I don’t remember the Haags saying where the piece of asphalt came from. It looks to me like it might have been relatively new. Plus there are many factors that might have played a role on Elm Street. Elm Street is a major artery street in a very busy city. Lots of traffic, including heavy trucks, etc compressing the asphalt. A painted lane marker might be a part of the equation that imparted a relatively slick surface for a bullet to skid on as it ricocheted.

I witnessed an interesting phenomenon when I used to work in downtown Columbus, Oh. Broad St. is the major east-west street through downtown Columbus and I worked at Broad and 3rd Streets for almost 20 years which was right across from the State Capitol building. The far right lane on eastbound Broad St. is a right turn only lane onto southbound 3rd St which is a one way street. There was a fairly new asphalt surface on Broad St. with the crosswalk paint still very vivid. The cars in the right hand turn lane on eastbound Broad St. that had stopped to make the turn onto southbound 3rd St. had stretched out the crosswalk lines where the tires would typically have crossed. It had formed two distinct points in the crosswalk lines about 18" long. It speaks to the elasticity of asphalt.

This is so ridiculous and backward it's not worth answering.

Nice dodge.

You start from a woeful knowledge base and then blunder from there.

Was that supposed to sound clever? It didn't work.

More of your uninformed dogmatism. I doubt you've even read Russo's book.

Am I supposed to read every book about the JFKA that has ever been published?

If you have, your comments are even more indefensible. You're in no position to be pontificating about anyone's research.

The questions I raised are valid ones for anyone proposing that Cubans put Oswald up to assassinating JFK. They are valid no matter who one postulates was behind the assassination.

You seem to be like a kid in a candy store when it comes to the JFKA. You can't seem to make up your mind about who did it or how they did it. You seem to be willing to embrace any theory so long as it doesn't include Oswald as the lone assassin. The only thing you don't seem to like is the one and only truth.

You have spent at least three and a half decades, probably more, telling us what you don't think happened. After all the research you've done and all the books you seem to have read, have you figured out who was behind the assassination and how they did it? I'll bet haven't done one tenth the research you have but I have been able to figure that out. It isn't all that hard to do.

“Conspiracy theorizing makes strange bedfellows.” If that’s not an old saying, it should be.

On another thread, I apparently characterized Greg Doudna’s complex fake-Walker-shooting scenario as “lunatic fringe” stuff. Michael T. Griffith then seized on this phrase as applied to Greg as an example of just what an intolerant LN punk I am. Greg then chided me for my use of the phrase. MTG and GD – strange bedfellows, no? I backed off to the extent of explaining to GD that I certainly meant the phrase – which I do tend to bandy about rather loosely – in reference to his work in a "kinder and gentler" way than in reference to MTG’s contributions.

What is the lunatic fringe of conspiracy thinking anyway? MTG likes to pretend, because it suits his purposes as a card-carrying lunatic fringer if there ever was one, that I mean “anyone and everyone who thinks the JFKA might have been a conspiracy.” If I mean every CTer, then I'm just lumping MTG with Larry Hancock and all the others, and this allows MTG to retain some veneer of credibility. This is obviously not the case, as anyone who has read my posts would know.

Let’s be honest: Rational people who are acquainted with the evidence as whole know Oswald shot JFK from TSBD6 and murdered Tippit. There’s no real doubt about this. Any conspiracy theory that deviates from these truths is edging toward the lunatic fringe, simple as that. Any theory that has elaborate alternative scenarios for the Walker attempt, Dealey Plaza and Tippit is lunatic fringe stuff, simple as that. When your theory isn’t even internally consistent, and you don’t care, you are in the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe. Readers, meet MTG.

A non-LF conspiracy theory accepts at least 95% of the LN narrative. It simply has to. If it accepts 100% of the LN narrative but insists there were conspirators behind the scene, it has to identify these supposed conspirators with compelling evidence and connect them to Oswald and Dealey Plaza with compelling evidence. Merely identifying possible conspirators is child’s play; that goes nowhere. John Newman, Larry Hancock, woulda-coulda-shoulda – so far, it all goes nowhere as far as I can tell. It all “swirls around” Oswald and Dealey Plaza but never really gets there. I don’t believe it ever will.

The Achilles heel of the LN narrative is the SBT and everything that goes with it – bullet trajectories, the nature of the wounds, the Magic Bullet (both its provenance and condition). If the SBT falls, the LN narrative has a hell of a problem. This is about the only Dealey Plaza aspect of the JFKA that I can see being worth a CTer pursuing. The rest is just blather – so far-fetched and inconsistent that it just makes the CT community look silly. The jury of history is not impressed and never will be. If the SBT could be conclusively proven – as John Orr is attempting to do, but his work will always have the taint of being sponsored by a fanatical CTer – then who the conspirators were would become a much more relevant question. If I had the money and contacts, I would assemble a world-class panel of medical and ballistics experts from other countries, experts who don’t know or care bupkis about JFK or the JFKA, and have them freshly examine nothing but the SBT.

