Bugliosi's "Conclusion of No Conspiracy"

[Ray Mitcham]

Ray,
The BSO and the Boston Pops are two different entities.

Yes I know, Steve, but it was the Boston Symphony Orchestra not the Pops. I rememberJohn Williams joining the Pops Orchestra in the seventies.

[Tim Nickerson]

Wow, Tim.  You left this out:

The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.

Michael, I left that out because I haven't seen you argue against it. It's not germane to the point I was making. You claim that the government got it right with its report in 1978 . Yet you argue against its concrete findings.

I. FINDINGS OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS IN THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY IN DALLAS, TEX., NOVEMBER 22, 1963

?A. Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third shots he fired struck the President. The third shot he fired killed the President.

• 1.President Kennedy was struck by two rifle shots fired from behind him.
  2.The shots that struck President Kennedy from behind him were fired from the sixth floor window of the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository building.
  3.Lee Harvey Oswald owned the rifle. that was used to fire the shots from the sixth floor window of the southeast comer of the Texas School Book Depository building.
  4.Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the assassination, had access to and was present on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
  5.Lee Harvey Oswald's other actions tend to support the conclusion that he assassinated President Kennedy.

[Bill Brown]

Duh, the one that said that LHO shot and killed JFK from behind. Playing games won't save you.

You're the one playing games when you attribute things to me that I have not said.  Grow up.

[Mitch Todd]

The HSCA also said that there was NO recognizable human figure in the sixth floor window. Funny how you choose to ignore that.

I responded to his assertion that the HSCA concluded that there were shots (note plural) fired from the GK. As you are aware, I noted that the HSCA only committed to one shot from the GK, and that was purely on the basis of the WA acoustic study, which turned out to be in error.

But speaking of funny...

What's really, truly funny is that you assumed that the discussion must be about whatever random pet windmill you've chosen to tilt at this minute...whether it had anything to do with the conversation or not.

What's even funnier is, your own source makes clear that there are no photos showing the SN window during the assassination, so there is no reason to expect to see a "recognizable human figure" of an assassin in those photos. You simply have no point.

[Ross Lidell]

Ross , you are right about the  Warren Report ( Main report that he handed LBJ ) having an index but I don't think the 26 volumes of testimonies and diagrams and pictures has an index. If you find out about the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report having an index , I would appreciate it if you let me know. Thanks Ross

Mike,

This is additional information.


Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits

The Warren Commission published 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits within a few months after issuing its report. Volumes 1 - 5 are hearings conducted by the Commission members in Washington DC. Volumes 6 - 15 are hearings conducted by staff attorneys on location in Dallas, New Orleans, and other places. Volume 15 also contains an index to names and exhibits. Volumes 16 - 26 contain photographed Commission Exhibits, usually abbreviated to CE (i.e., CE 399), plus other exhibits organized by name.

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1006


Sylvia Meagher was a research analyst at the UN?s World Health Organization. She took a strong interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and read the twenty-six volumes of the hearings and exhibits of the Warren Commission: "It was appalling to find how many of the Commission's statements were unsupportable or even completely contradicted by the testimony and/or exhibits... I began to list what is now a long list of deliberate misrepresentations, omissions, distortions, and other defects demonstrating not only extreme bias, incompetence, and carelessness but irrefutable instances of dishonesty."

In 1965 Meagher published Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits. As Meagher pointed out, studying the entire twenty-six volumes without a subject index would be "tantamount to a search for information in the Encylopedia Britannica if the contents were untitled, unalphabetized, and in random sequence."

A deep study of the Warren Commission Report convinced her that the its detailed evidence contradicted its general conclusions. Meagher therefore published Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report (1967). Meagher was unconvinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone gunman and concluded that the Warren Commission had attempted to cover-up details of the real people behind the assassination. Meagher believed that John F. Kennedy had been killed by a group Anti-Castro exiles.

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmeagher.htm


Question: Why wasn't Sylvia Meager killed before she could complete her work? After the Warren Report was published: Conspirators were said to be rubbing-out anyone who might expose the conspiracy!

