CTers: Do yourself a favor and focus on plausibility

[Michael T. Griffith]

This was a Presidential assassination. Anyone whose fingerprints were on it in any way was going to be executed. Every real-world conspiracy of any significance involves the minimal number of participants – and this would be true in spades of a Presidential assassination. And it sure as hell wouldn’t have involved an elaborate cover-up extending to Bethesda and beyond. This is just flat-out silly. Weird and fun, but flat-out silly.

This polemic shows that not only is your knowledge of the JFK case insufficient but that your knowledge of overall assassination history is lacking as well.

-- The conspiracy that killed Julius Caesar involved dozens of prominent people, including a number of members of the Roman senate. You can find the extensive nature of the plot that killed Caesar discussed in countless scholarly books.

-- The conspiracy that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which sparked World War I, was orchestrated by a network of South Slav nationalists and was directly facilitated by rogue elements within the Serbian military intelligence establishment.

The assassination team was helped by the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist group, by the chief of the military intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, and by numerous officers in Serbian intelligence. Serbian intelligence officers gave the assassins access to the same clandestine network of safe houses and agents that they used to smuggle weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.

The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were prosecuted, and over a dozen other people were indicted for their roles in the plot. In total, 25 people were indicted, and scholars agree that many others took part in the plot but were not prosecuted because they could not be identified with enough certainty to warrant formal charges.

-- Although it did involve an assassination, the Iran-Contra conspiracy was a White House-level plot that involved hundreds of low-level operatives who knew little or nothing about the overall plot and involved at least one dozen high-level officials who were the prime conspirators.

-- The Business Plot to depose FDR in 1933 involved numerous Wall Street high rollers who approached a retired Marine Corps general about replacing FDR as president. Luckily for FDR, that general, Smedley Butler, blew the whistle on the plot. The McCormack–Dickstein Committee investigated the matter and concluded "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

Butler revealed to the McCormack–Dickstein Committee that that Wall Street broker Gerald C. MacGuire attempted to recruit him to lead a coup, promising him an army of 500,000 men for a march on D.C., and financial backing. Butler said the pretext for the coup would be that FDR's health was failing.

-- The assassination of high-level Chilean government official Orlando Letelier, ordered by Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet, involved numerous people, including agents of the Chilean secret police. The conspirators assassinated Letelier while he was living in the U.S. because he was an outspoken critic of the Pinochet regime. Letelier had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Interior Minister, Defense Minister, and as Chile's ambassador to the United States.

The Pinochet regime undertook an extensive cover-up operation to hide its role in Letelier's death. The U.S. DOJ documented the Pinochet regime's extensive cover-up efforts. The cover-up operation was even given a formal name: "Operación Mascarada."

[John Corbett]

-- The Business Plot to depose FDR in 1933 involved numerous Wall Street high rollers who approached a retired Marine Corps general about replacing FDR as president. Luckily for FDR, that general, Smedley Butler, blew the whistle on the plot. The McCormack–Dickstein Committee investigated the matter and concluded "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

This is exactly what would have happened if anyone inside the government had tried to put together a conspiracy to kill JFK.