Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mosk-warren-commission-kennedy-assassination-20131027,0,4165051.story

by standeven • 13 years ago

54 62 13 years ago

mikiem• 13 years ago

"Back, and to the left"

lazyant3• 13 years ago

Look at the plaza in google maps, if there was a shooter in front of the car and slightly to the right, that would be on the curb in plain sight (grassy knoll is perpendicular to car in deadly shot); there's "nothing" in front of the car (buildings etc to hide), it's ramp to a highway.

hacknat2• 13 years ago

The promotion of false conspiracy theories is not harmless. In the past, what one historian dubbed as the "paranoid style of American politics" has led to fear of and antipathy toward certain religions and social and political movements.

This is a stretch in my opinion. This article is thinly veiled legacy defending. Not admitting to any of the Warren Commission's flaws just plays into the hands of the conspiracy theorists. Frankly there is a lot to be suspicious about. I'm not saying there is a conspiracy, but the Warren Commission deserves to be criticized.

For example: Seth Kantor's testimony of encountering Ruby at Parkland hospital after JFKs assassination remains a baffling thread that the Warren Commission dismissed out of hand. Kantor had a very normal and somewhat productive journalistic career up until the assassination. During the Warren Commission he wasn't even suggesting any ideas for what his encounter with Ruby might have meant, he just wanted it out there that it happened. Later he became a little conspiratorial (from what I've heard), but who could blame him after watching the President get shot and running into the assassin's killer soon thereafter (if he was telling the truth)?

If I had to be I'd say there is probably no conspiracy, but I think it's very safe to say that the Warren Commission is not even close to the entire story. People can't be blamed for filling in the details with their own imagination.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

This is a stretch in my opinion.

How do things like "Obama is a Muslim!!" fit in? Or the bizarre conspiracy theories around the "crescent of embrace" having coded pro-Muslim signals? Or the ever popular "THE JEWS DID IT"?

They feel like they've created ill-will towards Jewish people, and Muslim people, and anyone who looks a bit like a Muslim.

VLM3• 13 years ago

I would disagree strongly in that they've been ineffective at accomplishing anything.

OK I've heard from every distant acquaintance and social media connection since 2007 who's even vaguely neo-con that 'bama is absolutely positively a verified practicing Muslim. OK so lets say he is for the sake of an inductive proof. He's been in power quite awhile, and my kids haven't been forced to attend Mosque school, Sunday school has not been made illegal, the rapture hasn't happened, we haven't nuked Israel, Sharia law hasn't replaced our local laws, OK you clowns, if he is in fact a Muslim, aside from the thought experiment above, give me one reason, just one, why I should care? Because it obviously doesn't seem to matter. And next election, if an out of the closet Muslim was on the ballot, I'd vote for him, after all nothing relevant happened with "'Bama the Muslim" in charge, so the next Muslim president isn't going to be any more of a problem, right?

Ditto the jew thing, where people who hate jews to a ridiculous level seem quite competent at making themselves look like idiots, which seems fairly effective at discrediting their position. Their position may or may not be correct, but if the only people pushing it are morons, then ... at least from the "victims" point of view, that's a good thing? If the only people who hate you are widely viewed as morons, that's probably a good situation to be in?

hacknat2• 13 years ago

This is a fair enough concern, but I fail to see how it applies in this situation.

phelmig• 13 years ago

I can remember a time where conspiracy theorists told everybody that the NSA is watching everybody. Crazy, huh?

Even if in the case of JFK's assassination conspiracy theories have proven wrong that is not always the case. Think of Watergate, Irak invasion because of WMD, Secret off-border CIA torture prisons and of corse the massive NSA surveillance scandal (Thanks Snowden!)...

hitchhiker999• 13 years ago

Why is it that in a lot of recent American articles, the words 'conspiracy theory' are invariably linked with 'nutjob' 'wacko' 'tinfoilhat'. (This is the 'inception' of conspiracy theories.)