In all areas of religion and weirdness with which I have been associated, the lunatic fringe includes a wide swath of territory, from merely goofy to flat-out insane and even scary. As we see with the JFKA, occupancy of the LF bears absolutely no relation to an occupant’s intelligence, education or knowledge of the subject. All I mean when I use (and overuse) the phrase is “you are saying things that are simply too unrealistic, too far from the well-established facts, to be taken seriously.” (I have, only this morning, and with hand solemnly on a first edition of Best Evidence, vowed to stop using the LF phrase so freely since it does paint with too broad a brush.)

Much as MTG pops a vein every time I refer to the “conspiracy-prone mindset,” this is one of the keys – if not the key - to the lunatic fringe. One of the hallmarks of the conspiracy-prone mindset is a love of complexity – a preference for the elaborate, convoluted explanation over the straightforward one. Former Garrison investigator Tom Bethell addressed this in a humorous piece entitled “Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll,” https://www.jfk-assassination.net/bethell.htm:

Making the Simple Complex

I promptly fell into disfavor with Jones Harris and other conspiratorialists. Some of them, I later heard, automatically relegated me to CIA status. Nevertheless, I always considered Jones a charming fellow, and he demonstrated the first quality of conspiratorialists that I want to bring out: their love of complexity.
…
The extraordinary complexity involved – three Oswalds! – is a fundamental characteristic of conspiratorialist reasoning. Philosophers like to point out that any belief, more or less, can be sustained if the believer is willing to encrust his belief with enough assumptions; the only problem is that the resulting theory starts to look very complicated compared to much simpler alternatives readily at hand. It is an important principle of philosophy (although one little valued in assassination conspiracy circles) that the simple explanation should be preferred to the complicated one.

In a more scholarly vein, this is from “Why Conspiracy Thinking is So Popular: Psychological Reflections,” https://medium.com/@manfred.ketsdevries_62226/why-conspiracy-thinking-is-so-popular-psychological-reflections-54414da6e343, by a renowned Dutch psychoanalyst:

From a psychological standpoint, it is far less frightening to imagine a cabal of villains controlling events than to confront the reality that many world-shaping forces like pandemics, climate change, and economic crises, operate without central coordination or moral logic. The mind prefers a coherent fiction to an incoherent truth.

Yet the irony is that in fleeing complexity, conspiracy thinking often constructs fantasies even more convoluted than the reality that they are rejecting. The mind seeks simplicity but finds itself building baroque illusions, twisting narratives into decorative knots while insisting they provide clarity. The conspiracy theorist, attempting to escape chaos, accidentally creates a universe of even greater complexity: a universe with omnipotent puppet masters, endless secret codes, and plots within plots. The stories feel coherent only because they impose agency on the unbearable.

Just stay in the lane of plausibility as best you can, CTers, and you’ll be fine. You (we?) might even convince the jury of history!

Book by former CIA analyst sheds light on Cuba, Kennedy, Oswald

By David Adams
July 9, 20131:10 AM GMT+7Updated July 9, 2013


By David Adams

(Reuters) - Lee Harvey Oswald had closer ties to Cuba's intelligence agency in the months before his fatal shooting of John F. Kennedy than previously known, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.

Furthermore, the CIA lied about its knowledge of those ties to the Warren Commission that was tasked with investigating the crime, according to Brian Latell, the CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America from 1990 to 1994 and author of the book "Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, & the Assassination of John F. Kennedy," due out on July 9.
Cuba also hid what it knew about Oswald, writes Latell, citing a CIA wiretap of a conversation between two Cuban secret service agents he uncovered in declassified archives.

"I am now convinced that Oswald was engaged with the Cubans," Latell told Reuters.

While he is careful not to suggest Oswald killed Kennedy on instructions from Havana, Latell says the new evidence confirms a widely held belief that Oswald was motivated to kill Kennedy by a fervent desire to impress Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

"I'm convinced he wanted to defect to Cuba," Latell said. "He loved Cuba and Castro, and wanted to join the revolution."
Latell's book, which is a revised edition of an earlier work on Cuban intelligence published last year, is based on new pieces to the puzzle uncovered from several sources, including the unpublished memoirs of Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time of the assassination, as well as an interview with a former Cuban intelligence agent and declassified government documents.
Seven weeks before Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, Oswald famously traveled to Mexico City by bus hoping to obtain a visa from the Cuban embassy there to visit Havana. Cuba denied him a visa, but the bus trip, and Oswald's known communist sympathies, have long generated suspicion of Cuban involvement in Kennedy's death, although no hard evidence has ever been found.

