent, a common feature of untrue stories. On one hand he claims the Secret Service meddled with JFK's autopsy, stealing X-rays that showed his brain to be riddled with Hickey-implicating bullet fragments. But then, to demonstrate how damning those X-rays were, he quotes the Warren Commission testimony of Agent Roy Kellerman, the cover-up's alleged ringleader.   "The whole head looked like a little mass of stars," Kellerman testified. The brain contained "thirty, forty" metal fragments. Why would Kellerman say this if he thought the fragments pointed to Hickey? The answer, surely, is that he didn't and they don't.

 

McLaren is now disproving his own case. Does he genuinely believe what he's saying? Or he is clinging to his junk thesis only because without it there is no book?   In his closing pages McLaren grasps at some flimsy straws. Jackie, he notes, couldn't be persuaded to change out of her dress, which was stained with her husband's blood. "I want them to see what they have done," she said. Who, McLaren asks darkly, were "they"? Was Jackie hinting the deed had been done by a plural entity, namely the Secret Service?  

 

But they meant Dallas, as Sabato's scholarly and unhysterical book reminds us. JFK himself, on the morning of the assassination, had warned Jackie they were "heading into nut country" - the city was known to be dangerously rife with Kennedy-haters. But really, you don't need Sabato's book to tell you that Jackie, if she thought the Secret Service had killed her husband, would have found some less cryptic way of saying so. All you need is a sense of the way the world really works.  

 

This is the sense conspiracy theorists conspicuously lack. They claim to be sceptics, but the first thing a sceptic must be sceptical about is their own thesis. Instead the conspiracists are infinitely credulous about their own big ideas, while levying an unreasonable burden of proof on everyone else.  

 

The literary mind, in contrast, defers to the texture of reality. Norman Mailer, at the end of his typically weird and wonderful Oswald's Tale (1995), cut through the blur of the Dallas data-spew with some lines that only a novelist would dare to utter. "The proof of the magic bullet is that it happened," he wrote. "One cannot introduce the odds after the fact."  

 

McLaren accepts the magic bullet but can't believe Oswald's third shot had its own idiosyncrasies. Instead he invites us to imagine Oswald leering down his scope at Kennedy's head only to see it get blown off accidentally, at that very instant, by someone who can't even be shown to have been armed at the time.  

 

Either that happened, or Oswald fired a bullet that behaved in a not unheard-of way. To borrow Mailer's logic, the proof that Oswald's final bullet fragmented in JFK's head is that it did. This argument strikes me as far sounder than any of the "evidence" advanced in McLaren's flimsy stitch-up of a book.  

 

Back in 1993, Oswald's own brother, Robert, vainly tried to tell the conspiracy theorists they were wasting their time. "The facts are there," he said. "There's hard physical evidence there ... Enough's enough. It's there. Put it to rest."   But what were the odds anyone would listen to Robert Oswald, when his considerably less subtle brother had somehow failed to make the point stick himself?

 

 

David Free - The Australian - 16 November 2013

 

 

Always follow the money.....

Edited November 17, 2013 by youlots

[Spudulike]

Thanks for that post Youlots. It's interesting as it provides a critique of McLaren's idea and also asks 'is there any reason to doubt the Warren Commission's view?'.

David Free addresses some but not all of McLaren's points. Unaddressed remain the question of the angle of firing / impact of the fatal shot (the location of the fatal wound suggests it was fired from the rear left of Kennedy) and the statement of several people, including that of a senator in the car two places behind that of Kennedy that the smell of cordite was apparent at street level when LHO fired from an elevated location and into the wind. Free also conflates the 'magic bullet' argument with those advanced by McLaren but the latter accepts that a 'magic bullet' is proved by the seating arrangements in the Presidential Limousine.

I don't know a great deal about the JFK issue so this discussion is informative. I wouldn't say that there is a conspiracy about JFK's death but that there are interesting facts from the shooting and the aftermath that cause there to be speculation.

As an example of this, an x-ray technician reported to a recent US government commission that he was asked by US Secret Service agents to add metal fragments to an x-ray to (it appears) give the appearance of a fragmented 6.5mm Carcano round in JFK's brain and not a 5.56mm AR15 frangible round which would have broken into smaller pieces. If the recent testimony of that technician was accurately reported by the documentary, why would that request have been made?

That's my current view - there are interesting questions (if you ignore the OTT theories) that are not adequately answered. This is not usually the case with assassinations; possibly because most assassinations attempts take place at close range and the identity of the shooter is therefore very obvious (i.e. Jack Ruby in LHO's case).