I am a European wacko and proud; I believe that whole JFK thing was highly suspect.

fit2rule4• 13 years ago

Because you can't have control over a population like America without resorting to hatred and bigotry, plain and simple.

Time and again, we've seen that conspiracy theories OFTEN prove to be correct. Until that happens, however, it behooves the powers that be to draw lines in the sand - and calling someone a crackpot sure is a nice line.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Time and again, we've seen that conspiracy theories OFTEN prove to be correct.

We have?

adventured3• 13 years ago

There has long been a collective delusion in America, that for example, our government is pure of heart and wouldn't do the horrifically evil things some other governments do. Because, you know, we're supposed to be the good guys and all that made up jazz. Here to make the world safe for Democracy. Despite the fact that the US Govt. has been doing horrifically evil things for most of its history. An awful lot of the popular conspiracy theories in America have to do with the government. One could certainly also argue that the government has a vested PR interest in making conspiratorial types look like nutjobs.

If a leader is assassinated in most parts of the world, one of the first things that springs to mind is: coup. If it happens in America, it's assumed to be a nutjob, a "lone gunman." Americans have been extraordinarily naive about their own government, and perhaps critically far too much so in the last four or five decades (in which the US became the sole superpower and all the responsibility that entails).

Even now as our government slaughters civilians with drones, tortures people, threatens allies, tries to start new wars regularly (Syria), spies on every world leader they can get their hands on, abuses every friendly relationship in just about every way possible - Americans still think it's all for the best, to fight "terrorism" or some other horse shit made up excuse.

In a word, Americans don't want to believe their government has become evil. So into the sand the head goes.

VLM3• 13 years ago

A good analysis but there's also some wish fulfillment WRT being the world policeman and having the largest .mil in the world etc. Wouldn't you REALLY like the guys in charge to be nice guys? Even if you have to overlook some things to make it appear that way?

This is the source of the intense push to extremism and denial of much more minor, yet more likely, events. I strongly suspect Cuba was involved in the whole JFK thing. Now to discredit my view you'll get screaming nutjob conformist extremists claiming "I" must think cuban special forces paratrooper sniper army teams blew away JFK and ridiculous stuff like that in order to enforce conformity.

What I actually personally think is he was a nutcase and most likely went to the Cuban embassy and told some minor functionary his plan and asked for cash or help, at which time the Cuban embassy functionary, if he wasn't a total idiot, told him he's nuts and get the heck out, they're not going to help start WW3. Maybe the Cubans even told the SS but the SS blew them off too (just another nutcase or some triple crossing secret agent BS). Maybe the Cubans even gave him $10 and some bus tickets just to go the heck away. But after it actually happened, the whole thing has to be buried or it turns into an icky international incident. So my view is technically Cuba was involved, its just not at the level that extremists on either side claim in order to poison the well and prevent any further discussion. Or maybe the local police chief who laughed at him instead of reporting him was "involved". Or some SS agent who thought Oswald was a joke was "involved".

My point is there was a coverup of bad (sorta) judgment not an elaborate conspiracy / coup. Only sorta bad in that you can't assume every nut will actually do something, that would be a massive denial of service vector, handy to implement if you were actually planning something real...

I suspect that in a century when its all dusty and blown over, someone will release a letter some crackpot wrote to the Cuban ambassador explaining exactly what he planned to do (and did in fact do) and asking for help. Was it good to prevent WW3 in the 60s by covering it up? Yeah probably. Is it still a good idea in 2013? Eh. In 2113 will it matter? Probably not, so we'll finally get the truth.

Its the difference between information and actionable information. So the Cubans knew what was going to happen because he told them, well who cares what matters is what action is taken. In the 60s when the blood was still wet that would have meant WW3. Until Castro dies I guarantee nothing will be released because otherwise people will be asking for his head. In fact I'd give it an extra decade after Castro dies just to make sure theres no possibility of any course of action.

