That's a lovely little story. The irony of your comparison of Rowland to the Brothers Grimm is not lost on me.
No irony needed. That really is how the argument has progressed. You're at the point where you've been arguing that Rowland had to have misunderstood Specter's question. Otherwise, accepting the alternative leads directly to the self-destruction of Rowland's testimony.
I'm guessing that Rowland witnessing the man with the rifle somehow goes against how you view the assassination.
So you have to discredit his testimony and you do this by assuming he didn't see the man with the rifle and you bend his testimony around that assumption.
I used to take Rowland's story at face value. As you've pointed out, it does make for quite a coincidence, at least at first glance. Over time, though, I soured on the tale for the following reasons:
1.) I couldn't square the Rowland story with Bonnie Ray Williams' lack of corroboration, though Williams should absolutely be expected to do so.
2.) For that matter, no other witness puts a man with a rifle on the west end of the TSBD. In contrast, Fisher and Edwards see a man in the SN window immediately before the shooting. Euins and Brennan see a man shooting from the same location. Jackson and Couch reported seeing a rifle in the SN window during the shooting.
3.) First rule of fight club is don't talk about fight club: There's plenty of downside and no upside to a wannabe assassin exposing himself and his weapon to a thousand bystanders 10-15 minutes before the act. Who would do so in this situation?
4.) Rowland makes a number of suspiciously extravagant claims about himself during his WC testimony. He says he has a 147 IQ, has an "A'" average, "much better" than 20/20 eyesight, has performed extensive special research in echoes and acoustics, has been accepted to relatively prestigious colleges, etc.
5.) He also seems to hop jobs a lot. From his and his wife's testimony, he's held at least eight separate jobs from between May '63 and April '64. That's rarely a good sign.
6.) His wife pretty much calls him out as a liar in her WC testimony. It's usually bad when one spouse testifies against another. At least outside of a divorce case, where it's expected.
7.) His belated addition of an "elderly negro" on the sixth floor in his WC testimony that is curiously absent from his earlier statements
8.) Moving the man with the rifle from a position 10-15 feet within the building to 3-5 feet from the window between his earlier statements and his WC deposition.
9.) After the shooting started, Rowland didn't look back to see if he could see the rifleman. Given the situation, that's a curious omission. Unless Rowland knew that the rifleman didn't actually exist in the first place.
10.) The WC was curious about those extravagant claims and checked his actual background. He didn't have an "A" average by any means, nor had he completed high school. He hadn't performed any special studies in acoustics or echoes. He hadn't been a patient of the optometrists he claimed to have been examined by. He hadn't been accepted by SMU, and likely not by TAMU or Rice, either. His IQ tested out as 106, not 147. From reading the various reports, the one impression he seems to have consistently made on people was a notable lack of credibility.
11.) The 30-36 inch gap issue is icing on the cake at this point.
The problem both you and Jack have is that you are positing an almost miraculous coincidence - that Rowland described a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the TSBD and it just so happened, by a million-to-one shot, there was indeed a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the TSBD. This alone makes a mockery of the position you are forced to take on this matter.
And not any old rifle, oh no...a rifle with a scope! And guess what...?
Do you not feel silly having trapped yourself in this position?
And, would you believe it, the description he gives of the man tallies incredibly well with the handful of other witnesses who saw the shooter! What are the chances?
Seriously....what...are...the...chances?
Greater than you might think. Let's say I'm in Rowland's position in Dealey Plaza and I'm telling my wife about the extra-special security procedures in place for the President's visit. Let's say I want to conjure up a security agent to "point out" to my wife as an example of these special preparations. To do this plausibly, I need to:
1.) Come up with a role for the guy that demonstrates "special security precautions" appropriate to a Presidential motorcade. That is, beyond and above what would normally be done for your usual run-of-the-mill parade.
2.) Put this guy in a place that would inherently imply "special security precaution"
3.) Put him in circumstances where his non-presence could easily be explained away when your wife looked that direction and found herself unable to see the guy.
Making him a sharpshooter in one of the upper windows of a building facing Dealey Plaza fulfills all 3 requirements. Nothing says "important public occasion with VIPs" like a protective sniper overlooking the area. Of course, such a person would be placed up high to get the best line of sight/fire and to be able to survey the largest area. Putting him behind a window makes it easy to say that he stepped behind a column or fell back into the shadows when the Significant Other could see him.
