It wasn’t me!!!
If you agree with this point, who do you think killed Kennedy? You have mentioned Allen Dulles as a potential suspect and you have cited the House Select Committee’s conclusion of a probable conspiracy to kill Kennedy involving the mob. Skeptic Yank has brought up the Federal Reserve. And where is the forgotten man, Lee Harvey Oswald, in all this?
[quote=“Chewycorns”]However, I take issue that the Church Commitee or the later House Select Committee on Assassinations were a product of their time. Sure, they express the cynacism of the Watergate era, but until the late 1960s, people accepted what the government said at face value. After Watergate so many laws were changed to promote greater transparency in government (and, in some respects, abuse – Campaign Financing laws etc). Journalism also became aggressive with a “take no prisoners” ethos.
With your rationale, you could say that the Warren Commission was accepted at the time because Americans had yet to question and understand that their own government could be capable of great evil as well as good - the Hegelian dialectic. Regardless of political affiliation, one can recognize that Vietnam, Watergate etc. changed the rules of the ball game entirely. Things that happened in the past had to be re-evaluated by government institutions. So regardless of whether it is one gunman that killed JFK, the Mob, Angry Cubans, or Captain Long Dong Silver, I think it is good that polemics and the interested public are talking about the shooting and looking at new evidence as it is made available. It sure beats the silence and secrecy that permeated through government corridors for far too long.[/quote]
I have no problem looking at the evidence, but in many cases it was the Kennedys themselves who put the shroud of secrecy over JFK’s death, so it’s not really fair to for someone to point a finger at the government like it had something to hide. For completely understandable reasons, the Kennedys didn’t want the gruesome details of JFK’s autopsy made public. It’s also understandable that the Kennedy people would rush JFK’s body out of Dallas as soon as they could, despite the fact it was against Texas state law to remove the body before an autopsy could be performed there. So if you are going to suggest a conspiracy was responsible for Kennedy’s death and that a cover-up followed, make sure the cover-up includes the Kennedys themselves.
No, I just questioned the effectiveness of Allen Dulles being on the Warren Commission, just like JFK questioned his performance as Director of the CIA. I have no idea who killed JFK. There was a book some years back by a British journalist named Nigel Hamilton entitled, JFK: A Reckless Youth. In many respects his presidency was reckless as well. The Kennedy family made too many enemies rising from the Irish bog in which they came from. I definitely don’t think the CIA or FBI was involved. I think it was either Oswald (even with the inprobability of him being able making the 4 shots in 15 seconds or with the ludicrousy of the magic bullet theory) or some Mafia/Cuban Exile group. Interesting point…the day of the assassination was the same day that Carlos Marcello was acquited of racketeering (a case that RFK had a huge interest in) in New Orleans.
I agree entirely. They too were a product of their times. RFK did a lot of dodgy things as AG especially with wiretaps. Of course they did not want public information about JFK STD’s and Addisons disease being made public. This combined with Jackie’s aloofness to the general public, and yes, the whole family was secretive in the aftermath of Dallas. Even today this has not changed. There was something in news last weel about Sen. Kennedy being pissed off at some clergyman for disclosing the fact that Jackie was thinking about suicide after the assassination.
However, I think that the point of the Church Committee and the Congressional Hearings was to re-evaluate old evidence that had been kept secret – in many cases by the Kennedy family. Nixon, in many respects, was right to be pissed off by the whole Watergate thing…RFK and JFK did just as much illegal and nasty things in the three years they were in power. But the eastern establishment media protected them rather than chased them.
Chewy
From Full Metal Jacket:
34 EXT. BLEACHERS–DAY
The platoon sits on bleachers facing HARTMAN.
HARTMAN: Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was?
No response.
HARTMAN: None of you dumbasses knows?
COWBOY raises his hand.
HARTMAN: Private Cowboy?
COWBOY: Sir, he was that guy who shot all those people from that tower in Austin, Texas, sir!
HARTMAN: That’s affirmative. Charles Whitman killed twenty people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas
from distances up to four hundred yards.
HARTMAN looks around.
HARTMAN: Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was?
Almost everybody raises his hand.
HARTMAN: Private Snowball?
SNOWBALL: Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir!
HARTMAN: That’s right, and do you know how far away he was?
SNOWBALL: Sir, it was pretty far! From that book suppository building, sir!
The recruits laugh at "suppository. "
HARTMAN: All right, knock it off! Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got
off three rounds with an old Italian bolt action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where
these individuals learned to shoot?
JOKER raises his hand.
HARTMAN: Private Joker?
JOKER: Sir, in the Marines, sir!
HARTMAN: In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
Camera slowly moves in on PYLE staring at HARTMAN.
