New JFK assassination revelation could upend the lone gunman theory
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
The revelation is that the bullet was not lodged in JFK and did not fall out while shaking about on the gurney.
So if true (not that we can really know at this point) if the pristine bullet was retrieved from Kennedy's car then yes, that would upend everything.
If the story in the article is true, the bullet Landis found - i.e. the famous "magic bullet" - could not have wounded both Kennedy and Governor Connally and have been shot from the Book Depository (to Kennedy's rear) as the so-called single-bullet theory[0] requires, so it upends the Warren Commission's version of the assassination completely.
* https://spacecoastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JFK-A...
look at the arms. Kennedy is resting his arm on the car frame and Connally cannot. The seat he is in is not lined up with where Kennedy is. The bullet needs no magic to go in a straight line.
All of these conspiracy theories would die if those taking them seriously would just sit down and read the Warren report. If you can then find something specific in the evidence or conclusions that is wrong or illogical or seems like it was covered up in the report, please point it out.
“ Arlen Specter, who had traveled to Dallas to take Tomlinson’s deposition in March 1964, was thunderstruck when Tomlinson relayed this scenario. To judge from a transcript of that conversation, Specter spent much of the remainder of his time with Tomlinson essentially trying to talk him out of his recollection, causing a distressed Tomlinson to say he just was not sure about his memory.
But the Q&A itself clearly suggests that Tomlinson, unprompted and unbadgered, had a cogent recollection that a bullet, wherever else it ultimately ended up, had come from the stretcher that had already been left in the hall in front of the men’s room.
In its final report, the Warren Commission mentioned nothing about this detail from Tomlinson’s account. Instead, the panel largely dismissed Tomlinson’s testimony, writing that even though he was “not certain whether the bullet came from the Connally stretcher or the adjacent one,” the commission “has concluded that the bullet came from the Governor’s stretcher.”
As sibling points out, Oswald may have been a scapegoat or patsy.
The stories all say that the FBI reported the minimum time to fire that rifle was 2.25 seconds. How was that determined? How can a supposedly experimental result like that have no error bars? Was it determined by repeated firings of the gun found in the sniper's nest, or by another similar gun presumed to be an exact duplicate (of a 20-year old mail order gun?) for purposes of that measurement? It is known that Oswald spent some considerable time (maybe and hour or several, I don't remember) 'dry firing' the rifle the night before. Could he perhaps have developed speed superior to that of whomever the FBI asked to do that experiment? Has the 2.25 second minimum ever been replicated? How could the person trying to fire the gun as fast as possible for the FBI ever have as much adrenaline flowing as Oswald, the man who had previously tried and failed to kill General Walker must have had.
Maybe because he's 88 years old and likely to die soon? More or less a deathbed confession.
Consider that Watergate's "Deep Throat" Mark Felt only came forward at age 91.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/10/watergate...
The revelation is that the bullet was not lodged
in JFK and did not fall out while shaking about
on the gurney.
This pristine bullet was previously thought to have been found on Connally's stretcher, not JFK's stretcher.
It was thought that this bullet traveled into JFK from the rear, exited his throat, and then wounded Connally.
If Landis' claim is true, that would upend entirely the Warren commission's findings. Of course, we probably can't really know the truth at this point. But the article makes a solid case for it being quite likely true.
Not so. Three shots were fired according to about 85% of the witnesses. Previously, we had a missing bullet. The bullet Landis found might be that missing bullet, previously explained as having vanished someplace in Dealey Plaza. Oswald may have fired it while his view of the limo was partially obscured by the tree. If it made some slight contact with the tree, it might have caused the small bit of flying debris that nicked one of the spectators, then continuing its flight at a lesser speed, hit Kennedy's back, popped out of his back, and been found by Landis. The other magic bullet the Warren Commission may have figured out pretty accurately. Which bullet was the one found at Parkland? Given all the unanticipated mayhem that day, it could have been either one, but one would not expect that both of two wandering bullets would have been found. Many's the detective who has been baffled by red-headed identical twins.
It's a bullet. It just was next to an explosion that cleared it most most evidence. Then the barrel rifling altered the metal. That would not be harmed by picking it up. Then it went through jfk. Okay, we already know his DNA is on it.
The real question is why are you picking up random things from a crime scene and then putting them down in a hospital stretcher.
Probably seemed like a good idea at the time. My wife was in car accident once where the airbag deployed. For some reason her immediate reaction was to roll down the window. People in stressful and perilous situations sometimes do things that make no sense.
Why wouldn't she open a window?
It’s funny how advertising depicts air bags as these soft pillows when they are anything but inviting during the moment of deployment.
The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
> The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
The explosion they are referring to is the one inside the firearm when the firing pin strikes the cartridge.
No need to be unkind.
I don't really know, but it hardly seems like good practise to pick up a bullet. Don't crime scene investigators usually take calibrated pictures of important items such as bullets and often try to determine the trajectory?
There's also the chain of custody to think about - the bullet could easily have been swapped with a different bullet after he left it on the stretcher.
Of course it's not but that was no ordinary crime scene. There were thousands of people about, what would happen to the vehicle etc., etc? There's no way the crime scene could be secured in such a short time. And JFK had to be rushed to hospital. Nothing was certain.
He saw the bullet as evidence and on the spur of the moment secured it. After that he was likely in shock and thus his actions were more that of an automaton.
I’m kind of inclined to expect peculiar behavior from him.
From the NYT article. It also mentions that crime scene integrity wasn't as much of a thing at the time, which seems questionable at best. But still, if you believe the choice is between keeping or losing the bullet, you definitely take it.
And his “only law enforcement experience was being in the Secret Service? That isn’t a low bar.
It's all very logical and straightforward.
1. It only addresses the Vietnam War as a potential motive and "debunks" this motive. Geopolitics is complicated, and there are countless other potential motives, especially surrounding Cuba and the CIA's involvement there (Bay of Pigs, etc). The parts of the video I watched (including part 2) did not seem to address this at all. Eliminating one motive does not by any means eliminate the possibility of CIA involvement.
2. The video's creator seems to assume that CIA's involvement would consist of "hiring" Oswald to perform the assassination and that Oswald would have full awareness of the plans, etc. This is not the only scheme in which a conspiracy may have taken place, and in fact seems like a highly unlikely and unsophisticated scheme. It seems much more likely that Oswald was "used" rather than "hired" and that he was either convinced or coerced to shoot Kennedy. This is how murderous intelligence organizations do their dirty work (the CIA is known to have killed people) - via coercion, power, politics, propaganda, and not via direct orders or contracts. Assuming my theory is correct (of which I do not have certainty), Oswald likely had his own motives to wanting to shoot Kennedy, but it required a conspiracy to actually get him to carry through with it. This model of the relationships and dynamics involved seems entirely foreign to the video's creator and is completely unaddressed.