As for a conspiracy, well, it seems to have worked, JFK ended up fairly dead, now if there was a high level conspiracy you can examine history and see what they unleashed, which is pretty much ... nothing. Not even something failed. Other than certain Cuban political leaders getting downgraded from dislike to being more hated than any other human on the planet beyond any public rational level, not much really happened.

stephen_g• 13 years ago

People just tend to associate the term 'conspiracy theory' just with the ones that are actually crazy (such as the suggestion that we didn't land on the moon, or that the US Government perpetrated the 9/11 attack). And on top of that, many of the ones that actually turn out to be true do just sound crazy at first (who would have believed anyone last year if you told them the NSA was collecting metadata on almost everything that happens on the Internet and millions of US citizen's phone records etc.?)...

FedRegister• 13 years ago

Who would have believed anyone last year if you told them the NSA was collecting metadata on almost everything that happens on the Internet and millions of US citizen's phone records etc?

Anybody who was paying attention and had heard of Mark Kline and William Binney. The whole NSA story isn't new. Part of what makes Edward Snowden's leak of documents as powerful as it does is that it corroborates many stories that former intelligence officers have told about the internal workings of the agency.

jffry• 13 years ago

  ...who would have believed anyone last year if you told them the NSA was collecting metadata on almost everything...

Anybody who had been paying attention over the past ten years?

fit2rule4• 13 years ago

They're only crazy until they're unproven. Beyond that, they become history. Why everyone forgets that history is thus, crazy, beats me.

smegel• 13 years ago

Science at the time may have "proved" the origin of the bullets, but I thought modern science, including audio processing was a bit more ambiguous....

hugh4life• 13 years ago

"The promotion of false conspiracy theories is not harmless. In the past, what one historian dubbed as the "paranoid style of American politics" has led to fear of and antipathy toward certain religions and social and political movements."

The allusion to "paranoid style" is rather galling because that essay attacks right wingers exclusively... and there is no doubt whatsoever that the Warren Commission purposely downplayed Oswald's communist background as not to hurt Johnson's re-election.

oceanstone• 13 years ago

One thing that I'd recommend any supporter of the official story* (~1963) to look into, and invite them to elaborate on, is the story of Eugene Dinkins.

http://themostdangerousbookintheworld.com/index.php/hot-arti...

*Note: As of 1979, the official story changed. A Congressional Report from 1979 suggested that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy. This was 16 years after the Warren Commission.

http://www.examiner.com/article/congressional-report-john-ke...

jakeogh• 13 years ago

Magic bullet. ✓

"The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it." -John F. Kennedy April 27, 1961 https://archive.org/download/jfks19610427/jfk_1961_0427_pres...

adventured3• 13 years ago

It's an excellent quote. Sadly by the early 1960s the monster that would make America no longer a free and open society had already been birthed. It has been nothing but secrecy and Constitutional abuses ever since, with one piece after another of the American Republic being consumed by the military industrial complex. I suspect JFK knew what was happening, given Eisenhower's warning, and he most likely had conversation/s with Eisenhower about it. From what I recall, Eisenhower warned JFK about forces inside the government that would try to push him into a conflict in southeast Asia.

Now? Now we've got a psychotic general, among others - collectively potentially more powerful than the President given the blackmail material the NSA probably has on Obama after having illegally wiretapped him as a Senator for years - pointing his power at The People, and spouting off about how the media needs to be stopped. It has been a gradual coup against the democratic process and now secrecy reigns supreme.

NAFV_P• 13 years ago

If you want to find a conspiracy, the best place to look is a conspiracy theory.

semjada• 13 years ago

Come on, who bumped this shit? Or was it several of you, in collusion?

pgreenwood• 13 years ago

Some say the downvoters all died under mysterious circumstances.

maxden2• 13 years ago

And if a last-minute interrogation of Oswald had not delayed his transfer, Ruby would not have been at the jail in time to kill Oswald. These unfortunate coincidences are not, however, consistent with a conspiracy.