“I guess he finally got it through his head that they don’t like him in Texas.”
Blueface666,
I am sure Whitman was a good shot. However, there is documented proof in his Marine record that OSWALD was very poor with a rifle. His marine records show his inability to shoot at long ranges. Although I recognize that Oliver Stone’s JFK is ficticious, Senator Long in real life did not believe many of the Warren Commission’s assumptions. While much of the following scene is pure Hollywood BS, the movie dialogue correctly articulated Long’s doubts about Oswald’s marine record on shooting.
- LONG
Don’t get me started on that. Those Warren Commission fellows were pickin’ gnat s*** out of pepper. No one’s gonna tell me that kid did the shooting job he did from that damned bookstore.
Sure, three experts and not one of them could do it! They’re telling us Oswald got off three shots with world-class precision from a manual bolt action rifle in less than six seconds – and accordin’ to his Marine buddies he got Maggie’s drawers – he wasn’t any good. Average man would be lucky to get two shots off, and I tell ya the first shot would always be the best. Here, the third shot’s perfect. Don’t make sense. And then they got that crazy bullet zigzagging all over the place so it hits Kennedy and Connally seven times. One “pristine” bullet? That dog don’t hunt.
In real life Russell Long did believe there had been a conspiracy behind JFK’s murder, BUT he did not believe that Lee Oswald was a mere decoy. On the third anniversary of the assassination – close to the time Long and Garrison had their fateful conversation (in the late 60s) – the New York Times stated, “Senator Russell Long of Louisiana suggests a new investigation because of the doubts he has. Long believes Lee Harvey Oswald played a role in the assassination but suggests that someone else was involved.”(7)
Put simply, whether one believes that John F. Kennedy was killed by one lone gunman or a conspiracy, Oliver Stone’s JFK offers only misinformation about the circumstances of the shooting. However, I think along the sames lines as Senator Long…Oswald was not innocent, but there is a wider picture that perhaps will never be known.
Chewy
forty years later and the documents are still sealed.
isn’t a conspiracy really two or more people thinking/acting together to accomplish an objective? everything is a conspiracy. george steinbrenner, cashman and torre conspire to win.
they are conspiring now to keep the documents secret.
jackie is dead. john john is dead. just who do “they” think they are protecting by circumventing full dissemination of the truth? why would things still be locked up if they were pristinely legit?
damn right i am a “conspiracy nut”. hinckly was a family acquaintence of the bush family. the night reagan got shot hinckly’s brother was to have dinner with neil bush. accident? yeah. pope john paul just happened to died days before a score of his mates all died under questionable terms. power is the ultimate aphro. never under estimate the greed of the other guy. the last florida election? that wasn’t a conspiracy? yeah.
[quote=“Chewycorns”]Blueface666,
I am sure Whitman was a good shot. However, there is documented proof in his Marine record that OSWALD was very poor with a rifle. His marine records show his inability to shoot at long ranges. [/quote]
250 feet is not long range. And a Marine who is a poor shot (especially those from the old days who trained on M-1 Garands and M-14s) is still head and shoulders above 99.99% of the population. When I was going through the US Army’s Infantry School at Ft Benning, we were trained on targets from 25m out to 300m…250 feet is only 76 meters. Marine marksmanship training is considerably more rigorous.
Have to agree with Bluey. In my very brief experience in the Australian army we used the SLR 7.62 mm rifle and trained on a 25 and 300 yard range. Nothing mysterious about hitting a slow moving target from the distance Oswald was supposed to. If you’ve ever taken a look at the ballistics of a high velocity round you’ll also see there wasn’t anything particularly magic about the bullet travelling the way it did. Contrary to popular belief it is highly common for a bulet to deflect and change direction inside a persons body before emerging somewhere else. These rounds are moving at such speeds that they simply deflect off bone, usually shattering it in the process. It can quite logically exit and enter someone else also.
BTW. Blueface, nice link. I particularly like the “reach around”.
HG
No, I just questioned the effectiveness of Allen Dulles being on the Warren Commission, just like JFK questioned his performance as Director of the CIA.[/quote]
You originally wrote, “Regarding the Warren Commission: There was no love lost between Allen Dulles and JFK - Dulles had been fired after the disasterous Bay of Pigs.” Focusing on the lack of love between Dulles and Kennedy is a strange way of questioning Dulles’ effectiveness as a member of a Warren Commission.
Dulles had a long and illustrous career; Kennedy was at least as much if not more to blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco as his CIA director; and there were numerous other high-profile members on the Warren Commission who had the cachet to correct any mistakes Dulles made, even if he was as incompetent as you suggest. As it was, Dulles left the Kennedy administration as quietly as one can under such circumstances. He didn’t even give up his post until a year after the Bay of Pigs.
