It's essential people discriminate between actual conspiracies & ideations
It is passing incredible that now more than sixty years after the JFK assassination- with all the millions of key files released- too many still gobble the codswallop that "Oswald did it". Case in point, a Dallas Morning News columnist named Tom Croward who fairly screamed in his piece yesterday:
Adding:Son, if you claim to want to "unapologetically" address this issue, why do you succumb to fairy tales spun by the now discredited Warren Commission, as opposed to digging out the facts on your own as a genuine journalist should? The fact here is that all the files since released from the JFK Records Act show that Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And you can take that to the bank.Let's begin by dismantling the claptrap of one of the biggest purveyors of JFK anti-conspiracy nonsense: Gerald Posner in his ridiculous book, Case Closed. Which is the go to source for many of today's lazy or incompetent columnists who insist Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. To cut to the chase, Posner's slipshod work has already been exposed on one JFK website detailing a host of "Posnerisms", e.g.
http://www.assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm
Those who take the time to read carefully through the examples in the link will become aware of an unnerving lack of attention to detail and a penchant for what appears to be deliberate misrepresentation. Indeed, Posner’s entire case appears to be erected on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations, gross distortions and shoddy methodology, the mass of which can’t even redeem it as coincidental.
This dissembling cretin couldn’t even get his facts straight in a July 23rd NY Times piece:
Opinion | Post-Trump Shooting, the Government Is Allowing Conspiracy Theories to Flourish - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Writing:
In the early days following the Kennedy assassination, it was often said that the greatest marksmen in the world tried and failed to repeat what the government said Lee Harvey Oswald had done — fire three shots at a moving target in a very short amount of time. But it turned out that Mr. Oswald had plenty of time to get the shots off, and what he did has been replicated numerous times
Failing to note that the vaunted Warren Commission itself enlisted three master marksmen from the National Rifle Association to attempt to replicate the shots attributed to Oswald. [1] The WC -chosen team failed, even after rebuilding the alleged weapon to enable any shots to be fired. (An aspect Posner glosses over including that NO one has been able to replicate the alleged feat, likely because that Mannlicher-Carcano was never the weapon actually used. Nor the only one.)
Oswald was presumed to have fired from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository, so effectively six stories up or 60’ in altitude. However, the experts were allowed to fire from a tower only half this altitude (30’)[2]. In addition, while Oswald had to have fired at a limousine moving at 11 miles per hour, the experts fired at stationary targets[3]. The target area was also magnified for the experts, to the whole upper torso of the target prop’s body – while Oswald was limited to the head and neck.
More to the point, the rifle was altered away from the one Oswald supposedly used, according to the WC. The rifle sight itself was rebuilt and “metal shims were fitted to provide a degree of accuracy previously absent’. When Ronald Simmons, the Chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Army’s Ballistics Research Division was asked about this he replied: “Well, they could not sight the weapon in using the telescope”[4]. He added that the aiming apparatus had to be rebuilt by a machinist[5], with two shims added, one to adjust for the elevation, the other for the azimuth.
In other words, had they actually used the rifle in the same condition Oswald was alleged to have had it, then they’d likely not have hit the side of a barn. Even so, just one of the three expert riflemen was able to get off three shots in under 5.6 seconds – the designated time interval for total shots declared by the Warren Commission. And most to the point: none of the total 18 shots fired struck the targets (ibid.). in the head or the neck. In other words, from a technical standpoint of duplicating Oswald’s alleged shots- this trio of experts failed.
Another key aspect: for the duration of the 18 rounds, two
of the “master” riflemen were unable to reload and fire at the
stationary target as rapidly as Oswald purportedly did for the moving limo!
(The Mannlicher-Carcano had a bolt action recycling time of 2. 33 secs)
It wouldn't be until years later when Patricia Dumais - who
suspected the rifle was a stage prop and wanted to see the internal control
number - was informed by the National Archives (H.E. Livingstone,
1993, 'Killing the Truth', p. 204.):
'We cannot disassemble Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle because this action might be destructive to the object.’'
