Applying Logic and Critical Thinking to the JFK Assassination

[John Corbett]

This is the first post of several that I will present in this thread.

In numerous surveys done in the U.S. and Europe over the years, including fairly recently, the percentage of people who have said they believe JFK was killed by a conspiracy has ranged from 56% to 85%, with about 6% to 10% undecided. Even in the 1970s, surveys found that a sizable majority of Americans did not buy the Warren Commission's lone-gunman story. I think one of the reasons for the rejection of the single-assassin scenario is that it does not hold up when analyzed with logic and critical thinking.

Truth is not subject to popular opinion. It does not require a majority opinion. Most of the people surveyed are woefully uninformed about the evidence in the case which overwhelmingly points to Oswald as the assassin and there is not a scrap of credible evidence that points to anybody else. I challenged you to produce such evidence earlier this week and you passed on the opportunity.

   

Let us begin by looking at the key issue of motive.

Motive is not a key issue. It is entirely unnecessary to prove Oswald's motive. It can be fun to guess but nobody really knows because he didn't tell anybody his motive.

-- The lone-gunman theory is unable to provide a believable, credible motive for its alleged lone gunman. By all accounts, Oswald liked JFK. No one ever claimed to hear Oswald voice any intent to harm JFK. If Oswald's motive was to make a name for himself in history, why did he vehemently deny shooting JFK? If Oswald had killed JFK to make himself famous, one would logically expect that he would have proudly taken credit for JFK's death and announced his justifications to the world, but he did no such thing.

After Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, she made no effort to deny her guilt but proudly defended her action. She openly voiced two motives for her assassination attempt: (1) her anger over Ford's alleged destruction of the environment, and (2) her desire to draw attention to the Manson family.

After Leon Czolgosz was arrested for assassinating President William McKinley in 1901, he staunchly defended his action and made no secret of his motive. He said he viewed McKinley as an oppressive leader and was convinced it was his duty to kill an "enemy of the good people--the working people."

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre in 1865, he loudly made his motive clear seconds after he did the shooting, shouting to the shocked audience "sic semper tyrannis," i.e., "thus always to tyrants."

None of these cases are the least relevant to the JFK assassination. You seem to believe all assassins think alike.

But Oswald behaved in a completely different manner. At every opportunity, whether under police interrogation or when speaking with journalists, he fiercely denied shooting anyone, and he told the police--and his brother--that the evidence against him was fraudulent, even going so far as to claim he was a patsy.

I guess he never got a copy of the assassin's rule book.

Furthermore, according to the lone-gunman theory, Oswald tried to shoot right-wing extremist General Edwin Walker in April 1963. Now why, oh why, oh why would the same allegedly pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban Marxist who supposedly tried to shoot the ultra-conservative General Walker turn around and shoot the center-left JFK, who was publicly trying to make peace with the Soviets, especially given the fact that JFK had publicly disgraced Walker and had relieved Walker of command? That makes no sense.

Why would you think a senseless person would act sensibly. It doesn't matter if Oswald's actions makes sense to anybody else. It made sense to him.

-- The conspiracy theory of the assassination can provide concrete, documented motives for its suspects.

Motives without out evidence does not establish guilt. I'll bet there are lots of people in this country who wish Thomas Crooks had been a better marksman. Does that make them complicit in the attempt on Trump's life.

It has been amply documented, including with filmed interviews, that certain CIA officers who worked with the anti-Castro Cubans, along with some of the anti-Castro Cubans themselves, viscerally hated JFK and regarded him as a traitor. And we have two credible anecdotal accounts of CIA officers proudly admitting to close associates that they played a role in JFK's death.

Credible to whom?

One of the best books on evidence that some CIA officers and anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the assassination is former HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi's 1993 book The Last Investigation.

Oh, goody. Another JFKA conspiracy book. How many of these have been written? They can't seem to agree on who the bad guys were.

There is even stronger evidence of motive for certain Mafia elements. The historical record is clear, and no reputable scholar denies, that the Kennedy administration was waging an intense war against the Mafia, and that the Mafia viewed JFK and RFK as threats to their very existence.

OK, so JFK had enemies. What president hasn't. That doesn't mean they were behind the assassination. There have been 3 assassination attempts on Trump. Should we believe that the people  who hate Trump were behind  these attempts or should we believe they were acts committed by deranged individuals? In lieu of any evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe the latter.

Wiretaps recorded some Mafia leaders expressing a wish to see JFK dead before the assassination, and two informants reported that they heard Mafia leaders talking about a plot to kill Kennedy in the months leading up to JFK's death. Moreover, after the assassination, a government informant heard Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello admit to playing a role in the assassination.

Now all you need is evidence connecting these Mafia figures to the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Three of the best books on the evidence that certain Mafia elements were involved in the assassination are Anthony Summers' 2013 book Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (updated version), Lamar Waldron's 2013 book The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, and Dr. David Kaiser's 2008 book The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Are we supposed to believe every conspiracy book that comes down the pike? What makes these books more credible than all of the others?

Summers was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2012 and has twice won the Crime Writers' Association's award for top non-fiction works. In recognition of his scholarship, Summers was made a Fellow of the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin.