Edited November 17, 2013 by Spudulike

[youlots]

By way of clarification in respect of the above - lest some believe that I am a single gun theorist; I am not & have never have been. I have read the entirety of the Warren Commission transcript together with all other relevant transcripts of evidence much of which was not taken into account or arbitrarily dismissed or not given sufficient or any weight by the Warren Commission. I do not believe Oswald acted alone. Probably the most significant piece of evidence of itself, ay least to me, was the paraffin tests conducted on Oswald: 

 

 

"Test 1: Spectrographic Analysis

 

 

Oswald’s paraffin casts were subjected to two analyses. Spectrographic analysis, the method normally used by the police, showed evidence of barium and antimony on Oswald's hands, but not on his cheek.4

Test 2: Neutron Activation Analysis on Oswald

Spectrographic analysis was considered sufficiently reliable for criminal investigations, but in this case a more incisive test was also used. Neutron activation analysis, which is capable of identifying the presence of substances in quantities much too small to be captured by spectrographic analysis, also showed no incriminating quantities of residues on Oswald’s cheek.5 The result was reported in an internal Warren Commission memo: “At best, the analysis shows that Oswald may have fired a pistol, although this is by no means certain. … There is no basis for concluding that he also fired a rifle.â€6

Test 3: Controlled Neutron Activation Analysis

In order to check the validity of the neutron activation analysis of Oswald’s paraffin casts, a controlled test was made. Seven marksmen fired a rifle of the same type as that found on the sixth floor. The standard paraffin test was administered, and the paraffin casts were subjected to neutron activation analysis. All seven subjects showed substantial amounts of barium and antimony on their hands and, more importantly, on their cheeks.7

The absence of significant quantities of residues on Oswald’s cheek meant that he almost certainly had not fired a rifle that day."

Source: 22november1963.org.uk

 

Secondly, but in aid of the above, it is not in doubt that:

 

Oswald was a poor marksman & the fact that the rifle he used was/is notoriously unreliable:

 

 

The Mannlicher Carcano rifle that was discovered on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, however, was a “cheap old weapon†(Warren Commission Hearings, vol.4, p.29).

It was examined by the FBI’s firearms specialist, who stated that:

Every time we changed the adjusting screws to move the crosshairs in the telescopic sight in one direction it also affected the movement of the impact or the point of impact in the other direction. … We fired several shots and found that the shots were not all landing in the same place, but were gradually moving away from the point of impact.

(

Warren Commission Hearings, vol.3, p.405

)

Ronald Simmons of the US Army also examined the rifle, and found problems with the bolt and the trigger mechanism:

There were several comments made — particularly with respect to the amount of effort required to open the bolt. … There was also comment made about the trigger pull … in the first stage the trigger is relatively free, and it suddenly required a greater pull to actually fire the weapon. … The pressure to open the bolt was so great that that we tended to move the rifle off the target.

(

ibid.

, pp.449–51

)

 

[Spudulike]

Thanks for that info. Did the Warren Commission comment on the results of those tests please? They seem conclusive.

Re: the quality of LHO's markmanship, he only just got the mark required to gain the USMC Sharpshooter badge and his shooting declined after that point. That said, he was firing at close range and perhaps with iron sights (negating the issue with the scope).

With my limited knowledge it appears that LHO would have needed a lot to go right to discharge three accurate shots in nine seconds: the rifle to be accurately zeroed; the bolt action to be easy; his own skills to be sufficient and for him to hold his nerve enough to shoot well. The first video is interesting imo because it shows the shot to jam ratio.

Edited November 17, 2013 by Spudulike

[youlots]

 It's interesting as it provides a critique of McLaren's idea and also asks 'is there any reason to doubt the Warren Commission's view?'.

David Free addresses some but not all of McLaren's points. 

 

Yes. I'm of the view that there is insufficient evidence for McLaren's central thesis - especially in regards to to positioning of the spent cartridges which I feel is extremely inconclusive but especially in regards to the frangible fatal bullet given the weight of the forensic ballistics tests suggesting otherwise. As to your other comment, in regards to the jam ratio, the material rifle was/is also subject to an extremely high jam ratio.

[Spudulike]

If you don't mind me asking Youlots (so I can read up about this subject) you seem to have read a lot about JFK's death; is there an explanation about what happened that you lean towards?