In general, discourse around the JFK assassination and potential conspiracies focuses way too much on the shooting itself - ballistic physics, positions of possible shooters, analysis of film. This is a complete distraction from the more important question which is around Lee Harvey Oswald's incredibly suspicious relationships and contacts with known CIA people.
Conjecture: A is not the culprit because motive xyz does not check out.
Reasoning: That doesn't exonerate A, who could have other motives.
Without agreeing with it, that looks perfectly well reasoned to me.
Compelling evidence exonerating the CIA you say? Well ok, I'll believe that when I see it, just like any other evidence from gravity onward. The CIA's docs haven't been declassified and released.
So many well reasoned arguments can be created so it is possible for people's minds to cloud.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here but it seems like it's not contributing anything much to the discussion. Perhaps your mind clouded before you wrote it?
edit: did you edit your original post /after/ I replied?
And think about the number of people involved in an organisation like that who pledged allegiance to serve their country and now have to go along with killing the president. Just so incredibly unlikely. People watch too many cloak and dagger movies.
In that scenario, all you need to do is believe that the interests of the country are separate from the interests of a particular president.
Trump is a classic example where some people might have held that view.
If they were, would you believe them?
Assassinating a popular, progressive president in the 1960s was very doable and didn't take a lot of people to pull off. It will never be settled as to the true motive of the killing.
Compare this to "the moon landing was faked" or "9/11 towers were not only an inside job, but imploded" and they are much less plausible.
Unfortunately this isn't limited to conspiracy theories. We spent the better part of the years with leaders and scientists forcing similarly baseless explanations down or throat rather than taking the time to collect the data that actually supported the politically favorable talking points. There were countless fantasies made up to explain the risks of the specific virus, efficacy of masks, net benefit of vaccination, etc.
This seems untrue in the current media landscape. It is more likely people will disagree and then drift back to their echo chamber.
People DO conspire. History is filled with examples both large and small. Suspecting a group of people of conspiring is not scary, there are lots of crazy theories out there that do no harm, ancient aliens, crystal skulls, all kinds of stuff.
"conspiracy theory" is a term with a lot of power, I would argue that people in power who actually do conspire have a pretty good incentive to call things that might expose them by that term. This ensures that the media cannot cover the topic without hurting their own reputation and that people who discuss it will be in the out-group and less likely to be taken seriously. In fact, they also have an incentive to play up the craziest ones (pizzagate, birds aren't real) to discredit and cover what might actually be a real case of conspiring.
You cannot stop people from coming up with crazy theories and talking to each other about them, particularly in the age of the Internet. The only thing you can do is discuss and provide evidence against them. Using that label only emboldens believers nowadays, since they become more convinced that the powerful are using the power of the term to suppress them.
In this case, history dictates that my Bayesian priors should be strongly shifted towards at least some "conspiracy" at play considering the how other leaders have been killed in the past by some conspiracy. History also dictates specifically that the CIA is capable of similar conspiracies (although this would probably be the biggest/most dramatic). The facts paint a pretty clear picture of how the assassination actually happened, but an entirely unclear picture of the motivations. Other tidbits of information strengthen and weaken these prior understandings (in my opinion they strengthen overall), but since they are only vague tidbits, the shift in understanding is small.
I believe you call this "unsubstantiated" because you do not allow history to form a prior understanding of the dynamics at play. You also seem reticent to allow for fuzzy truths or uncertainties to exist. This is entirely incongruous to the way I, and many other folks on HN, perceive the world, hence the disagreement. There fundamentally is a bottomless pit of possibilities of what happened, but this is the method in which I and many other narrow down that pit to vague likelihoods.
Distraction is the point.
Distraction from several key points which beg a series of questions.
- Dulles formed the CIA from the OSS.
- Dulles hated Castro and thought he'd trigger a full scale invasion by launching the Bay of Pigs "raid"
- Dulles was not all that happy when that plan, not only failed, but triggered his dismissal from the agency he formed and headed up, by JFK.
- Dulles, may not have been a psychopath, but he calmly watched his sister almost drown in the ocean, before their finally mother rushed to save her.
I was a teenager living outside the US when I learned about JFK's assassination. It was a Saturday morning where I was and I remember it vividly more from the shock reaction of my parents than from the radio news report (I heard the news first and told them about it).
From that moment onwards the news coverage was intense. When Ruby shot Oswald we were struck with a sense of disbelief—even with my naïve sense of US politics, law enforcement, etc. the first things that came to mind were why would the seemingly sleazy Ruby want to shoot Oswald at all, second, how did US law enforcement let it actually happen. Either the US was in more chaos than the news was reporting and it was a free-for-all over there, or that Ruby's ulterior motive was more than just loyalty to the US/JFK.
I wasn't alone in thinking this, many were of this opinion and it was the first thing that came to our minds. I'd stress we'd formed that opinion within days if not hours of the news—that's well before any of the conspiracy theories or 'grassy knoll' stories emerged.
That line of thinking can power any conspiracy theory.
Do you really think there are only 3 options for his motives? Why not “an impulsive criminal businessman with a gun filled with rage in the hours after a presidential assassination in his town during a Cold War looks for a way he can personally feel some modicum of control in a world that is mostly chaotic”.
However, the bank robber analogy starting at 26mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8tO16xdrY&t=1601s does not sit quite right.
You can't just stick with one theory and keep fitting other facts to that theory forever - there is going to be a breaking point.
To keep going with that particular bank robber story - Jake.
In the example barring other facts, it is 99.9% probable that Jake indeed is the bank robber.
What if instead of finding $9k out of $10k, police only find $5k out of $100k on Jake?
What if not only talking to his girlfriend about robbing the bank he also talked about robbing the bank at the bar the previous week?
What if there was an amateur theatre troupe at that bar that night?
What if one of those actors was also an accomplished make up artist and high speed driver?
Okay, the story keeps getting sillier.
Even with these new facts the prosecution would still win.
Let's add a new fact security cameras at a bar also show Jake, with similar timestamps to the bank's cameras. There are 3 more patrons that are willing to swear it was Jake.
An old lady reports that she saw a car drive up at a high speed to Jake's car and leave a package.
At that point we have a problem with being so sure on Jake being the guilty one. There is some reasonable doubt now.
My point is you can never be 100% sure. All you can do is adjust priors.
With JFK as it currently stands we might say 95% chance that Oswald was the lone gunman and 80% that he acted completely alone.
We can also say there is a 40% probability there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK, there might have been even more than one, but those might have had nothing to do with Oswald.
Then, in the ensuing confusion, a Secret Service agent following the motorcade accidentally discharged his AR-15 in the back of Kennedy's head, killing him.
The agent who pulled the trigger on the ground doesn't even need to realize he had done it; it's possible to accidentally discharge without realizing it.
The quality of the secret service back then was nothing compared to what it is now. I mean one of the reasons the secret service agent in the article didn’t come forward was because he got drunk with other secret service agents the night before the shooting and he didn’t want it to surface.