[John Mytton]

4. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, we all know from our own experiences in life that it is almost impossible to keep a secret. And that?s when only a few people, even two, are involved, and even if the matter that one wishes to remain undisclosed isn?t terribly important. Somehow or other the information gets out, and it does so rather quickly, whether induced by one?s conscience, as in a death-bed confession, or through a former wife or mistress, or inadvertently, or simply because people can?t keep their mouths shut.? As I told the jury in London, ?I?ll stipulate that three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead.? On a national scale we see this phenomenon at work with one presidential administration after another being unable to control, frequently for even a few days, ?leaks? to the media on matters they did not want known. (One example among thousands: USA Today reported on July 19, 2002, that ?recent news leaks [of classified information from a congressional probe of 9-11 intelligence failures] have infuriated the White House and prompted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to issue a memo warning that staffers who spill secrets are jeopardizing American lives.?)3 In the Kennedy case itself, we saw that although only a few members of the FBI?s Dallas office were involved, they were unable to keep secret their effort to suppress Oswald?s leaving a threatening note at the Dallas office about ten days or so before the assassination.       
When we apply this literal rule of life to the alleged massive conspiracy the conspiracy theorists claim existed in the murder of the president of the United States?massive not only in the considerable number of people who would have had to be involved* but also in the great number of details and matters that would have had to be suppressed, any one of which could have exposed the plot or given rise to an inference of its existence, and which allegedly included the doctoring of many photographs and X-rays, even the Zapruder film itself, and the murder of over a hundred people to silence them, and then the cover-up of each of these murders?we can be certain that if such a conspiracy took place, its existence would have broken out of its original shell in a thousand different ways, and relatively quickly. Yet after forty-four long years, not one credible word, not one syllable has ever surfaced about any conspiracy to kill Kennedy. (There have been noncredible confessions of guilt in the Kennedy case, nearly all of which have been discussed in depth in this book?for example, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana allegedly telling his brother Chuck that he was behind the murders of JFK, RFK, and Marilyn Monroe, that he met with LBJ and Richard Nixon in Dallas before the assassination and told them he and the CIA were planning to murder JFK, and that Jack Ruby coordinated the whole assassination for Sam. Because none of these confessions are even remotely credible?indeed, many are downright amusing?no serious person has ever paid any attention to them.) The reason why not the slightest trace of a conspiracy has ever been uncovered, of course, is that no such conspiracy ever existed.       
When we add to the above the allegation by conspiracy theorists that a second massive conspiracy existed?by the Warren Commission* and its leading assistant counsels to suppress the truth about the assassination from the American people?and not one word has ever leaked in over forty years of the existence of that conspiracy either, the only reasonable conclusion is that only people who subscribe to rules of absurdity, not rules of life, could possibly believe that a conspiracy to kill Kennedy ever existed. The conspiracy argument in the Kennedy assassination requires the belief that for over forty years a great number of people have been able to keep silent about the plot behind the most important and investigated murder of the twentieth century. In other words, it requires a belief in the impossible. Political columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in 1992, pointed out the absurdity of the cover-up premise: ?That in a country where the fixing of a handful of game shows could not be held secret, a near-universal assassination conspiracy has remained airtight for 28 years.?4 How, sensible people ask, could such a vast conspiracy remain leakproof for almost four and a half decades, or even four and a half days? British writer D. M. Thomas marvels at the absurdity of the notion that ?a network of conspirators killed Kennedy, corrupted the medical and legal investigations, and buried the truth, all without a hitch.?       
In his book, Loving God, former presidential assistant Charles Colson, in writing about Watergate, said, ?With the most powerful office in the world at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists [of President Richard Nixon]?could not hold a conspiracy together for more than two weeks.?
RHVB


JohnM

[John Mytton]

5. Obviously, the more complicated a plot is, the greater the likelihood that something will go wrong and it won?t work. Everyone intuitively knows this, and hence we can assume that if there had been a plot to kill Kennedy, the plotters would have made it as uncomplicated as possible. But the massive conspiracy envisioned by most conspiracy theorists necessarily would be extremely complex, and this fact is greatly exacerbated by the ineptitude of human beings.       
I?m talking about the staggering incompetence at every level of our society, one that normally prevents any group, large or small, including the U.S. government and its agencies, from performing at anywhere near optimum capacity? Indeed, on a scale of one to ten, they normally operate below five. Incompetence is so widely prevalent that I expect it, and when I find competence I am always pleasantly surprised. Let?s look at just one example among a great many, this one at the CIA, the main federal agency conspiracy theorists suspect of being behind the assassination. In 1994, Aldrich Ames, chief of the CIA?s Soviet counterintelligence branch, pleaded guilty to the biggest espionage case in U.S. history. Ames furnished the Soviets U.S. secrets in return for more than $2 million. His perfidy led to the deaths of several Russian undercover agents working for the United States in the Soviet Union. Ames told his interrogators it was ?really easy? to obtain the top-secret information even after he was transferred to anti-narcotics work in the early 1990s.       