Waldron is a respected journalist and historian. His historical research and non-fiction books have won praise from Publishers Weekly, Vanity Fair, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and major publications in Europe. His research has been the subject of two prime-time specials on the Discovery Channel, produced by NBC News. He has been featured on CNN and the History Channel.

Kaiser is a respected historian. When Kaiser wrote his JFK book, he was a professor of history at the Naval War College. He later held professorships at Harvard University, Williams College, and Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard. He is now retired. (On a side note, Kaiser concluded that the HSCA's acoustical evidence was valid.)

Really smart people are perfectly capable of coming up with really stupid ideas.

[John Corbett]

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[Lance Payette]

I am on the conspiracy side mostly because of the the nature of the JFK/JBC wounds and the timing difference in the shots that came “close together” whether 1 and 2 or 2 and 3.

Sure, which is why I have made clear that I am open-minded toward a plausible CT scenario, which to my mind means a gunman in or on the Dal-Tex or County Records building, with Oswald as either a knowing participant or one who was duped into participating in a conspiracy that was different from what he thought it was. I lean toward the Mafia because the motive was simply perfect, but it could have been an anti-Castro or even pro-Castro gunman. Once things start getting more complex than this, it quickly loses me.

What MTG hopes to accomplish by insisting I am a foaming-at-the-mouth CT-baiting LN zealot is beyond me. If I thought he had any money and I was confident I could testify witout giggling, I'd sue him for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and possibly even malicious res ipsa loquitur. The humor is that he has absolutely zero awareness that he is shooting himself and the entire CT community in the foot (feet?) with his grandiose claims that literally everything including Ruth Paine's kitchen sink points toward a conspiracy. It's too bad he's not a Garrison cultist - he'd be perfect.

I seem to be unusual (weird?) in that I enjoy trying on different hats and different personas to see if I can talk myself out of a particular line of thinking.

[Royell Storing]

   When they jimmy the elapsed firing time from 6+ Seconds to 10+ Seconds, you KNOW there is a problem with the 1 shooter scenario. The trailing team always wants to change the rules.

[Lance Payette]

   When they jimmy the elapsed firing time from 6+ Seconds to 10+ Seconds, you KNOW there is a problem with the 1 shooter scenario. The trailing team always wants to change the rules.

Who is "they" other than the KGB-obsessed He Who Shall Not Be Named? Sure, anything even a second longer improves the three-shot narrative. The two-shot (by Oswald anyway) scenario eliminates all problems even for the LN narrative. But what does this have to do with logic and critical thinking? On this question, the issue is simply where the best evidence points. If the best evidence points to Oswald firing two shots but three or more shots having been fired, then this would suggest a conspiracy. The effort to move back the supposed first shot is nothing more than an attempt to improve the scenario of Oswald firing three shots, which generates its own implausibilities and isn't even necessary to the LN narrative. When there is no real evidence of this early first shot, the estimates are all over the map, and many witnesses described the first shot as sounding distinctly different, logic and critical thinking suggest to me that the early first shot is mostly a convenient invention to preserve the scenario of Oswald firing three shots. When we factor in the problematical SBT and all the issues surrounding it, as well as the witnesses who insisted two shots were extremely close together, then it seems to me that a conspiracy along the lines of what I have suggested has to at least be taken seriously.

[John Corbett]

   When they jimmy the elapsed firing time from 6+ Seconds to 10+ Seconds, you KNOW there is a problem with the 1 shooter scenario. The trailing team always wants to change the rules.

The people who you say jimmied the elapsed time to 10+ seconds did no such thing. 10+ seconds was allowed for in the WC's conclusion on the subject of the timing. From the last sentence in Chapter 3 on page 117 of the WCR, I quote:

"Since the preponderance of the evidence indicated that three shots were fired, the Commission concluded that one shot probably missed the Presidential limousine and its occupants, and that the three shots were fired in a time period ranging from approximately 4.8 to IN EXCESS OF (emphasis mine) 7 seconds."

While I do not subscribe to the 10+ second timeframe for the three shots, it is compatible with the WCR's conclusion. They could not put a limit on the timeframe for all three shots because the could not determine with ccertainty when the first (or last) shot was fired. To this day, we have no definitive proof. My own belief, which I acknowledge is not a proven fact, is that the first shot was fired at or about Z147. With the third shot fired at or about Z310, that leads to a total time of 8.9 seconds for all three shots (163 / 18.3).

[Michael T. Griffith]

MTG--

I strongly suspect LHO took a shot at General Walker. Ergo, LHO had an inclination to shoot a major public figures.

I am definitely open to Greg Doudna's conclusions on the Walker shooting, which exonerates Oswald of malicious intent and has some else doing the shooting and with a different rifle. I think Doudna may well be correct.

One thing that has never made sense about the Walker shooting is the unlikelihood of completely missing Walker from such a short range while firing from a supported position. Standard residential window glass, such as the kind at Walker's house, would have had very little effect on the bullet's path, and it is hard to believe that the gunman would have fired with the window frame anywhere near his aiming point.

Also, I view as credible Gen. Walker's rejection of CE 573 as the bullet that was removed from his wall. Walker, an experienced soldier and combat vet, knew bullets and was adamant that CE 573 was not the bullet that was removed from his wall.