The magic bullet and exit wound - as seen on film kept from Americans for years - were enough to convince me the lone gunman theory was nonsense, but the rest of it also needs some accounting for.
Oswald could definitely have made the shots. He was a trained Marine marksman. There have been multiple tests showing that it is possible to make the shots.
Kennedy had a small entry in back of the head. The explosion on top and side of head was not the entry wound. There isn't an exit wound because it was probably in damaged area so could say explosion was the exit wound. Remember that he was hit with rifle bullet that causes lots more damage than handgun.
If you are in the room, you might be able to make the shots - although the FBI failed to, and Oswald was a lousy shot - but my main problem is that he could not have moved through the building as needed without being seen by some people, and not by others who did.
The photos of Kennedy do not show a small wound in the back of the head. They are distressing for a number of reasons, not least they clearly show the back of the head has exploded out.
This documentary I watched recently is long, but it puts all the eyewitness testimony of Oswald in the depository building into one big spacial timeline [1]. There are some inconsistencies (like you would expect when aggregating a bunch of eyewitness testimony from fallible humans) but there's nothing there that made me think there was something nefarious going on. Anything specific you had in mind?
As far as the autopsy photos go, I know the photo you're referring to, and you're misinterpreting it.
Here are some medical illustrations [still kinda graphic, but not photographs] of the part that "exploded out" [2] and what the actual hole in the back of his head looked like when you held that part back in place [3]:
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlKUJHXYxQ&t=260s [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlKUJHXYxQ&t=260s [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HSCA-JFK-head-7-125.jpg [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JFK_posterior_head_wound....
Oswald was a good shot, he was rated sharpshooter and marksman in the Marines. Lots of people left to watch the motorcade. Memories are always unreliable. Oswald was supposed to be working.
It is possible that FBI was working from bad info or incompetent. It was thought that the last two shots were rapid fire. But there is better info now that the shots were spaced out with plenty of time for bolt action rifle, and the "rapid fire" was echos. Lots of people have recreated the shots, some not that good shots.
I just looked up the Zapruder film right now [1]. In the seconds before the fatal shot, you can clearly see Connolly turn around to face JFK (you can see the rotation of the shoulder pretty clearly as the car passes the road sign). At the moment of the fatal shot, he appears to be in the middle of turning back to his original position. Now I can't tell from the Zapruder film whether or not they were aligned or instead offset by several inches, but it is very clear that Connolly was not facing forward at the time of fatal shot.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBJFT-OyDEc is the source I used.
some HN
>people are able to
opine outside their circle of competence.
Not sure what specifically you are referring to with all of them, but in general it covers the various eyewitness reports used to establish multiple shooters. In short (and would really recommend reading the book if you are interested in the subject) they are not credible. Often inconsistent (both internally as the stories are told on different occasions) and also mutually inconsistent. There were a lot of people there that day and it was quite chaotic after the assassination. It doesn't seem that implausible to me that there would be a lot of conflicting information from eyewitnesses. But the eyewitness testimony taken as a whole is completely consistent with Oswald firing all three shots from the Book Depository.
> magic bullet
From memory, there was nothing "magical" about the magic bullet. The injuries on both Kennedy and Connelly and the video evidence are completely consistent with the official story that a bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the neck, exited through his throat and then hit Connelly in the the thigh.
> exit wound
I assume you mean the story that there was an exit wound on the back of Kennedy's head. But according to the actual autopsy that was not the case. He had an entry wound on the back of his head and exit wound on the side/front (again consistent with the official story). The story of a rear exit wound is from two doctors who treated Kennedy at the hospital in Dallas. They were not doing an autopsy. They were administering emergency medicine to a man whose head was covered in blood and brain fragments. And there accounts have been directly contradicted by other doctors who were there.
This was based on acoustical analysis of Dallas police radio recordings:
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-repor...
The recording was, indeed, later found to not even be from the time of the shots but from an entirely different point in time, after police already noticed Kennedy shot. In that very recording, police officers say things in reaction to the shooting. After those voices, the “shots” from which the conclusion was drawn appear. Painfully obviously, that doesn’t make any sense.
Also the recording was in an entirely different point in space too, as it wasn’t even from a bike in the motorcade, as the HSCA thought but it from a different 3-wheeled-motorcycle stationed where Kennedy would’ve been arriving.
Drawing conclusions from that recording about the Kennedy shooting is probably less reliable than drawing them from the Live Aid concert version recording of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
In summary, after adjusting for that lone error in HSCA, Warren and HSCA concluded the same.
For example, if there were actually multiple gunmen in different locations, who all fired within a few seconds, they would have to have had some way to coordinate not only the fact that they would shoot at the motorcade that day, but to precisely synchronize exactly when they all fired. How would they do that? Did LHO even have a watch? Were there other gunmen sitting around somewhere with their guns ready and on target and fingers on triggers, ready to fire within a split second of when some other shooter fired?
I would also note, I've watched training videos on how to respond to mass shooter situations. One of the main points is to discount any claims of additional shooters in other locations until you hear shots yourself. It seems it's quite common in mass shooter situations for witnesses to falsely report additional shooters in other locations.
Edit: it is mentioned (not very clearly) at the end that the recordings were "voiced" by other people. So that answers my question.
In 1992, Congress passed a law saying everything was to be declassified in 25 years. October 2017 came and went, and the FBI blocked around 7,500 documents from release. The DEA didn't want CI names related to organized crime in them. The State Department blocked some due to "national security and foreign affairs concerns".
Trump claimed while running for President that he was now going to release everything, yet the FBI and CIA stepped in again and those plans changed.
Trump finally said he couldn't release them due to some being "of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure".
So they remain secret, 60 years later.
Just that one connection in a file, "we asked agent $name and he said $agency knew nothing" might be justifiable to keep secret if theres a connection to someone still active.
> Just that one connection in a file, "we asked agent $name and he said $agency knew nothing" might be justifiable to keep secret if theres a connection to someone still active.
The names of the agents would be redacted at first place on declassified material.
Though we do know these agencies have broken laws and done some pretty nasty stuff like MKUltra over the years.
So they really have no stock and should have been broken up a long time ago. No conspiracy theories needed really.
Not that this proves anything, it was just a "oh, I can tangibly see it" feeling that I didn't get from reading about it. For some reason the view from Oswald's window isn't in popular knowledge although you can find plenty of pictures.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/politics/b-21-stealth-bomber-...
But who knows, maybe an intelligence or sapience from another world just wants to confuse people, or something similar in the long probability tail of life experience in this universe.
EDIT: Here's a video of someone replicating the shots with that rifle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmY6HmR4fs The comments also point out other factors that could have made the shot easier.
Also, the car only started accelerating after the hit was made, and it was fairly axial to the bullet trajectory. I dunno know about you, but I can reload a bolt action rifle without dropping aim in under a second. It’s using the rifle as it was designed to be used.
