Six questions about the JFK Assassination

As some of you know, I have done research into the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

My interest began as I was forming political opinions early in my childhood. That wasn’t too unusual given the circumstances: we lived in Montgomery County during Watergate, and my dad worked for U.S. Customs as a lawyer. Among the things he did was review FOIA cases. FOIA wasn’t brand new then (it passed in 1967) but was novel enough that experts on it were more rare than they are today. Again, this was the time of Watergate, and most people in the area were familiar with the workings of the U.S. government and took it for granted that it represented a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. When you then do a bit of research and find out that roughly ten years before (at that time), a popular Democratic Party President was assassinated, then his alleged assassin was himself killed two days later while in police custody…well, it would be unusual not to be suspicious.

My feeling is that there was a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of Kennedy. It’s only a feeling, however; one thing I have discovered in my research is that the definitive evidence — for any theory, including the “lone gunman” — simply isn’t there, due to secrecy, meddling, incompetence, and disinformation. Listening to the “lone gunman” accounts being discussed by believers, you’ll find that they descend into the same tropes that “conspiracy theorists” do: conjecture, cavalier dismissal of sources, ad hominem, circular reasoning, the lot.

(Subsequent conspiracy allegations against the government in the decades since have also caused me to realize that most people, regardless of their supposed professionalism, prefer to champion a point of view based on their politics and then search for specific information to support them, rather than form an independent theory. 9/11, Benghazi, Russiagate, Jeffrey Epstein…all suffer from a huge degree of nonsense that’s deliberately thrown about to push a political advantage.)

So, denied the ability to verify primary evidence, I’ve concentrated on a more detached and philosophical approach. As part of that, I came up with six yes/no questions several years ago which I believe detail the best case for a conspiracy in the assassination of John Kennedy. I would submit that if any one of these questions can be answered “yes”, then the door is open for the possibility of conspiracy. I’d go so far as to say that anyone who asserts strongly that all of these can definitely be answered “no”, then we are dealing with a “coincidence theorist” — and I don’t countenance coincidence theory any more than conspiracy theory. (My definition of coincidence theory: The belief that in a world where elites are highly placed in global affairs, are highly interconnected, and capable of personal or coordinated decisions which affect the public at large, all significant events without exception are attributable to impersonal, random, and unconnected forces.)

So here are the six questions. They can be a bit dense, especially the fifth one, but I think if they are contemplated honestly, one can see that there are some undisputed assertions which, when considered as a whole, make a conspiracy the simplest explanation for the assassination.

1. Was Lee Harvey Oswald a CIA asset?
2. Was Jack Ruby involved with the mob?
3. Has evidence of this crime been fabricated, destroyed, suppressed, or altered to present a particular theory – either in favor of or against a lone gunman?
4. Is there evidence of other contemporary plots to assassinate the President?
5. Is there evidence of collusion between any two of the following elements in conducting secret or illegal activities — including assassination plots, either inside or outside the United States — prior to or contemporary with the assassination: the CIA, or IC in general; the mob; extreme right-wing organizations; anti-Castro Cubans?
6. Did the U.S. Government have the means, motive, and opportunity to conceal factual information concerning the assassination from the public?

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The Librarian Syndrome

poundAlright, okay.  I haven’t written here in eons.  Chalk it up to a perfect storm of soul-searching, personal drama, dwelling on some insignificant details like where the next meal’s coming from, and a well-deserved vacation from, to closely paraphrase Barbara Bush on post-Katrina New Orleans, “wasting my beautiful mind on something like” the news of the day.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the wherefores, because I have a different fish to fry right now.

I do not have extensive experience in politics.  Yes, I helped to lead a political party, but we weren’t exactly in the mainstream; there were many, many backrooms where true political power was exercised that I was not invited to, and I may not have accepted even if I was.  But I can safely say that I have more than the average joe, and from observation, I may have more than the dreadful excuses for punditry whose limp opinions dominate the interminable analysis that news is subjected to, thanks to the 24-hour news cycle.  (That’s a true misnomer, by the way: there simply aren’t 24 hours of news in a day, pretty much by definition, so much of what they say has no value.)  Even if one doesn’t buy that assumption, I would hope I’d be seen as possessing at least a different point of view, informed by different but no less valid information.