So all the Warren Commission followers have been 'had' for over
60 years by a colossal hoax. Prof. David R. Wrone, whose review of Case Closed appeared in The Journal of Southern History, notes:
"Posner often presents the opposite of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture of Oswald’s background- for example – he states that, under the name of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones Printing Company and that a ‘receptionist’ identified him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as the source that Posner cites indicates. “
But the dimensions of the colossal hoax perpetrated on the American people by the Warren Commission - which ought to be the real subject of Mr. Croward's ire- go even deeper. I am referring to how actual physical evidence was fraudulently manipulated, i.e. in the "autopsy" carried out at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Specifically, the rear of JFK's head (with the gaping EXIT wound from a frontal shot) had to be "redone" using mortician's plaster, i.e.
The reason is so it would now conform to the WC fairy tale, i.e. that the kill shot came from the rear - fired by one Lee Harvey Oswald in the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository - and not from the actual assassin on the grassy knoll. This reconstruction (on the left side) would also then dovetail with the portrayal in the Warren Report, using the now famous WC sketch by
artist H.A. Rydberg:
Note the upper inclined arrow (from the upper shoulder) through
Kennedy’s throat marks the original placement.
This was done in order to simultaneously account for the (actual) upper back
wound (5.5. inches below the tip of the right mastoid process) and the throat wound without adding an
extra shot (entry from front) , which would have pointed to conspiracy (i.e. at
least two shooters). Thus the "single bullet" or "magic bullet" theory. The change in angle and placement (on back) had to be done else it
would require someone firing from street level (blue arrow), as opposed to firing from the Texas School Book
Depository.
The actual alteration occurred compliments of
Warren Commission member Gerald Ford,
who understood that to make Specter’s “magic bullet” work the original upper back wound had to
become a base of neck wound.
Hence the bullet path had to be raised
5.5 inches to get a downward
sloping angle. The problem was
he had to violate the original autopsy report -
from Adm. George Burkley - to accomplish this manipulation. Note
the initial draft of the autopsy report stated:
“A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the
shoulder to the right of the spine."
Ford altered it to read:
“A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly
to the right of the spine."
The act of deliberate manipulation was also
reported in the NY Times decades after the fact, e.g.
So we only now begin to see and appreciate the level of cynical manipulation of evidence to get ordinary 'Joes' and 'Janes' as well as casual JFK historians (evidently like Larry Sabato at U. of VA) to buy into the Oswald did it bunkum. Once Gerald Ford changed the angle of wound entry
– from the upper back to the base of the neck- he effectively sacrificed one of
the seven wounds needed for the magic bullet. While gaining a more realistic
wound angle, in order to be able to account for an exit throat
wound, he had to forego the one accurate
(back) wound the Warren Commission had originally identified. In its
place a spurious neck wound.
There was still left the job of converting Parkland's Dr. Malcolm
Perry to rejecting his original take of a throat entry wound for an exit wound. Nurse Audrey Bell related to JFK researcher H.L. Livingstone (on
his visit to Dallas in 1991), how Perry was hounded relentlessly - including by
SBT creator Arlen Specter. In the words of RN Bell:
“They
called him in the middle of the night from Bethesda to change the entry wound
in the throat wound to an exit wound.”
But Dr. Perry damn well knew what he saw and had faithfully sketched an entrance wound, placed just slightly above the knot of JFK's tie, e.g.
The placement and identification as an entrance wound also substantiated on close inspection of the key Zapruder film frame, showing JFK clutching his throat, e.g.
This, of course, also shows a frontal shot, not one from the rear at the TSBD. This, obviously, was why Dr. Perry was subjected to so much pressure to change his observation to an exit wound, i.e. to allow for a shooter behind the limo.