The members of the Warren Commission were not selected because their careers had no mistakes; they were selected because they were all big swinging dicks whose authority would not be questioned by anyone in the establishment, and who could use that authority (along with their special powers granted by LBJ) to freely move about the halls of government to acquire the information needed for the investigation.
Yes, but we are talking about killing a president. This isn’t a typical mob hit. The mob hated the Kennedys, especially Robert, but there is no solid evidence that the mob planned an assassination attempt on President Kennedy or even knew Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) simply tacked on their suspicion of who was responsible for the conspiracy after concluding there must have been a fourth shot from a second gunman on the grassy knoll. As Posner writes in Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK:
In December, 1978, after spending nearly $5.8 million, the Select Committee reviewed a draft of the lengthy final report on both the JFK and the King assassinations. While if found that there was a likely conspiracy in the King case, it concluded the Warren Commission was basically correct and that Oswald alone had killed Kennedy and Tippit. But late that month, acoustics experts Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy came forward with their interpretation of the Dallas dictabelt recording from the police motorcycle “proving,” with a supposed 95 percent certainty, that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll. On December 29, Weiss, Aschkensay, and Dallas police officer H.B. McClain, who mistakenly thought his cycle had the open microphone, testified in a public hearing. The more than six hundred page draft was put aside, and a majority of the committee approved a preliminary nine-page “Summary of Finding and Recommendations” that concluded, based solely on the flawed acoustics findings, that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK involving a second gunman.*This is hardly a damning case. Based on faulty acoustics evidence, the HSCA changes it conclusions at the last moment and concludes there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. On no more evidence other than motive against the President’s brother, it concludes that individual mobsters may have been responsible for the conspiracy. And then it fails to connect Oswald to any of the mobsters.That flip-flop in the closing days of the committee’s existence overshadowed all its less sensational, but often solid, conclusions. Instead of quietly resolving the conspiracy questions left over from the Warren Commission, the acoustics blunder opened the door to much greater speculation about a plot. And since the committee had decided there was a conspiracy, it felt obliged, in its final report issued in July, 1979, to assess the probable identity of the conspirators.
For some time, Blakey had had a suspicion about possible organized crime involvement, partly because the mob’s well-known hatred for attorney general Robert Kennedy, and partly because of the way Ruby had killed Oswald, which he says “had all the earmarks of a mob hit.”** Although it could never prove Oswald had personal contact with any mobster, the Select Committee nevertheless, under Blakey, concluded that while the “national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, were not involved in the assassination, it could not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.” Suspicion focused on Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, Tampa godfather Santo Trafficante, and New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello.
*[Chief counsel J. Robert] Blakey later told a journalist, “If the acoustics come out that we made a mistake somewhere, I think that would end it [the talk of a conspiracy in the case]”
** Though the mob hated Robert Kennedy because he was relentlessly pursuing them, the committee implied that individual mobsters may have assassinated JFK in the hope that by their removing him, Robert would lose his power to prosecute them.
But how could Marcello possibly know that Kennedy’s death would result in the removal of Robert Kennedy or that his assassination team would succeed or that its members (which had to include the nutty Oswald) wouldn’t have been caught and spilled the beans on who had hired them? Mobsters in the U.S. have rarely gone after local judges and prosecutors, let alone tried to knock off the president of the United States just on the off-chance that it would remove his brother – the Attorney General – from power.
[Oswald] was also trained in the use of the M-1 rifle. On December 21, 1956, after three weeks of training, he shot 212, two points over the score required for a "sharpshooter" qualification, the second highest in the Marine Corps [There are only three classes of qualification in Marine Corps rifle training, so this is a bit misleading]. Such a score indicated that from a standing position, he could hit a ten-inch bulls-eye, from a minimum of 200 yards, eight times out of ten. Shortly before he left the Marine Corps, in May 1959, Oswald again certified himself on a firing range. Although he then had no motivation and his disgust for the Marines was high, he still managed to score 191, enough to qualify as a "marksman." Sgt. James Zahn, the NCO in charge of the marksmanship training unit, said, "In the Marine Corps he is a good shot, slightly above average...and as compared to the average male...throughout the United States, he is an excellent shot."Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, page 20.
This website is a must. I used to be a JFK assassination junkie. Believed anyone but Oswald was the assassin.
But i now realise that was all a bit silly.
The above website does the best job of debunking all the JFK nonesense.
salon.com/news/feature/2003/ … index.html
Check out this article from Salon this week. Regardless of whether you believe in the lone gunman theory or in some crazy conspiracy theory, I think national security is no longer at risk so the info should be released. I hope they win!!!