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.

[Lance Payette]

Not a fallacious appeal to authority because I know absolutely nothing about him, but Kevin Balch at the Ed Forum, who has always seemed very knowledgeable and reasonable to me, posted the following on an active thread about "Lone Nut Proponents' Failure to Deal with the Alvarez Fraud":

By the way, I’m not a Lone Nutter. I just think the shots all came from behind, probably from only two positions (TSBD and Dal-Tex). This is a much simpler operation requiring significantly fewer people, better probabilities for escape of the assassins and little chance of leaving evidence that would contradict blaming a lone nut (if that was the intent). I’m sure the planners never even dreamed all the imaginative interpretations that have been made.

To have planned something as conceived by many of the conspiracy theorists would easily require dozens, all tightly coordinated. And that does not include the off-Broadway production put forward for 10th and Patton.

And remember also that this would have been duplicated for Chicago, Tampa and Miami.

So while I cannot appeal to Mr. Balch as an authority, I can say "Great minds think alike." 

[Michael T. Griffith]

Anyway, if I were retained to construct a plausible conspiracy to sell to a jury or the court of public opinion, I believe I would have to work within these realistic parameters.

Humm, well, since 2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world finds your theory of the JFK assassination to be implausible, perhaps you should focus on coming up with a plausible lone-gunman theory. Here are just a few of the markedly implausible aspects of the lone-gunman story:

-- Your supposed lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was at best a mediocre shot when using a semi-automatic rifle against stationary targets at Marine rifle ranges, allegedly used a bolt-action rifle to perform a shooting feat that has never been duplicated, not even by Master-rated riflemen who used the alleged murder weapon and who fired under easier conditions than those Oswald would have faced.

Not one of the rifle tests that have been done to date have duplicated all of the conditions under which the supposed lone-gunman would have had to fire. In the one rifle test that duplicated most of those conditions, the 1967 CBS rifle test, only one of the 12 riflemen scored two hits in the required timeframe on the first attempt, and that was only because the test counted shots as "hits" even if they landed far down on the back or far out on the shoulder of the target silhouette, at least tripling the size of the target compared to Oswald's alleged shooting feat.

-- You can't even identify when Oswald could have zeroed the alleged murder weapon. Some of you have even floated the absurd argument that the rifle would not have needed to be zeroed, a spurious notion that even WC staffer Wesley Liebeler scorned in an internal WC memo.

-- You have your supposed lone gunman shooting from the sixth-floor window when multiple eyewitness accounts (1) independently put him on the first and second floors of the building during the shooting, and (2) rule out the claim that he dashed down the stairway in time to be seen by Officer Baker beyond the second-floor landing's door to the lunchroom.

-- Your alleged lone gunman went to the trouble of carefully hiding his rifle but left his paper "gun case" and his three spent shells in plain view near the sixth-floor window.

-- Your supposed single assassin allegedly ordered his rifle by mail, idiotically and needlessly creating a paper trail that led straight back to him, when he could have easily bought a better rifle at a local gun store that would have been untraceable (there was no gun registration in Texas in 1963). Not only this, but he mail-ordered the rifle using name Hidell (although no Hidell was listed as authorized to get mail from his post office box), and then, incredibly, carried a fake Hidell ID card on him on the day of the shooting!

Oswald was no fool and was not ignorant. He was highly intelligent. He spoke fluent Russian. He was a voracious reader. Oswald’s tested IQ scores generally ranged from 103 in the fourth grade to 118-119 on subsequent tests. His 118-119 scores put him in the above-average category. Historical and psychiatric evaluations consistently classified his overall intelligence as above average. Says British scholar Anthony Summers,

. . . evidence suggests Oswald was far from stupid. School records show that in several subjects he was three years ahead of his class, and his intelligence was noted by his officers in the Marine Corps. (Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination, p. 77).

-- You have your supposed lone gunman using the wrong kind of ammo to have caused the bullet fragmentation seen on the JFK autopsy skull x-rays. This isn't even a close call. No FMJ bullet would have exploded into dozens of tiny fragments and several sizable fragments, in addition to depositing a large fragment, two small fragments, and several tiny fragments 1 cm below its alleged entry point. Such behavior for FMJ bullets is unknown in forensic science. Revealingly, the HSCA's medical panel declined to cite a single case where an FMJ bullet had behaved in this manner, even though they knew this was an issue.

Again, these are just a few of the implausible claims of the lone-gunman theory.

[John Corbett]

Humm, well, since 2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world finds your theory of the JFK assassination to be implausible, perhaps you should focus on coming up with a plausible lone-gunman theory. Here are just a few of the markedly implausible aspects of the lone-gunman story:

-- Your supposed lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was at best a mediocre shot when using a semi-automatic rifle against stationary targets at Marine rifle ranges, allegedly used a bolt-action rifle to perform a shooting feat that has never been duplicated, not even by Master-rated riflemen who used the alleged murder weapon and who fired under easier conditions than those Oswald would have faced.