[youlots]

As regards the magic bullet I have always preferred Connally's express testimony wherein he stated that he was not shot by the same bullet that entered Kennedy: in consequence, more than four shots were fired. It follows that LHO could not have been the lone gunman & it also, importantly, neatly corrals the "magic bullet theory" which I feel has always been a massive red herring that has bewitched many but to no real purpose.

Edited November 17, 2013 by youlots

[Spudulike]

So, it's LHO and another. Common sense would make LHO the dupe and a.n.other an experienced marksman.

Does LHO take part knowingly (and why?) or is his presence coincidental but obviously very helpful?

[youlots]

If you don't mind me asking Youlots (so I can read up about this subject) you seem to have read a lot about JFK's death; is there an explanation about what happened that you lean towards?

 

Well that calls for all sorts of speculation on my part. What I do believe after extensive reading & consideration for the best part of 30 odd years is as follows: Do I believe that LHO fired the Mannlicher on the day ? Yes. Do I believe that LHO acted alone? Certainly not. Do I believe that only 3 shots were fired? Certainly not. Do I believe that LHO fired the fatal head shot? No. Do I believe that the Warren Commission disregarded certain critical evidence? Absolutely. Do I believe that LHO was a patsy? In part, yes.

Edited November 17, 2013 by youlots

[youlots]

So, it's LHO and another. Common sense would make LHO the dupe and a.n.other an experienced marksman.

Does LHO take part knowingly (and why?) or is his presence coincidental but obviously very helpful?

 

Yes - LHO & another experienced marksman for sure. Your 2nd question is the most intriguing one for which we'll never have an answer.

[Spudulike]

Well that calls for all sorts of speculation on my part. What I do believe after extensive reading & consideration for the best part of 30 odd years is as follows: Do I believe that LHO fired the Mannlicher on the day ? Yes. Do I believe that LHO acted alone? Certainly not. Do I believe that only 3 shots were fired? Certainly not. Do I believe that LHO fired the fatal head shot? No. Do I believe that the Warren Commission disregarded certain critical evidence? Absolutely. Do I believe that LHO was a patsy? In part, yes.

Thanks. I need to do some more reading about this!

The one other thing that seems obvious is that whoever 'they' were, they were not messing around. If the missing x-rays showed fragments from a frangible round then someone wanted JFK dead on that day and was taking the matter very seriously. I.e. ensuring that any hits would cause maximum damage.

Thanks for your info again. Most interesting.

[youlots]

Thanks. I need to do some more reading about this!

 

 

Be careful what you wish for.... ;-) It is, at least to me, a very vexed subject - that ends up asking more questions than it answers but then again probably no more vexing than most historical subjects. Like most of history I doubt that we'll ever really obtain the comprehensive truth.

[The Brit]

A few years back I was in Dallas and went to the the site...the book depositary is a museum now and you can stand right next to the window where Oswald fired...now I'm now gun expert, but it just made you doubt even more how one individual could fire three shots with perfect precision at a moving target in such short time...also took a wonder round the grassy knoll, it's all very eerie, especially as they have two x's in the road, one to signify the first shot, the last, the kill shot...for me, one of the main things that convinces me there was a conspiracy is just how dodgy everyone acted afterwards...I mean, they handled evidence over the murder of a president worse than an ordinary joe...and to allow jack ruby to just waltz up to the most wanted man in America and kill him before he could tell his story is just way too convenient...

[The Brit]

different view of the rifle issue. The only caveat imo is that the volunteers are familiar with rifles (from their profession) and are not under the stress that LHO was.

I'm sure there was a tree partly blocking the view as well from the book depositary, not the clear sight these guys had

[Spudulike]

A few years back I was in Dallas and went to the the site...the book depositary is a museum now and you can stand right next to the window where Oswald fired...now I'm now gun expert, but it just made you doubt even more how one individual could fire three shots with perfect precision at a moving target in such short time...also took a wonder round the grassy knoll, it's all very eerie, especially as they have two x's in the road, one to signify the first shot, the last, the kill shot...for me, one of the main things that convinces me there was a conspiracy is just how dodgy everyone acted afterwards...I mean, they handled evidence over the murder of a president worse than an ordinary joe...and to allow jack ruby to just waltz up to the most wanted man in America and kill him before he could tell his story is just way too convenient...

It's interesting to learn about the museum and the two x's marked on the road (and the tree).

I didn't realise you could look out of the window used by LHO - pretty amazing.

I agree that a lot went wrong for JFK that day - a chain of errors and bad events. And Ruby. Well, as you say, how could that happen? It was a different time of course (in terms of how police went about their business) but how was he able to be so close to LHO?

Edited November 17, 2013 by Spudulike