"What he did during most of the time he spent in the Mexican capital remains perhaps the most important unsolved mystery of the Kennedy assassination," writes Latell, who spent much of his career at the CIA working on Cuba.
U.S. officials never admitted the full extent of what they knew, fearing perhaps they would face public pressure to retaliate against Cuba if greater evidence of a Cuban link became known, Latell argues.

Mann learned shortly after Kennedy's death that Oswald had stayed at the Hotel del Comercio in Mexico City, known by the CIA to be a haven for Cuban spies in Mexico working for the DGI, Havana's national intelligence agency, closely run by Castro.
Mann learned this information at the time from the CIA station chief in Mexico, according to his memoirs, written in 1982. But when he raised it with his superiors in Washington, Mann was silenced by the State Department and told to cease his inquiries about Oswald's stay in Mexico.

Mann was furious and objected, but did as he was told. "In the week after the assassination Mann was convinced Cuba was involved. He was convinced Oswald was working for the Cubans at the hotel," Latell said.

"He started getting very aggressive and upsetting apple carts in Washington."

Mann, who died in 1999, was reposted out of Mexico barely a month after the Kennedy assassination.

During its investigation of the crime in 1964, the Warren Commission was curious about the Mexico trip. But when the commission traveled to Cuba and asked about Oswald's hotel stay, the CIA hid its knowledge about goings on at the hotel, according to Latell.
The Warren Commission later declared that it found no evidence of Cuban government involvement in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
In his research on Cuban intelligence Latell also discovered records of a CIA wiretap of a phone conversation between two DGI officials in Mexico and Havana shortly after the assassination in which they discussed the events in Dallas. One of them remarked how interesting it was that Oswald had wanted to fight for the revolution. How could they have known that, Latell asks, unless the DGI already had a file on him?

Latell suspects Cuba was aware of him as far as 1959 when Oswald first sought contact with Cuban officials at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles.

Castro has always asserted that Oswald was totally unknown to Cuban authorities. Latell and others find that hard to believe, citing reports that after being denied a visa in Mexico, Oswald shouted, "I'm going to kill Kennedy," in the street outside the Cuban consulate.

"We thought that was incriminating of Oswald," said Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the 1977 House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which re-examined the evidence in Kennedy's death.
Castro was asked about Oswald's shouted threat, but denied any knowledge of it.

"We found that it did happen and he lied about it," said Blakey, adding that the motive of Oswald's Mexico trip remains unclear as Latell's book does not reveal exactly what occurred in the Hotel del Comercio.

Latell also cites an interview with a former Cuban agent tasked with monitoring U.S. communications, who said that on the day of the assassination he was ordered to stop all CIA tracking efforts and redirect his antennae toward Texas.
"Castro knew Kennedy was to be fired upon," Latell says the agent told him.
U.S. officials covered up these vital clues because they were concerned about the consequences if a Cuban connection was publicized, Latell argues.

"Had it been known it could have triggered an invasion of Cuba," he said. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, "didn't want that" so soon after the missile crisis that had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war barely a year earlier.

"They went nose to nose before and they didn't want to do it again," Latell says.

Reporting by David Adams; Editing by Arlene Getz and Leslie Adler

I'm very suspicious of this stuff. It smacks of fabrication and incredibility to me. We don't know if many of these contacts even actually occurred. If they did occur, we don't know if the G2 operatives identified themselves as pro-Castro or if they posed as anti-Castro.

I can't believe that any knowledgeable researcher would buy the story that Oswald (the real Oswald, anyway) yelled, "I'm going to kill Kennedy," in the street outside the Cuban consulate in Mexico City.

This whole fable of Oswald as the devout Castro supporter makes no sense given Oswald's conduct after he was arrested. A genuine Castro lover who shot Kennedy to impress Castro would have proudly announced his deed to the world at every opportunity after his arrest, just as other politically motivated assassins have done throughout history. 

All of these books will end up on history's clearance table, as they should, while the WCR will continue to stand tall as the definitive account of JFKA as it has since it was first released to the public almost 62 years ago.

Thanks for the good laugh!

FYI, three of those books were bestsellers and were widely acclaimed. They were also extensively cited in later scholarly books on evidence of Mafia involvement written by historians Dr. Richard Mahoney and Dr. David Kaiser.

Last Second in Dallas, published in 2021, is still selling well. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes, a graduate of Yale University, wrote the foreword for the book. What do you suppose Rhodes sees in the book that you don't?

BTW, you might want to read the HSCA's critique of the WC's investigation.

Anyway, do you plan on providing your list of six books that you'd recommend to a newcomer, or are you just here to snipe and posture?