It wasn’t a good shot. It was a lucky shot. One he clearly didn’t fully prepare to land, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have been arrested shortly after in a nearby movie theater. It was hardly sophisticated, and its success hinged almost entirely on blind luck and circumstance, which is the most difficult scenario to protect against.
...who ordered the murder. Shooter is the least important factor considering how many enemies JFK had in the establishment. It is too easy to blackmail someone in performing the murder.
Especially if you have friends in the CIA.
From wikipedia: Ruby was known to have been acquainted with both the police and the Mafia. The HSCA said that Ruby had known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana (1908–1975) and Joseph Campisi (1918–1990) since 1947, and had been seen with them on many occasions.
"In July 1974, however, he was seized by police in Mexico City and shipped back to Chicago. One year later he was bullet-riddled in his home in Oak Park, Ill., by unknown assailants. He had been scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his alleged involvement in a Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s."
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sam-Giancana
So, the guy was involved and worked with the CIA. Meaning, CIA could have been involved, too.
And they conveniently offed him to prevent him to talk. Such class.
So, yea, the depository is a perfect location to shoot onto that route. This in and of itself is a massive problem.
Presidential security in 1963 wasn't what it is today. For example, JFK would stop his car to go mingle with the crowd. There's a photo on this audio recording from Miami in 1963 [1].
There are parallels with 9/11. Prior to 9-11, people would generally go along peacefully with hijackers. Why? Because they knew the "routine". The hijackers would fly the plane somewhere, land it, make demands, make noise for their political cause and, more often than not, people would get to go home. Harrowing for sure. But the general public didn't conceive of planes being used as cruise missiles. We all know post-9/11 was so much security theater but it was also largely unnecessary because people were now aware they could be used as a missile so were less likely to simply go along with demands.
JFK's assassination changed the threat modelling and protection by the Secret Service of the president. In spite of that, Ronald Reagan was shot by an assailant [2] without any great planning or mass conspiracy.
Now it's all bulletproof motorcades with armor plating to survive running over a land mine. It's Secret Service vetting every audience member at a live event. It's mapping out and securing any potential sniper positions. None of that was true to the same degree in 1963.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep_NiYKrcC0
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ron...
For the experiment they had all the measurements and distances, detailed ballistic dummies (with bones and whatnot), positioned properly (the Governor was on a smaller, lower jump seat, and sitting below the President), and they shot from a tower.
They had the same rifle, though not the actual rifle, and they had period ammunition from the same lot that Oswald used. Who knows where they dug that up. I also can’t speak to the atmospheric conditions but those would affect accuracy, not impact.
Only thing hey didn’t mimic was the actual motion. It was a stationary shot.
Sorry to be graphic here, but as I recall this was the shot that hit The President in the throat, passed through him and continued on to hit the Governor, twice, I believe. Through his arm and into his leg.
And you know what?
They did it. They replicated the shot. Was it 100%? No. But I’d call it 90+%.
The damage to the dummies was very similar, including deflection off the bones. They recovered the bullet and it was not perfect, but it was in very good shape. It was simple ball ammunition and did not expand like modern bullets can.
It was, to me, a very convincing demonstration about how little magic was in the original bullet.
Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmY6HmR4fs
For instance, I recall sitting next to a table of 9/11-truthers meeting up at a coffee shop. Their discussions kept circling back to the sheer implausibility of a fire causing structural beams to buckle. People don't have intuition for jet-fuel-hot fires; nor skyscraper-high gravitational potential energy. Similarly, the dynamics of a high-speed bullet is so far outside people's intuitions that they derisively call its behavior "magic."
I'd like to hope that at least problem 2) could be ameliorated if good laboratory-based educational experiences were widespread enough; the terribleness of everyday intuitions smacks you in the face quickly when you try to do even a basic experiment. On the other hand, maybe the old dictum holds true that education benefits those most who need it least.
They might, if they think for a few minutes about how metalworking works.
> I'd like to hope that at least problem 2) could be ameliorated if good laboratory-based educational experiences were widespread enough
I think a lot of this comes from people being alienated from working with the physical world. Blacksmiths probably have extremely accurate everyday intuitions about how metal behaves under extreme heat.
You think you're having an argument with someone about the facts and what you're actually doing is having a conversation with someone who is deeply invested in defending their _entire world view_ which means they just can't accept whatever argument you're trying to make. You can go after each argument they make and dispense with them in turn, and they'll continue to invent new ones -- for decades if they have to. It's like trying to argue with a christian fundamentalist about the logical impossibilities of noah's ark. And it really doesn't matter _who is right_. Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.
I'm not sure that's true in this case. I remember 9/11, but I wasn't even born yet when the Kennedy assassination happened. I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally. It doesn't really have emotional salience for most people now. For me, it's merely a curiosity, and I can't say that the truth of the matter is important to me either way.
Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, I don't see how it's relevant to current politics, and the possible players involved are no longer relevant either. Joe Biden himself, old as he is, was only 21 at the time and still in college.
A group with that much power - to kill a president then get it covered up - is not going to just fade away quietly. It'd have to be a powerful group and powerful groups have a habit of lasting beyond the lives of the members.
If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active. Picking on one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_... that would make a good story ... if it was the Israelis there'd be no reason to believe they stopped. It'd put Jeff Epstein's kompromat operation in a new light if they were trying to manage US politics.
> If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active.
I don't think these are correct assumptions. Sixty years is a long time, and the world has changed a lot. The Soviet Union is a shell of its former self (hence the current Ukraine conflict), Fidel Castro is dead, etc.
> if it was the Israelis
IMO this is one of the dumber and least plausible of the conspiracy theories.
What are we even to conclude from this, though? Of course Israel still exists, but what exactly are you trying to imply about the current situation? Netanyahu, by the way, was 14 years old in 1963 and was actually living in Pennsylvania, US at the time.
> there'd be no reason to believe they stopped
Stopped what?
So some right-wing CIA people (and their Mafia/Anti-Castro helpers) used a left-wing communist Oswald as the patsy for JFK. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill JFK
And then some Jewish Israel Mossad people copycatted for the RFK assassination, using a Muslim Palestinian as their patsy. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill RFK. (And I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm Jewish, so this isn't an antisemitic thing.)
But I agree with the point that it mostly doesn't have much impact on the modern world. Whoever was involved in these assassinations doesn't hold power any more. They're dead.
No kind of reconciliation process is truly required to prevent this kind of thing in the future. The world has changed and that's why these kind of political assassinations aren't used in the west today.
Not because there aren't people that wouldn't love to have this tool. It's just not as viable as it was in the time before mass surveillance and uncontrollable information flows.
Try to imagine pulling off the RFK or JFK assassinations with a large number of uncontrolled smartphones posting and even live streaming to the internet.
It's not some grand conspiracy, just some guy with a gun.
I can imagine pulling off JFK 2.0... but I don't want to.