In noting that it took an incredible nine years for Ames?s colleagues and superiors at CIA headquarters to catch him, syndicated columnist Mary McGrory wrote that ?Ames and his wife did everything they could to arouse suspicion, living it up in the most provocative manner. What G5-14, on a salary of $69,000-plus, pays half a million in cash [$540,000] for a house in Arlington, Virginia, buys a bright red Jaguar [which he drove to work] and runs up Trumplike charges on his credit card??6 A November 1994 report on the Ames case from the Senate Intelligence Committee found ?gross negligence? (?negligence? being a euphemism here for incompetence) at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Select Committee on Intelligence ?agreed that the agency [CIA] is in deep disarray,? a condition, they said, that long predated the Ames case.7       

I mean, in 1986 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with billions of dollars spent, and the finest scientific minds available, and with the space shuttle Challenger right in front of their noses for inspection, and with a defective pressure seal wrongly designed and about which they had been advised and warned on numerous occasions, sent seven astronauts to their death because of their dreadful incompetence. Speaking of NASA, on the first day of the Apollo 8 flight that circumnavigated the moon, when Colonel Frank Borman, the commander of the flight, was sending transmissions back to Cape Kennedy, he referred to the Apollo 8 flight as the Gemini 8 flight, a flight he had participated in three years earlier. That?s life in the real world.       

While we?re talking about incompetence, let?s look at an extreme example of it in the Kennedy case itself. Established procedure in the Secret Service during a presidential motorcade is to scan not only the crowds but also the roofs and windows of buildings as the motorcade goes along.8 But apparently, and unbelievably, not one of the sixteen Secret Service agents in the motorcade through Dealey Plaza was looking anywhere near the upper floors of the Book Depository Building. If they had, they would have seen (as several Dealey Plaza witnesses who never had any obligation to look for such things did) a figure or a rifle in the window where Oswald was. But there?s no evidence, from any of the reports of the agents, that they saw anything in Oswald?s window, or even saw the three black Book Depository employees in the two windows beneath Oswald?s window. Pardon my pique, but where in the hell were their heads when the president?s limousine passed by the Book Depository Building, other than up the proverbial place? Special Agent Roy Kellerman told the Warren Commission that in the Secret Service detail protecting the president, ?when you are driving down [the] street?and you have buildings on either side of you, you are going to scan your eyes up and down? the buildings.9 Can you imagine that? Thirty-two trained eyes belonging to sixteen men whose duty and responsibility was to protect the president, and not one of these thirty-two eyes saw Oswald, or a rifle, or anything worthy of their attention in the sniper?s nest window. But several lay people did, and they were only there to watch the motorcade, not watch over the president?s security.       

The question is, How could the vast number of conspirators contemplated by the theorists have pulled off this incredibly complex conspiracy to such a degree of skill?never bumbling or slipping in any way that would reveal or even suggest their existence to one outside their group?that eternal secrecy would be guaranteed? Easy. You see, we know human beings are unable to keep their mouths shut and routinely incompetent, frequently stumbling over their own feet. But the conspirators envisioned by the theorists have their mouths permanently zippered and are extraordinarily competent, even prescient, being able to predict faultlessly all of the many uncontrollable variables in their mission to the point where everything worked perfectly, and with mathematical precision.       

As Richard White, professor of history at the University of Washington, and speaking in a generic sense, says, ?You can?t trust the government to do anything right?except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.?10 In other words, the conspiracists believe that Murphy?s law (whatever can go wrong will go wrong) doesn?t apply to the alleged conspiracy in the assassination and cover-up.       

The above deals with the murder and cover-up. But with the many groups supposedly involved in the conspiracy, like the CIA, mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and military-industrial complex, how could they handle all the logistical complexities and inevitable disagreements among themselves over details during the planning phase leading up to November 22, without anything they did out of the ordinary (and by definition, they would have had to do things out of the ordinary) coming to the attention of just one person outside their group?
RHVB



JohnM