That seems consistent with a conspiracy though; ie: Ruby wasn't ready, so delay Oswald.

Kadin• 13 years ago

Or it was just random chance, and absent Oswald's delay, Ruby never would have killed him, and we wouldn't know anything about Jack Ruby today. (He'd just have been some dude who thought about offing Oswald but never quite got the chance, the story probably only retold to drunks at his bar for the rest of his life.)

There are any number of other things things that didn't happen -- if Oswald had been walked out of the building early, maybe he'd have been run over by a bus, and we'd have a bus-driver conspiracy theory instead of a Jack Ruby-based one. But he didn't, and wasn't, and so that theory doesn't exist.

It's easy to see conspiracies in long chains of events that have unfortunate consequences. But if you look at unfortunate events that are demonstrably not conspiracies (e.g. power plant or aerospace accidents), you'll see the same sort of stupendously-unlikely chains of events feeding into each other. They in fact do tend to be very unlikely, generally coincidental, events, but it's important to keep in mind that we're only looking at the events that lined up in such a way to produce a particularly bad outcome. All the times that little failures happened but didn't produce the meltdown or explosion or whatever, we don't pay any attention to.

Such is the case with conspiracy theories: it's easy to look at something after the fact and say "what are the odds of that happening?!" when in reality, the odds of it happening were 100%: they happened. (And if they hadn't happened, we wouldn't be remarking on them.) But the human mind seems to deal poorly with coincidences, so there is a desire to assign agency to random chance.

maxden2• 13 years ago

I agree that it could have been random chance, and any number of things could have or did happen to make events happen as they did. It depends on how far back you want to go to highlight pivotal events, or with the butterfly effect, consider every miniscule event is important to the end result.

Absolutely agree with aerospace accidents occurring because of events that by themselves wouldn't be fatal, but the combination is.

I still think the original articles attempt at proving there was no conspiracy by using that example is a poor choice, because if you did want Ruby to kill Oswald, and the timing was wrong, Oswald needed to be delayed.

singularity20015• 13 years ago

Everything surrounding the De Mohrenschildt persona is most peculiar. His brother founder of Radio Free Europe, his close connection to Jackie Kennedy, his correspondence with H.W.Bush

oh and let's not forget Hoovers 29.11.63 memo on "information furnished by George Bush of Central Intelligence Agency"

podperson2• 13 years ago

It's not that there's no conspiracy, it's that there are too many credible, and not even mutually exclusive, options (some with strong supporting evidence) to pick from.

My three favorite isolated pieces of evidence: (a) the pristine "magic bullet" found on the stretcher JFK was brought in on (it wasn't just magic how it supposedly hit two people 1/12 of a second apart, but it took no damage in the process, and was found lying on a stretcher), (b) the perfect handprint of Lee Harvey Oswald found on the rifle by Dallas PD -- which happened to have custody to Lee Harvey Oswald's corpse -- after the rifle was returned by the FBI lab which found no prints at all, and (c) the implausibly large number of witnesses with strong mob connections (many of whom died in suspicious circumstances over the next ten years). Each of those, on its own, is enough to launch a thousand conspiracy theories.

BTW: I really love American Tabloid by James Ellroy. It doesn't pretend to be "true" but it's a lot more compelling that JFK.

Anyway, in 2025 the LA Times can declare that Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes.

lazyant3• 13 years ago

regarding a) magic bullet, it wasn't pristine; it was deformed but not longitudinally but sideways, also they have fired the same bullets/rifle and it doesn't deform if it doesn't touch a bone

podperson2• 13 years ago

Interesting, I did not know that. (I guess I don't obsess enough over it!) It's still very unconvincing (it didn't just "touch" a bone).

There is far more weirdness in the case and there's plenty of collateral evidence that the FBI's modus operandi at the time was to frame suspects in high profile cases -- along with anyone J. Edgar Hoover simply didn't like -- to reinforce its reputation for infallibility.