Surveillance cements consequences.
If it was Israel, then who cares? Are we doing diplomacy by assassination now? The reality of politically motivated, err, unpleasantness, has existed forever.
Let's not forget the 20yr war that happened straight after 9/11. Less killing the better, and a death in cabinet doesn't always get the change 'the powerful group' may want.
I'd be more worried about getting on a submarine with a console controller now.
What has changed is that covert political assassinations by the secret services of nation states is no longer a viable strategy the way it was when JFK and RFK were killed.
Not even the Mossad is good enough to pull it off these days, and they're probably the best in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...
Soo.. an intelligence firm that needs to be advertized or spoken of.. is a little strange.
As catch rates go up, the more unhinged your assassin needs to be, so why not take a step back and influence the 'unhinged' single adult male, via the internet and never even raise an eyebrow?
The atmosphere of ambiguity around the world, is thick and dense lately...
I'm sure the secret services have come up with creative things. The Russians sometimes use poison when abroad, but even that is usually discovered now due to sophisticated hospitals.
The old tricks of discrediting, bribing, and blackmailing are probably still just as effective as ever. Maybe more so.
I think OP's point is that personal remembrance, direct knowledge/witness, or subject matter expertise is not a requirement when it comes to defending one's strongly invested world view. Instead of looking at evidence, people start with a vague belief about the world and then draw the lines between everything that happens and that world view.
For example: "There are inscrutable elites that operate in secret to control the world." This is a vague and close to impossible-to-prove assertion, but people believe it strongly, and they use this world view to explain everything they have questions about. JFK was obviously assassinated for going against the Shadowy Elite! If you take your belief as a given, many wild explanations simply follow logically. 9/11 was orchestrated by this Elite to [do whatever The Elite does, there are a wide range of speculation even among the "shadowy elite" believers]. COVID was planned by The Elite. It goes on and on, and everything makes sense when you're working from that one assumption.
If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.
EDIT: Parent commenter I see what you're saying now and yea I totally agree!
I don't dispute that there are people like this. What I was disputing, specifically, was the overgeneralization, applying this characterization to everyone: "Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened."
Even among those who are into a "Shadowy Elite" conspiracy theory, I don't see a lot of emotional investment remaining nowadays in the JFK conspiracy specifically. Of course they're obsessed now with Covid, for example. JFK is old news, not salient.
The CIA and the military wanted global escalation and military conflict. Kennedy, by contrast, was working more towards reconciliation and global peace through good faith. Just prior to Operation Northwoods, he had recently removed the head of the CIA (following the Bay of Pigs catastrophe), and following the Joint Chief of Staffs presentation of Operation Northwoods to him, JFK also removed him from power as well. JFK would then go to on to pass a unilateral nuclear test ban as a show of good faith to the USSR, and was reportedly not only looking to withdraw from Vietnam, but also to completely dismantle the CIA. Less than 6 months later, he would be assassinated.
That's hardly a tale of some 'shadowy elite trying to control the world.' In fact the assassination becomes so utterly predictable in this context that one has to consider that if it was a simple lone-wolf then the CIA and military effectively won some sort of one in a quadrillion type lottery (at least from their rather sociopathic worldviews). For that assassin to then to be assassinated, after initially claiming he was a "patsy", and all the other weirdness around it all, I think Occam's Razor starts pointing in a pretty clear direction.
We can certainly have a discussion, but it's outside the realm of logic, because there's no possible evidence that could disprove it. That doesn't make it true or false, but it does make it useless to discuss in the terms of logic, and trying will just lead to frustration.
What would we do differently if the shadowy elite was behind JFK's death? What would we do differently if the shadowy elite wasn't behind it? What ends were gotten by the shadowy elite through the means of mysterious assasinations to help the Rolling Stones sell records?
These are all reasonable questions to ask, but the philosophy of logic won't help us come to answers.
It's science that doesn't have anything to say about unfalsifiable situations (metaphysics, negative statements, etc).
We've really left the realm of empiricism, not logic.
He's dead, so...what?
because obviously(?) there was someone conspiring to kill him.
If the conspiracy was on the part of the spy agencies, as claimed, then the agencies involved are absolutely still relevant. If the CIA or whatever back then was willing to kill someone because he threatened to reduce their power, given the intelligence agencies have even more power now than they did back then there's no reason to think they wouldn't do it again if threatened.
Jesus of Nazarath was reportedly crucified in Judea almost 2000 years ago, and people have all sorts of opinions on that event.
Events like these just have a way of getting out of hand. Honestly, I think my grandma, who was a JFK fan-girl, would probably be incredibly confused by the ideology of modern JFK conspiracy theorists.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/accidental-assassin-jfk...
Saying that "nobody" is willing to discuss this in good faith is going way too far. Just because I don't expect anyone to be able to convince me that it wasn't a conspiracy doesn't mean I'm not open to the possibility.
All good faith means, in this context, is that one is willing to maintain intellectual honesty. That may be hard for many but far from all.
Is that a recursive statement or are you somehow the only one with clean hands?
[0] I pulled it out of my ass, same as you did.
He may truly remember these events as he is describing them, even if what he's described never actually happened. That's unfortunately how (poorly) human memory works.
I sometimes keep a diary, for example when I go on long trips that are different from my day-to-day life. I try to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes i notice what i write isn't fully representative of my state of mind at the time, simply because when you're writing stuff down (especially when you're writing with a pen and paper (slow!)), you can never fully capture all the concurrent thoughts and emotions you're experiencing, so its impossible for a diary to be fully accurate. Undoubtedly, e.g. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of prominent research in that field, our memories tend to be fallible, but maybe that's part of the reason?
When I was writing a paper on the history of D, I had kept a lot of records, such as emails. I was often surprised when the details didn't quite line up with my memories.
This is one reason why one cannot get a fair trial 40 years after the fact, if any of it relies on eyewitness testimony.
In all seriousness it's crazy how bad memory is. Like we all have a false version of the truth.
The second part was just me agreeing with their comment that it's crazy how bad our own memory is and how it's difficult to come to grips with. Like when my mom, sister, and I are all arguing over a past event and remember it very differently. The true events are (to my knowledge) absolute, but in a philosophical sense, we're all living in our own reality as our memories are telling us the events unfolded differently even though they didn't.
I think there's a similar "induced memory" surrounding who watched the challenger disaster live.
(Fwiw, I'm still pretty sure I watched it live)
Years later we discussed it and they were both adamant we all watched it live on TV. Am I misremembering, or them, or all of us? Tough one.
With 9/11 I seem to remember one of the impacts only being seen from the explosion, but you couldn’t see the plane itself. Maybe that was the second one?
There is an archive of several news channel and their coverage of 9/11 at https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911#/. Some of the news channels had better viewpoints and saw the second plane hit on live footage [1]. The NEWSNW channel has a very solid view of the second plane as it hits, which causes the reporter there to react mid-sentence. Note that's the live coverage; since there's so many cameras pointed out the towers by that time, there's several different angles of the actual moment of impact (although most news channels were focusing on the views that best showed the damage at the first tower when it happened live).
