"How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too?" - Matt Ridley in
'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists',
The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011
Scott Aaronson seems to believe that because he’s a quantum
physicist that he’s also knowledgeable enough to make intelligent comments – in
his blog – on the JFK assassination. He isn’t. He comes across as yet another overconfident, under-informed
proxy "expert" (using his quantum physics bona fides) but who probably couldn’t tell Oswald’s
OS-351- 164 file from his
201-
289 248 CI/SIG file or his 74-500 file. All as reported in the Appendices of Military Science
professor John Newman’s book,
‘Oswald and the CIA’ – from freedom of
information act documents.
But this is the typical BS that serious assassination
researchers have to put up with – because these semi-educated (on the
assassination) critics only serve to
clutter the blogosphere with yet more disinformation and ignorance when some of
us are attempting to educate our countrymen as to what really went down – based
on actual documents released on the basis of the JFK Records Act – not
half-assed speculations or conjectures.
Look, I will try to go easy on this guy – given he’s a
quantum physicist – but I will not back away from calling out balderdash when I
see it, the same as I would with SPLC writer Marilyn Elias, Miami Herald
columnist, Glen Garvin, and Dr. Steve Mason.
For those who want to see all of his dreck you can dredge it
up here:
I will stick only to the distilled claims extracted from his
bilge. My points in the order in which
he elicits them in his forlorn preface to his "20 reasons for believing Oswald was the lone assassin".
1- The
use of the term “buffs” is a derogative term as has been pointed out by Dr.
Michael Parenti in his paper, The JFK Assassination - Defending the Gangster State.
Parenti notes:
“
These investigators have been described as
"assassination buffs." The term "buff" is a diminishing
characterization, describing someone who pursues odd hobbies. For the same
reason that we would not refer to "Holocaust buffs," so should we not
refer to these serious investigators as "assassination buffs." Their
efforts reveal a conspiracy to assassinate the president and an even more
extensive conspiracy to hide the crime. “
By invoking the term “buffs” in the JFK case, one can
suspect that – logically – Aaronson would also label Simon Wiesenthal as a
“Holocaust buff” because he’s pursued further research into the Nazi butchers
who ran the camps – especially those that pulled the levers to release Zyklon
B.
2- Aaronson
claims when the “scales were peeled from my eyes” he found the Warren
Commission claim that Oswald fired exactly 3 shots with his Mannlicher –Carcano
from the Texas School Book Depository “compelling”. REALLY? Then either Scott
didn’t examine the WC evidence diligently enough, or he was incapable of
applying the most basic geometry and physics – not to mention being unable to
peruse files more recently released via the JFK Records Act – including Gerald R. Ford’s abominable revision of the
(upper back) wound placement, see e.g.
Let’s make it clear Aaronson - as a physicist - could have done the same
analysis as I did above, if he’d have gotten off his ass and actually obtained
the requisite files (FOIA requests from the National Archives), examined them
and proceeded. Did he? Clearly not! In
fact, he’s not even remotely aware of how the Warren Commission itself was
compromised ab initio. See e.g.
and:
3- Aaronson claims “And as for Oswald’s motives, I think I
understand them as well and as poorly as I understand the motives of the people
who send me ramblings every week about P vs. NP and the secrets of the universe.”
I don’t think so, pally. If you didn’t access his CIA files,
how the hell could you possibly know anything about his motives? As Michael Parenti notes (ibid.):
“
Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a
lone drifter but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of
his IQ tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick
learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret security
clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Air Force Base in
Japan, a top secret location from which the CIA launched U2 flights and
performed other kinds of covert operations in China. The next year he was
assigned to El Toro Air Station in California
with security clearance to work radar. “
In regard to the last, examination of his CI/SIG file showed
that Oswald had clearance – access for all the following:
“The
locations of all bases on the west coast, all radio frequencies for all
squadrons, all tactical call signs, strength of all squadrons, the number and
type of aircraft in each, names of commanding officers, and authentic codes of
entering and exiting all ADIZ radar ranges.”
If
indeed Oswald was as lame as Aaronson claims, he’d never have been entrusted
with any of these, period! Hell, he’d
not have been entrusted with the CIA Director’s pet poodle. Moreover, he'd
never ever have been let out of the States, and with the ease of dispatch the
document trails disclose.
Once
again, this glaring failure of perception – because Aaronson hasn’t done his
homework- shows he’s not qualified to comment on any aspect of the
assassination.
4-Aaronson claims he began his thinking by
allowing something like a “10 % probability” for conspiracy in the JFK
assassination and then – after presumably investigating (which he clearly
didn’t – as shown from the previous critiques), he then goes on to aver:
“Now, though, I’d place the JFK
conspiracy hypothesis firmly in Moon-landings-were-faked,
Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside territory.”
Really? And you call yourself a physicist? You ought to turn in your diplomas, degrees! This
bloviation discloses he can’t discern an actual conspiracy from a loony bin
conspiracy “theory” or paranoid speculation. The clearest
example of the latter, apart from the ones he conflates with the JFK assassination
conspiracy, is one cited by Joe Klein in the latest TIME (Oct. 20, ‘A
Troubled American Moment’, p. 28).
That is, the “federal government buying tons of ammunition for the post
office in order to raise the price of ammo for gun owners.”