The 'capper' is the head shot itself, the real kill shot - not any from behind that Oswald was claimed to have made. We see it clearly in Z-frame 314:
We also - thanks to release of critical JFK files from JFK Records Act- have the actual image showing the entry wound of the bullet at the right temple:
We can thereby infer the direct trajectory of the bullet from the right front of Kennedy’s forehead
to the rear of the head (leaving the gaping hole seen in previous b&W photo) , and contrast it with the Warrenite fictitious version of an assassin to the rear at the Texas School Book Depository. Finally, the motion of Jackie backwards over the limo trunk also confirms the kill shot from the front, not the rear, e.g.
Jackie was adamant, when asked in WC secret session, what she was doing and she replied she was trying to recover a dislodged piece of her husband's skull. There
is no way known to Newtonian physics a shot arriving from the rear would create a skull fragment hurtling backward - since the momentum must be in the same direction. Hence, Jackie would not be reacting this particular way if the shot
arrived from the rear as the Warrenite fairy tale claims.
The only possible explanation is JFK was killed from a frontal
shot, in accord with the Newtonian law of linear momentum transfer. One does not need elaborate mathematical
formulae to show this. Or elaborate logic to deduce Lee Oswald could not have been the assassin.
So if Lee Oswald was not responsible for the dastardly deed, who was? The (1975) Church Committee hearings and testimony were
critical in establishing the existence of the program called ZR/ Rifle. Former CIA Director Richard
Helms -in one session - spoke to the Committee at length about ZR/Rifle.
When pressed he even identified two hit team members by
their code names: WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN. He described the former as "a
stateless soldier of fortune and a criminal" (Church Committee
Report, pp. 43-44). He summarized the second in these terse terms (ibid.):
"If you needed somebody to carry out murder I guess you had a man
who might be prepared to carry it out.”
More compelling still, a
direct link of Richards Helms to William Harvey and the assassin (designated QJ/WIN) appears in a
February 19, 1962 memorandum from Helms to Harvey obtained from the
Assassination Archives in Washington, D.C.
All of which comes together (take note, Mr. Croward!) knowing these
assigned mechanics would have used the CIA Assassinations Handbook,
available since Operation PBSuccess in Guatemala, in 1954.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/
As noted in Document 1:
"The idea of forming assassination teams ('K' groups) apparently
originated with Castillo Arenas in 1952. Adopting Castillo Arenas'
concept the [ ] chief routinely included two assassination specialists in
his training plans. CIA training for sabotage teams in early 1954 also
included creating a 'K' group trained to perform assassinations."
There is no doubt such a 'K' group was set to target Castro under ZR/Rifle (not
'Mongoose' in 1962), but could easily be redirected to target Kennedy in late
1963. The proof in the pudding was the letter ‘D’ – on the
cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicating a CIA Staff D SIGINT
or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National
Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep
Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994):
“In
1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of
developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle.”
When ZR/Rifle was redirected from targeting Castro to JFK- probably in late 1962 or
mid 1963 - it was all over except for the triangulation of gunfire that
took out the 35th president. Who would have done it? A professional team
dispatched to Dallas and basically admitted to by former CIA Director Helms in later Church Committee hearings.
Is digging out the truth behind actual conspiracies, difficult, time-consuming? You bet. But the truth, the facts, are vastly preferable to childish appeals to fantasies to help one sleep better at night. Besides, as St. Paul once admonished, when one becomes a man one puts away the things of a child. That includes peddling patently false bunkum and fairy stories about the Kennedy assassination we've been fed for over 60 years.
In this case, no fictitious Oswald rifle "launched a post truth era from Dallas" as Croward insists. Rather, a contrived compendium of fraudulent exhibits, manipulated (as well as withheld) evidence, and deliberately omitted witnesses in the Warren Commission Report, created the post truth and fake news era we now are enmeshed in.
See Also:
In One Blockbuster JFK Assassination Documentary 7 Parkland Doctors Expose The Chicanery Of The Warren Commission
And:
And:
And:
References[1] Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964: Vol. II, p. 243 (Government Printing Office)
[2] Op. cit. p. 137.
[3] Op. cit. p. 133.
[4] Op. cit. (Vol. II), p. 250.
[5] Ibid.