There's only three known recordings of the first tower being hit (the best quality one being from someone shooting a documentary film who heard the plane, looked up with the camera, and recorded it as it hit). The hit of the Pentagon is only recorded by a security camera, where there is but one frame with part of the plane being just barely in the view before the impact.
[1] This takes place in the first or second clip of the second row of the 9:00-9:10 segment, depending on how bad the delay is.
However, upon reviewing the CCTV footage, it became clear that the whole incident, from bike arrival to employee emerging from behind the bin, lasted about 11 seconds.
The colleague was astounded to see the footage and couldn’t explain why he had felt it was so much longer.
I think there’s a good chance that stressful situations play havoc with human memory formation.
I experienced it one time when I accidentally put the car into a a skid at 70mph. I remember calmly realising the car was moving sideways. Having time to ponder that for a few moments. Then deciding to start steering into the skid. Then think about that for a while. Release the break a bit. Finally we did a full 360 and ended up in the middle of the road again.
It seemed like it took a minute or more but was probably a few seconds if that.
Brains are awesome! (My younger self driving ability, much less so)
I assume you were also aiming at a point of absurdity, because I don't want to imagine that you'd like to lenghten your perceived lifespan i.e. by being tortured...
My experience with aging family members is that their memory of old events tends to improve as their short-term memory seems to get worse. I've had family memebers not remember where an object is, and from their nursing home bed, when asked about "what happened to ___?" reply with remarkable accuracy - to the point we were able to find several family heirlooms (photos from WWII that were lost in the 1960s, an old service rifle, old writings, paintings) right where they said it was. I wonder if perhaps that is the case here.
> He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
> ...
> Yet the bullet that Landis now claims to have discovered that morning emerged largely intact and only moderately damaged, its base having been squeezed in.
Interesting turn of phrase. Princess Di was far closer a contemporary of Jackie Kennedy than either are today. I can't imagine there is a large audience of people who would understand the reference to Princess Di but not Jackie Kennedy. Like saying "Will Rogers was the Red Skelton of his era". Iykyk.
Found it: Operation Northwoods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
The CIA will not be one singular entity of one mind and focus. There will be factions in that organisation, there will be rogue elements. There does not have to be a grand master plan but there could be. There does not have to be uniform competence and there will not be. Operations go wrong all the time. Pieces will be moved into position at vast expense then not used for so many possible reasons. Further if it were a cia operation (and I have no idea about that) it may not have been intended to actually kill anyone and Oswald surprised people by his effectiveness.
All sorts of wild stuff is plausible and you need evidence to assess it. Every huckster will trade on the doubt, there will be wishful thinking and genuine, directed official misinformation. Treating the CIA as an entity all marching in lock-step of one mind and purpose is an assumption that stretches plausibility and certainly requires evidence. Chaos is almost certainly a major factor in any explanation and indeed counts as the entirety of the official version of what happened and its aftermath.
All these years he never told anyone? It is completely different from his written statement at the time. After all these years, I call BS.
Internally, the KGB considered the JFK assassination as a coup
Plenty of other options with way higher probability for success.
It is if you want to make it look like Cuba did it. They (the CIA) needed it to be public.
Thing is, it's not a conspiracy theorist video. The best part of the video is the last segment where the creator uses all the examples to show just how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, even when fresh let alone decades later. They go on to say that pretty much any conspiracy theory relies on cherry-picking certain details as irrefutable while ignoring others and this is esentially an arbitrary decision based on whatever narrative someone is pushing.
Additionally, the details supposedly changed never make sense for a conspiracy that is supposedly powerful enough to arrange all this.
Lastly, people often see things through a modern lens. Presidential security is a big one. JFK used to stop his motorcade and go into the crowd. Anyone with a handgun could've ended him. These people weren't all frisked and vetted. It was a different time. JFK's assassination is probably a big part of why presidential security changed. So the idea that you needed to have or be a sniper (or a team of snipers) is a silly one and based on modern assumptions.
Myths in this area persist too despite them being debunked. One that springs to mind is that you couldn't fire Oswald's rifle fast enough. CBS and the FBI tested and debunked this in the 1960s [2].
When this happens you'll often find the conspiracy theory moves the goalposts from it being "impossible" to "very hard". I'm sure it was hard but Oswald was also irrefutably a Marine-trained shooter.
Personally my theory is that any mystery surrounding JFK is much like that of 9-11: intelligence agencies caught with their pants down, not wanting to upset allies and/or not wanting to expose intelligence assets.
The last point I'll make is a study was recently done on the link between narcissism and conspiracy theories [3]. Now this has a lot of relevance to why who gets sucked into QAnon and their political leanings. But it's relevant beyond that.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that random things happen. They'd rather believe it's all part of a plan. It's almost preferable if it's a nefarious force as some people love to LARP as being oppressed or even just being brave warriors standing up for what's righteous. But this shares a lot of the psychology with those for a predilection for religion. And narcissim is the definition of main character syndrome.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7euN1HTuU
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_...
It would be interesting to analyze a collection of user-defined user-level customization filters, as some sort of zeitgeist.
This kind of discussion is really only interesting from a historical perspective. It doesn’t really have any bearing on modern politics or society.
This is completely untrue. Some of his family members suspect he was murdered by the US intelligence agencies for planning to curb their power. Given the intelligence agencies have even more power now than back then, and are still not held accountable for their actions, if they were indeed responsible for killing JFK that heightens the need for the public to come out in mass in support of candidates committed to breaking up or disbanding those agencies.
The people have some kind of obligation to that but what looks like dynastic power is fine?
I'd even go further and say that those still living should be tried for high treason.
RFK Jr. simultaneously believes that his father and uncle were killed by the intelligence state, and that they ought to be providing him protection, and that they want to kill him. I find his opinions pretty confusing on this matter
The DHS didn't even exist back then, the SS was absorbed into it some time after it was created in 2002.
Regardless, one can want the usual protections given and needed and also hold the belief that some agencies are too powerful and corrupt and need to be broken up. (like breaking up the DHS and making the SS it's own entity)
He's currently receiving the standard amount of protection from the secret service for a primary candidate at this stage (none).
That being said, dude is either non-serious or damaged to the point I wouldn't let him run Bluth's Original Frozen Banana stand, and he wants to be President?
The U.S. tried that already recently (more than once if we're being honest), electing a non-serious and damaged human raised in a family where ambition was treasured over f*cking hugs. I'm not sure if anyone else is paying attention, but that went very very very wrong.
Why don't we stop putting people like this into power just to assuage our own insecurities? Wouldn't it be a better investment to try and find a way to change the culture to encourage mental health from the beginning of life rather than devolve our society due to late-life insecurity and low-information voters?