The question that follows is, "which building?" The Rowlands are on the East side of Houston facing West. The Sheriff's Department building is behind them and so is ruled out. They can't see into the narrow windows on the County records building that face Houston St, so it gets ruled out. The South side of the DalTex building has no south-facing windows visible from the Rowlands' position and they can't see into the ones on the West side because of the angle. It gets ruled out. The Old Red courthouse is to the left, but still kinda behind them. They wouldn't be looking in it's direction anyway. There are only two buildings in front of them: the TSBD on the right and the Terminal Annex Building on the left. The TSBD is slightly closer; more importantly, it's directly on the parade route and thus would be the likely first choice.
From there, let's pick a window. From the photos taken of the TSBD that afternoon, only floors five and six had open windows. This is important for two reasons. First, A sniper probably wouldn't want to shoot through a window. Second, the upper-floor windows of the TSBD were fairly dirty, as evidenced in the various photos of the TSBD taken inside and out. Carolyn Walther said in her affidavit that she couldn't see in through the windows because they were too dirty. The Rowlands would have an even harder time of it as they were further away than Walther.
As for the gun used, a sharpshooter would have a high-powered rifle, and most likely a scope. Because, sharpshooter. A trim man implies action more than a scrawny one or a fat one. And an open necked shirt implies and action sort of guy more than a button up collar, unless you believe in Action Accountant. In 1963, turtlenecks were owned by bongo-snapping hipsters. And light colored shirts were fairly common. For example in this photo:
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth184809/m1/1/To be honest, I don't think it had to have happened exactly like what I just described. My point is, once someone decides to generate a fictitious "secret service man" to impress someone else, he's going to have to operate under constraints imposed by existing circumstances. The result isn't the result of some random process, and the "million to one odds" idea you have is therefore erroneous.
As for coincidences, consider something assassination-related that I ran across recently in the Dictabelt recording. On that recording, there is a famous stretch where the microphone on a DPD motorcycle gets stuck in the "transmit" position for several minutes. It first appears just after 12:28 PM is announced and continues until a bit after the 12:34 PM announcement. Interestingly, the open mic episode starts at the end of a transmission by the officer whose call number is 75, and ends at the tail of a transmission by the same officer. When I first realized that, I wanted to think 'hey, I found the source of the open mic!.' Still, I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, started to look more closely into the matter, and soon was able to rule out '75' as the source of the open mic. '75' was a car far to the northeast of Dealey Plaza, Parkland, the Trade Mart, or Oak Cliff. The coincidence is highly unlikely, but it turned out to be nothing more than a coincidence.
So what are the compelling arguments you cling on to, to support this "Tale of Coincidence" the Brothers Grimm would've found too outlandish to include in any fairy-tale.
1) He changes his estimation of how far the man is stood in the building.
2) He misunderstands one of the questions.
Have a little think about the magnitude of the miracle you are proposing and then have a look at what you've got to back it up with.
I've sprinkled this thread with more reasons than those two. You just haven't paid attention, or aren't thinking. In case you missed anything, I just listed all of my reasons for distrusting Arnold Rowland's account. By the way, I included a link to the important persons file the WC gathered on Rowland in my last reply. The one that shows him in a less-than-favorable light. It seems to have been omitted in your last post on the matter.
As you well know, Rowland only mentioned this second man after he became aware of the importance of that window.
There were lots of people looking out of lots of windows but only one had a rifle.
Why would he have mentioned this second man in his early statements?
Mr. SPECTER - Shortly after the assassination and before these interviews that you described were completed, Mr. Rowland, had you learned or heard that the shots were supposed to have come out of the window which we have marked with the "A"?
Mr. ROWLAND - No, sir. I did not know that, in fact until Saturday when I read the paper.
Mr. SPECTER - Which Saturday is that?
Mr. ROWLAND - The following Saturday.
Mr. SPECTER - Would that be the second day, the day after the assassination?
Mr. ROWLAND - Yes.
Mr. SPECTER - Well, knowing that, at that time, did you attach any particular significance to the presence of the Negro gentleman, whom you have described, that you saw in window "A"?
Mr. ROWLAND - Yes; that is why I brought it to the attention of the FBI agents who interviewed me that day. This was as an afterthought because I did not think of it firsthand. But I did bring it to their attention before they left,
And the source for this is Rowland. The statement that Rowland wrote out for the FBI was made on Sunday. By his own statements to the WC, he knew that the man in the SN was significant before then. But Rowland neglected to put that in his statement. He can't blame that omission on the FBI; he wrote the statement out himself.