Anyhow, the basic argument "if there was a conspiracy, someone would have talked by now" is disingenuous. All kinds of people have talked -- so many that it's impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.

jstalin3• 13 years ago

For those who are pointing to the "magic bullet" theory, it's all a matter of understanding how both Kennedy and Connally were seated in the limo. No "magic" bullet required:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_bullet_theory#Theorized...

I grew up with a steady diet of conspiracy theories. My mom could be considered a guru on JFK. But after venturing out on my own and reading actual source materials, like many of the interviews in the Warren report, such as the doctors, Marina Oswald, and even the bus driver that picked Oswald up after the murder, makes it clear that Oswald did it.

I'll admit that there are still some weird parts to the story, like Oswald's visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico city, but I'm willing to bet that Oswald was some sort of CIA source or contact and that fact needed to be covered up. It would have been supremely embarrassing. But I don't think that there's any wider conspiracy.

Edit: For those that are interested, I think the McAdams site is the best "anti-conspiracy" site out there, despite its 1990 internet look: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm

mhartl2• 13 years ago

So much of the conspiracy theorists' case rests on the "magic bullet" that you'd think its definitive refutation would have chastened them. Perhaps my favorite source is this video, which uses the Zapruder film and computer animation techniques to recreate the scene:

http://youtu.be/DSBXW1-VGmM

It's clear from the timing and the geometry that a single bullet, originating from the Texas School Book Depository, did indeed hit both Kennedy and Connally.

Another cornerstone of the conspiracy case is that Kennedy's head moved "back and to the left" after being hit, when in fact the Zapruder film shows a sharp movement forward immediately after impact. This fact was uncovered by, of all people, Richard Feynman: http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro/wound... (Warning: graphic imagery).

The real world is messy, and conspiracy theorists will always be able to find things to stoke their suspicions, even though many of the key "facts" underpinning the conspiracy theories have been debunked in the years since the assassination. It's clear at this point that no amount of evidence will convince some people that Kennedy was killed not by an elaborate plot but rather by a lone nutjob. But Oswald had the means (rifle & training), motive (desire, as a 24-year-old loser, to prove his importance to the world), and opportunity (a job in a building that happened to lie on the motorcade route published in the paper on 11/20 and 11/21). As Robert Oswald, Lee Harvey's brother, put it, the Kennedy assassination was one of those "happenstances of history"—undeniably, a bitter pill to swallow.

jstalin3• 13 years ago

The stabilized version of the Zapruder film is instructive:

[WARNING GORE] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTBInhsKW3E

Of course, that then leads to the conspiracy theorists claiming that the Zapruder film has been altered too. In fact, they believe that, incredibly, all available evidence was tampered with.

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

The real world is messy, and conspiracy theorists will always be able to find things to stoke their suspicions

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that conspiracy theorists will often latch onto one detail that they think is odd, that doesn't quite jive with what you would expect from the official account, and use it as the basis of saying that the official account is a lie.

(Expect for a hyper-sentitivity to weirdness, that ignores the messy reality of reality..) So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a reason why the official story doesn't fit the observed facts. The problem occurs when they fail to ask themselves why that weirdness makes any more sense in their version of events.

Since what I just said there might not ring true, I'll give an example:

(The best example of this I have is "Why wouldn't they just actually shoot him from the book depository? It would be far simpler, shooters from different locations buys them little and seemingly serves to do nothing other than raise the suspicion of people like yourself.")

For various silly reasons, some "9/11 Truthers" think that empty remote controlled planes, probably controlled by the CIA or some other shadowy organization, were used in the 9/11 attacks. What they can never explain to me is why the CIA, or other shadowy organization, would use empty remote controlled planes instead of actually just hijacking planes.

Why all the stagecraft to imitate something that you could just actually do?

singularity20015• 13 years ago

yes, everything points to cover-ups of CIA connections and Mafia-police connections. very embarrassing but no definite proof of wider conspiracy.