That's like saying how rise of Nazism was just an episode in history that can and should be forgotten.
A lot of people have valid reasons to believe that deep state was responsible for JFK's death. If their fears are confirmed to be true, then that must have huge political impact on the current US establishment, considering how CIA still has too much power.
> The state of US government is so dramatically different from back then.
Knowing the truth of historical matters seems like the first step in finding out if it really is.
If a US clandestine institution actually did this, and that institution still exists, then the news should have _massive_ impact on society as it is now. If anyone still involved is living, or if anyone involved with a cover up is currently employed, we have should expect unusually massive impacts.
Is it? If it happened before it could happen again. And if a presidental assasination happened and was covered up, what other things happened and got covered up in the between decades, and what things still happen and are being covered up now?
History tends to have repercursions, even after centuries.
It takes a long time for some coverups to be uncovered (Tuskegee syphilis experiment took decades) but I think we have to downgrade our expectations that an uncovering will happen as time goes on.
Conspiracies to kill relatively powerless people seems more interesting to me because it's The Man vs. the everyman.
"I’m from the government and I’m here to help." wasn't said til 1986
This was the Civil rights movement era. But I guess you'll say that normies didn't care about that.
> "I’m from the government and I’m here to help." wasn't said til 1986
Yes, we mustn't forget the pioneer of populism and anti-elitism Ronald Reagan.
And he had ambition to deeply change the country.
And let us not forget that one famous speech about a certain "conspiracy".
Maybe I'm cherry-picking? But this narrative that he was just swoons loved by the people and everyone got along seems like some rose-tinted glasses.
This new revelation doesn't change anything, it's just hearsay.
Kennedy, Gaddafi, Shinzo Abe, Benazir Bhutto, Yitzhak Rabin, Rajiv Gandhi, Anwar Sadat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin_assassination_co...
The bullet points seem to be mostly confusion at the scene and shitty police work afterwards.
What is the conspiracy. That he was not killed at that spot, but later by the secret service? Like "that guy fired blanks at him, lets kill the PM and frame him"?
But it is something about putting blank bullets in order to gather support with a fake assassination and then he was really killed by the Shabak on order of Shimon Peres (but can’t say that’s verbatim)
It always seemed even less internally consistent than most JFK theories
During the 1WW the death rate of officers was about twice that of privates for a sample.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X2...
I believe that there is a risk of opportunity murder when bullets are flying. Using the confusion as cover. But, as I said, only speculative.
Sure, it's the obsessing over conspiracy theories that I don't get. There's no way to verify the various speculations, so what's the point?
This particular conspiracy theory is interesting because the assumed enemy here—the Soviet Union—was ostensibly (and seeming authentically) unhappy to see this happen. So who wanted JFK dead and why?
That's an entirely different issue.
> So who wanted JFK dead and why?
Again, Occam says Oswald.
I think it doesn’t. That’s why the story has never come to rest, there’s simply too many question marks about the whole thing
1. Oswald defection from the army and time in the Soviet Union
2. Oswald going to the Cuban and Soviet embassies before the murder (possibly starting a third world war)
3. The subsequent assassination of Oswald
This can be mostly explained by a mental disorder but it is still a messed up story
Kinda like the Reichstag fire huh
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s kill the President” can be kept by so many people for such a long time. In my experience large organizations of people just don’t work that way
I don’t think large organisations can act in such a coordinated manner at all but they can be manipulated.
Cartels with a lot to lose can take their secrets to the grave, in particular if their constituents have a lot to lose. Everyone else has “unfortunate accidents”.
1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians
2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog
3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design
4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki
5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month
Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place
The JFK assassination still remained a secret?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s
kill the President” can be kept by so many people for
such a long time.
However, what if that wasn't the conspiracy?
What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
If the US Government knew of or suspected USSR involvement in JFK's assassination: their choices were essentially "war with the USSR", "look like fools who bowed down to the USSR", or "pretend that Oswald was a lone, crazy guy."
In other words: not a conspiracy per se where the government was en masse covering up some specific thing they knew to be true. I agree with you that feels implausible. Especially since presumably a significant portion of the government would have been opposed to the assassination or the cover-up.
But it might have been more of a concerted effort to look the other way. Like, "If we investigate Oswald and the investigation too closely, the trail might lead to Russia or one of its satellite states, and therefore war, and therefore nuclear war. So therefore let's all agree that Oswald was a lone gunman because it sure beats war with the USSR."
That does not seem impractical to me.
Remember, the country was still reeling from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the chilling possibility of having narrowly avoided nuclear war.
However, it seems like the well known facts about Oswald (the communist background) weren't a major issue at the time (at least from what I gathered), so maybe there wasn't anything to cover up
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to stir the cold war issues around the assassination, is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
[edit]: I think I misread you, I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think there were probably fears it would be perceived as a foreign assassination which drove some actions in the US government.
I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this
is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think
there were probably fears it would be perceived as a
foreign assassination which drove some actions in the
US government.
But I agree with you: I cannot imagine that Khrushchev or the leadership of the USSR wanted open war. For the same reasons the USA didn't.
There is definitely a middle ground sort of possibility, where Oswald was involved with the USSR to some extent (informant, or whatever) but they truly had no idea he was going to shoot JFK. That seems completely possible.
Of course, the Soviet government was enormous and not monolithic. Maybe some within it wanted war, maybe some thought that they could prod Oswald into an assassination without getting "caught."
Seems possible, but zero idea how likely that is.
The simplest scenario is: Oswald worked in tandem with a second rando guy who had a rifle and wanted the president dead. No shortage of those in America, a land with cheap rifles and ~16 million WWII vets who were trained to use them.
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to
stir the cold war issues around the assassination,
is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
The only thing I'm really sure of is that it was in the US government's best interests to sell the idea that Oswald was a lone crazy guy. That was the least-bad scenario for America.
Not a conspiracy in the more surreptitious sense that most people consider. It would bear all the same hallmarks though, and I guess that’s what sets off people’s radars
There may be forensics technicalities that are hard to explain but it seems that in any event that is highly ‘investigated’ people find too many patterns in the noise (9/11 for example)
Like most of those Cold War events, these cover ups look more like protecting intelligence sources and blunders than some large overarching cabal
The official explanation for 9/11 is also the simplest possible explanation: terrorists carried out a very low tech and plausible hijacking attack that exploited some rather obvious holes in our airline security.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are orders of magnitude more complex than this official narrative.
I don't think the JFK "second gunman" theory is more complex than the official truth. In it's simplest form (Oswald worked with another gunman, but there was no overarching conspiracy involving Russia or Martians or lizardmen or whatever pulling the strings) I would argue it's simpler than the official narrative.
As I said elsewhere, the only evidence of a second gunman is we know Oswald was a good shot with a gun and so needing 3 shots (with a scoped rifle at close range - less than 100 meters) is something to question. But in the end it seems more likely he would have pulled the trigger himself and thus not needed help.