Oswald was more than capable of making the shots that killed JFK. His longest shot was only 88 yards, less than half the distance he had to qualify at in the USMC. [quite]

Not one of the rifle tests that have been done to date have duplicated all of the conditions under which the supposed lone-gunman would have had to fire. In the one rifle test that duplicated most of those conditions, the 1967 CBS rifle test, only one of the 12 riflemen scored two hits in the required timeframe on the first attempt, and that was only because the test counted shots as "hits" even if they landed far down on the back or far out on the shoulder of the target silhouette, at least tripling the size of the target compared to Oswald's alleged shooting feat.[/quote]

This one has been a favorite red herring argument of the CTs for years. No shooting in the history of firearms has ever been duplicated because every shooting has its own set of variables that cannot be duplicated. There is nothing about Oswald's shooting of JFK with his Carcano rifle that was beyond his capabilities.

-- You can't even identify when Oswald could have zeroed the alleged murder weapon. Some of you have even floated the absurd argument that the rifle would not have needed to be zeroed, a spurious notion that even WC staffer Wesley Liebeler scorned in an internal WC memo.

Tell us why it is necessary to prove when Oswald zeroed his rifle. Is that a legal requirement to prove somebody committed a homicide with a firearm?

-- You have your supposed lone gunman shooting from the sixth-floor window when multiple eyewitness accounts (1) independently put him on the first and second floors of the building during the shooting, and (2) rule out the claim that he dashed down the stairway in time to be seen by Officer Baker beyond the second-floor landing's door to the lunchroom.

Now you are just making things up. Nobody put Oswald at another location in the TSBD DURING the shooting. Your lie refutes itself. How could Oswald be on the first AND second floors during the shooting. It's amazing somebody who has been at this as long as you have could come up with a claim so wacky.

-- Your alleged lone gunman went to the trouble of carefully hiding his rifle but left his paper "gun case" and his three spent shells in plain view near the sixth-floor window.

So?

-- Your supposed single assassin allegedly ordered his rifle by mail, idiotically and needlessly creating a paper trail that led straight back to him, when he could have easily bought a better rifle at a local gun store that would have been untraceable (there was no gun registration in Texas in 1963). Not only this, but he mail-ordered the rifle using name Hidell (although no Hidell was listed as authorized to get mail from his post office box), and then, incredibly, carried a fake Hidell ID card on him on the day of the shooting!

Oswald didn't buy the rifle for the purpose of killing JFK because he couldn't have possibly known 8 months prior to the act, he would be handed an opportunity to do that. A firearm is only traceable if the authorities have the weapon in their possession. When Oswald took the shot at Walker, he was able to leave the scene with his weapon. He didn't have that option when he killed JFK. Leaving the building with the rifle was not an option. Imagine if Oswald was holding the rifle when Baker confronted him. The encounter would have ended very differently and possibly badly for Baker since Oswald would have still had a live round in the chamber. Oswald could have bought better rifle but it would have cost him more money.

Oswald was no fool and was not ignorant. He was highly intelligent. He spoke fluent Russian. He was a voracious reader. Oswald’s tested IQ scores generally ranged from 103 in the fourth grade to 118-119 on subsequent tests. His 118-119 scores put him in the above-average category. Historical and psychiatric evaluations consistently classified his overall intelligence as above average. Says British scholar Anthony Summers,

. . . evidence suggests Oswald was far from stupid. School records show that in several subjects he was three years ahead of his class, and his intelligence was noted by his officers in the Marine Corps. (Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination, p. 77).

So what's your point. Nobody has said Oswald was stupid. Oswald was presented a golden opportunity to achieve fame by killing JFK. His options were limited. The time and place were dictated to him. He had to smuggle his rifle into work and then leave it behind when he fled the scene. Your whole premise is that Oswald planned to get away with the crime. I don't think that even crossed his mind. I think he was perfectly willing to trade his life for JFKs just as the three previous presidential assassins had done. Booth couldn't have been more conspicuous after he shot Lincoln. Everybody in the theater knew who he was when he leapt from Lincoln's box onto the stage. Guiteau and Czolgosz both committed their crimes at close range knowing they would be apprehended immediately. They didn't seem to care. Why do you assume Oswald would have.

You have your supposed lone gunman using the wrong kind of ammo to have caused the bullet fragmentation seen on the JFK autopsy skull x-rays.
This isn't even a close call. No FMJ bullet would have exploded into dozens of tiny fragments and several sizable fragments, in addition to depositing a large fragment, two small fragments, and several tiny fragments 1 cm below its alleged entry point. Such behavior for FMJ bullets is unknown in forensic science. Revealingly, the HSCA's medical panel declined to cite a single case where an FMJ bullet had behaved in this manner, even though they knew this was an issue.

Can you cite an expert in either wound ballistics or forensic medicine who shares your opinion on this or is this just another of your amateurish arguments.?

 

Again, these are just a few of the implausible claims of the lone-gunman theory.

The only implausible claims are the ones made by you.

[Joe Elliott]

Plausibility is the enemy of an interesting story.

[John Corbett]

Plausibility is the enemy of an interesting story.

Bingo!