Now THAT is a "conspiracy theory" at least by the standard of common mocking and ridicule as present in the mainstream media and too many blogs! In fact, it’s little more
than a wild speculation because there’s NO evidence offered at all. It is based
on a feeling or more accurately a paranoid suspicion. This type of subjective foolishness
is impossible to prove or disprove because it’s in some psychological la-la
land where no evidence would even be accepted by the paranoid, anti-government
speculators.
Compare that to the fake Moon landing bilge which can easily
be disproven (assuming the proposers are open to science) by referencing the
lunar laser ranging experiments (to determine the precise distance from Earth
to the Moon). These use lasers fired from Earth to reflectors left on the
Moon’s surface by the Apollo Moon landing teams. (If they contend that “robot
craft” could have left them there the logical retort is, “Well if we could send
robot craft to the Moon why not manned craft? Once you can compute the
necessary trajectory 99% of the problem is solved!)
In the case of the JFK assassination, physics works the
reverse way to show why a conspiracy – had to exist.
Let’s first bear in mind when we write or speak of conspiracy we mean a three-layered configuration,
as noted by Peter Dale Scott in his ‘Oswald, Mexico and Deep Politics:
Revelations from CIA Records on the
Assassination of JFK’. The layers include: 1) The framing of Oswald, 2) the actual
assassination and the 3) the cover up of (1) and (2). The error of the corporate media and too many dilettantes is they do not separate the parts, which renders any analyses incomplete and misguided from the start.
The framing itself was accomplished using: 1)
fake cables, dispatched from the Mexico City station, 2) an Oswald impostor who
was photographed going into the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, and 3) raising
false speculations about Cuban-Soviet involvement. For a lengthy accounting of
the details go to these links:
Again,
this isn’t speculation – but based on actual CIA files that disclosed what went
on – especially in the Staff D purview as well as David Atlee Phillips shenanigans!
Regarding Staff D, as Peter Dale Scott observes
(op. cit., p. 18), after referring to the letter D on the cover sheet of
Oswald’s 201 file:
“Staff D was a
SIGINT or Signals Intelligence operation, run in conjunction with the National
Security Agency or NSA. Because of the ultra-secrecy of the NSA and SIGINT,
Staff D became a hiding place for other CIA ultra-secrets as well. In 1961,
when William Harvey headed Staff D he was assigned the task of developing the
CIA’s assassination program, ZR-Rifle, because ‘D’ was the perfect cranny in
which to tuck a particularly nasty bit of business.”
Which was to assassinate any head of state. Even
a U.S.
head of state who assorted powerful interests (Joint chiefs, Military defense
contractors, CIA etc.) felt had betrayed them.
Now let’s get back to what the physics discloses
in term of the conspiracy element (2).
The image of interest from the Zapruder film is
shown below:
Carefully note the direction
of her motion! It is toward the direction of the limo rear or toward the
Book Depository.
According to her secret Warren testimony (excised from
original published Report, see e.g
Appendix E):
"I was trying to hold his hair on. But from
the front there was nothing. I suppose there must have been. But from the back
you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on."
In other words, parts of JFK (hair, at least one
occipital bone – later recovered) were being hurled back across the trunk. Such motion is impossible for a rear shot such as
from the Book Depository, because the direction of linear momentum is always in
the direction the bullet travels. Hence, the shot had to have come from the
opposite side of the limo – or where the stockade fence of the grassy knoll
stood.
That this never even occurred to Aaronson, as a
physicist, is even more startling and suggests again he didn’t do squat in
terms of even looking at the films available (Nix and Zapruder) before jumping
to his absurd conclusions.
As for
the cover up, that part of the conspiracy is also solid, as I already showed
(check the earlier links) for my FAQ parts 4a, 4b and 5 on the bullet wounds.
Only a dilettante or slacker would fail to see the obvious hands of cover up if the
details are read and understood.
Does Aaronson want to do this?
5- Nope. Aaronson, in the clearest evidence yet that
he’s unfit to take on something as big as the JFK assassination, blabs:
“I’ll give twenty reasons for
believing that Oswald acted alone. Notably, my reasons will have less to
do with the minutiae of bullet angles and autopsy reports, than with general
principles for deciding what’s true and what isn’t. Of course, part of
the reason for this focus is that the minutiae are debated in unbelievable detail elsewhere, and I have nothing
further to contribute to those debates”
Oh, okay, so basically Aaronson
confesses from the outset he can’t be bothered by any “details” which have been
argued “elsewhere”. He will instead provide us with “general
principles” for deciding what’s true and what isn’t.
Hmmm….”general principles” minus
the actual physiological, physical and documented facts (e.g. from CIA files) before him. Sounds like a guy conducting a
séance or voodoo to me. Abracadabra! Here is reality …..based on my general
principles of truth, honor and the American (media) way!
I guess that based on his aversion to details, Mr.
“General Principles” can tell us the tunneling probability for a particle
through a rather steep Coulomb barrier, without even knowing the wave
functions for the different regions or the height of the barrier. Makes sense, no? I mean
if he can offer general principles of truth for the JFK assassination without
even dirtying his hands with "details" or glancing at a single CIA file for Oswald - certainly he can do that quantum tunneling trick too. Right?
As I will show, this historical event is far above his head and no macroscopic tunneling is available to help him penetrate the ignorance barrier. . Maybe he needs to stick with quantum tunneling!
Next: Response to Aaronson's twenty
reasons for believing that Oswald acted alone.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be jubilant today about the Cuban Embassy reopening in Washington. His rapprochement efforts with Castro would have culminated in this earlier - had he lived.