I think this is a plausible line of thinking. My issue with the official story is that it feels stretched to cover too many datapoints. Like it kind of explains the data but not quite and indeed the obfuscation I’m detecting could just as well be coming from something like that as any new world order coup. tldr; Still fishy though.
What I think the US government feared was a public perception that Russia (or Cuba, or whoever) might have been behind it.
That's when swathes of the public and various grandstanding politicians start rattling their sabers and thinking about war. Any official story besides "Oswald was a crazy lone gunman" would have looked awful for the US and increased the odds of war, a recurrence of McCarthyism, etc.
So I don't think the possibility of a second gunman was ever seriously entertained, even though there's some evidence for it.
Or the fact that I assume Oswald was crazy and being a megalomaniac did actions that might have started a war?
Also, was Oswald’s own assassination at the hands of a mob figure ever satisfactorily explained?
Do we even know that?
It's amazing that people in 2023 can be just as accepting of the mainstream narrative as the average joes in the 60s, that were subjected to a top down narrative decided by the powers that be using 3 TV channels and 2 newspapers.
Exactly. We don't know since "the killer is dead, nothing to see here, keep moving". I give up.
The authorities, in the coming weeks, months do a "shootout" where another person is killed and they declare "in an operation today, we killed the perpetrator of the previous killing. Case closed".
No one is arrested, no suspect is made public before the second shooting and no one asks why no due process was followed.
Its like clockwork and we can count out such instances in more than 2 dozen in the past 20 years if not less.
Read up on Allen Dulles.
It's just HN crowd. The majority of Americans have always believed that others were involved.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-kil...
[1] https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/h...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110724214814/http://www.aarcli...
All sub-100 meter shots, easily achievable with a scoped rifle with 4x magnification and a bit of practice.
During his Marine Corps service in December 1956, Oswald scored a rating of sharpshooter (twice achieving 48 and 49 out of 50 shots during rapid fire at a stationary target 200 yards [183 m] away using a standard issue M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle), although in May 1959, he qualified as a marksman (a lower classification than that of sharpshooter). [0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination...
While he was at San Diego, Oswald was trained in the use of the M-1 rifle. His practice scores were not very good, but when his company fired for record on December 21, he scored 212, 2 points above the score necessary to qualify as a "sharpshooter" on a marksman/sharpshooter/expert scale. He did not do nearly as well when he fired for record again shortly before he left the Marines. He practiced also with a riot gun and a .45-caliber pistol when he was in the Marines but no scores were recorded. [1]
1. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-repo...
"What's all the fuzz about? The dude was near the murder site at the time, it's obvious it was him, duh"
There are a lot of people who didn't/don't like the US, and a lot of people who like the US but didn't like Kennedy!
It is not exactly outlandish to think that maybe >1 people wanted Kennedy dead.
I don't see anything implausible about a second shooter having Kennedy in his sights, waiting for the initial shots to be fired, and pulling the trigger once he heard the initial shot.
There are a lot of implausible aspects to all of this, but that... doesn't seem like one.
Either there are two shooters working together from the beginning, or one knows about the other and the other does not.
But that needs a bigger conspiracy than just kill JFK.
What about that seems implausible to you?
As for coordinating their fire, what about that seems implausible?
"I'll shoot first, once JFK reaches point XYZ. When you hear my shot that's your signal to shoot. Be ready and have your finger on the trigger, because obviously Secret Service is going to floor the gas and GFTO ASAP as soon as the first shot is fired"
That seems entirely within the realm of plans two dudes could come up with. I don't think it necessarily points to some larger conspiracy.
Much easier to keep everything quiet too. The difficulty of keeping secrets increases exponentially with the number of people who know it.
I mean, sometimes a former military guy decides to do some killing and sometimes he has somebody working with him.
Yes it does matter, if the official story established by the Warren commission is not true, it does matter to know why was Kennedy assassinated and by whom exactly, because Kennedy's death has had so many worldwide implications, that this isn't even just about USA.
If that story is ever debunked one day, factually, it will change the future of the USA. If the government lied about all that, then what other things the US government lied about? It will shake the very foundations of that country. It's literally the definition of a smoking gun, no pun.
Which implications exactly?
> If the government lied about all that, then what other things the US government lied about? It will shake the very foundations of that country.
I mean... we already know that the government has lied about countless things.
However, Paul Landis is not claiming that the government lied. He's merely claiming that he himself withheld important information from the government.
They list of groups that might have pulled the trigger on Kennedy is dozens long. Knowing which one did, decades later, really changes nothing.
I’m not in the conspiracy theorist crowd, but the “doesn’t matter anymore” crowd is disappointing.
It's true that it doesn't have a huge impact on modern life but it matters a lot to anyone who is interested in having an accurate view of history.
History is extremely important. It can help us make predictions about the future and understand circumstances in the past.
This specific incident has been researched to death. There is very little we will be able to understand about the sociopolitics of the past that we don't already know if the hand on the trigger changes. Every hypothetical scenario has been gamed to exhaustion, and which one reflects the reality we happen to be living in isn't going to change modern sociopolitics very much. What would change in a relationship with Russia if we found out a USSR plot killed Kennedy? The USSR is gone. What would change in people's trust in the FBI if we found out they killed Kennedy? That institution's reputation is already tarnished, and the people who would have made the decision to have him killed no longer work there. What would it matter if there was a conspiracy of a few people working with Oswald? We already know that it doesn't take more than one actor to kill a President from other assassination attempts.
Similarly, there is little to be gained studying this topic to exhaustion in terms of future predictions. Kennedy was a singular President existing in a singular time. A series of fairly unique circumstances led him to be universally hated and loved at the same time... Immensely popular, but his combination of willingness to challenge entrenched power and brash indifference to consequences made him dozens of enemies who would have had the resources to eliminate him.
Whether he was killed by a secret FBI project or a lone, angry man with firearm training changes none of those facts.
Your opinion on JFK as a president is moot. The fact he could not continue being president is what changed the world. LBJ succeeded him and the rest is “history”. It doesn’t need to play out in todays politics but as I said, why study history at all if the only point is to gain insight into how it effects us directly today??
I guess I'm just personally burnt out on this topic because I've been watching people bandy conspiracy theories back and forth my entire life, and the odds of this changing the understanding of the day's events in any meaningful way aren't larger than the other "revelations" I've seen in my time. I guess upon further reflection, I do have some concern that people will take the stuff too seriously and do something foolish.
To give an analogy, the Titanic disaster is extremely well understood, but the disproportionate obsession with it has recently led to people getting killed again. One could certainly argue that they were free people making free choices and I would agree. But similar obsession in the political spectrum seems to have a nasty tendency to end up with somebody showing up in a pizza parlor with a firearm demanding to see the basement that doesn't exist. So it makes me twitchy.
who are you refuting? I never said or implied that Paul Landis claimed that the government lied at first place.