I used to be passingly interested in the conspiracy part of the JFK assassination until I watched this EXTENSIVE in length and sourced video on the assassination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8tO16xdrY
It's all very logical and straightforward.
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.