Went2NZ4JFK• 13 years ago

I confirmed one of the claims in the movie JFK myself.

I'm always more interested in proof of a conspiracy, than in evidence of any particular parties guilt. This is usually easier to find, because the conspiracy itself leaves more evidence in harder to control situations than the crime does.

One good example of this is something I was able to confirm myself by direct examination.

In JFK there's a scene that really struck me, where Kevin Costner is getting filled in by Mr. X in Washington. He tells JFK that the papers in New Zealand have full write-ups of LHO that would be impossible without a pre-planted cover up story.

So, one day I found myself in New Zealand and went to a university library and looked up the papers on that day.

LHO was arrested approx. 1:40pm, Dallas time. Time Zone differences: NZ is UTC +12 hours, Dallas is UTC -6 hours. Thus LHO was arrested on November 23rd, at 7:40AM NZ Time.

Yet the morning papers on the 23rd, a Saturday, which came out between 8AM and 10AM (it varies by the edition) had a write up of LHO's dossier.

In the 1960s they did have telephones so the news could have easily reached NZ by then. However, printing tonnes of newspapers takes time, as does writing a story and distributing the papers.

The papers likely went to print in the middle of the night before-- which is before the assassination even happened.

I wanted proof, and I got it.

The people who don't believe are not interested in evidence and will take any rationalizations presented to them at face value. This is the reason that, every year or every 5 years, in November, we get these asinine "there was no conspiracy" stories like this one.

Check my account name, I won't be back (assuming I don't get hellbanned for the "crime" of disagreeing with the hive mind, like so many do.)

lazyant3• 13 years ago

that paper was printed in the afternoon http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/newspapers/sta...

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

So the conspiracy decided to notify a newspaper in New Zealand in advance? And none of the many, many people involved in putting it together and printing it noticed the rather large cover story that hadn't happened yet?

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

This is a perfect example of what I have talked about elsewhere in this thread: finding a weirdness, declaring it a supporting detail of your pet conspiracy theory, and absolutely failing to describe how the detail is any less weird when considered in the context of your pet theory. Assuming that the CIA or Illuminati or whoever killed JFK: Why the hell would they tip off New Zealand newspapers of all people?

Lets do some role-playing to explore the full extent of this absurdity:

"Alright Stan, lets go over the checklist one last time"

"Welp, we have all the bullets and guns already, and both shooters say they are good to go. Escape routes are already planned, and Ruby knows his lines. I think that just about covers it.. oh shit..."

"What?"

"We forgot to tip off New Zealand!"

"W-What?"

"We forgot to tip off New Zealand. Boss says that New Zealand newspapers have to know about this before it goes down."

"Why the hell..."

"Hey man, orders are orders. Something about the international dateline I guess?"

"....that is not how the international dateline works."

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

There's no doubt it was a conspiracy. The Warren Commission is the most famous, but most people are unaware of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, which ruled in 1978 that JFK's assassination was part of a conspiracy and that even further, Cuba and the USSR had no involvement in it.

po8crg• 13 years ago

So, it's just a coincidence that it happened on the day that the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast?

philwelch• 13 years ago

The frightening thing is that all of the usual suspects--CIA, FBI, Mafia--committed assassinations regularly and it would have not been out of character for them. And for most motives, you can't count out LBJ either--whoever wanted Kennedy dead likely had some belief that LBJ would be better for their purposes, and what better way to ensure that than to involve him in the plot?

On the other hand, knowing JFK it could have just as easily been a jealous husband.

nedlerner• 13 years ago

I highly recommend the book 'Crossfire' by Jim Marrs which is full of interviews and perspectives the Warren Commission chose to ignore. Marrs was a Texas new reporter at this time. The term 'conspiracy theory' has no place in a functioning democracy - if we don't question authority and keep our wits about us our democratic rights are quickly stripped away as we increasingly find

Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy

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