With that as prologue, I feel I can say two things are true about politics: Continue reading

It looks as though something has happened…

no bullshitReposting here from my entry on 43Things.

I did my usual and rather morbid yearly ponderance on the assassination of John Kennedy yesterday, and I believe today that my sister will be screening the movie JFK. It’s still interesting, and in some ways, still relevant.

There’s a logical construct called Occam’s Razor, which, generally speaking, posits that if you are given a set of possible causes for something, the simplest one is the most likely correct. This is often brought up with respect to “conspiracy theories”, and it’s helpful. For example, the whole 9/11 conspiracy thing tends to fall apart when you examine it under those conditions. Was it a controlled demolition? Okay, who did the demolishing? And what did they do it with? Did someone literally sneak in hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosives without anybody noticing, or was the building collapsed by (much more simply) having a plane fly into it?

The thing is, I’ve read the stories of many of the “lone gunmen theorists” with respect to JFK, and under the same conditions, it’s their theories which start to come apart. Oswald just happens to have been a communist defector and re-defector to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Ruby just happens to have been a mobster originally from Chicago. People with foreknowledge or who witnessed something different were guessing, they were crazy, they were mistaken, they were greedy or self-aggrandizing…after all of that, it’s pretty clear you’re dealing with a “coincidence theory” – one that’s harder to justify that just simply saying more than one person, in some sense, was involved.

Reasons why this election sucks, Part LXXXVII

whatEarlier I had posted that due to the second Presidential debate between Obama and McCain, I was more likely to vote for Cynthia McKinney.

I am now considerably less likely to vote for Cynthia McKinney.

A few parting comments:

  • This does not mean that I think any greater of Barack Obama. I can still thank my lucky stars that that particular flavor of Kool-Aid has yet to pass my lips, and I don’t have to fall back on the usual two-party nonsense.
  • I don’t, however, know who I’m going to vote for. And yes, I’ll vote for someone, or do something to deliberately register my distaste with all the nominees available. (Edit: McKinney is still a possibility; Obama is still a possibility. Hell, Nader or McCain or Barr or Chuck – Bah Gahd – Baldwin might be as well. Lord, give me strength.)
  • In the meantime…does anyone have any helpful tips on removing the imprint of a forehead from my desk?
  • *sigh* Least I know how the Republicans feel now. The ones with a high school education, anyway.

The shot heard by no one

I haven’t written here for a while, but there’s a particular reason for that.  The GP’s convention occurred the weekend before last, and it’s safe to say that it had an impact on my view of the Party and the actions that I’ve been taking and planning to take as an activist.  I figured that the best thing to do was to take some time and sort out exactly how I felt about the whole thing.  (As an aside, I do wish more people, particularly journalists, would do exactly that; however, the 24-hour news cycle demands immediate filler and “breaking news” even when it would be best to report the bare bones of a story and leave analysis to a later time, once things develop – in other words, say it is too early to tell because it is, and leave it at that for a bit.  Of course, this can’t be done, and in any case such tactics are best for those who create the policy rather than those who report on it.  I have a foot in both camps, to an extent, so I find myself in the ever-popular “weird area”.)

So my silence hasn’t been because of neglect, but rather a deliberate consideration as to my next move: what I’m going to say, how I’m going to say it, and what I’m going to do next.

In the meantime, I was struck by a few recent developments of JFK assassination lore: the publishing of a new home movie taken on the day of the assassination, and the publication of Vincent Bugliosi’s voluminous defense of the Lone Gunman Theory. Continue reading

It’d be a shame if something were to happen…

Over the weekend, I found out, a step behind the new cycle, of the death of Deborah Jean Palfrey, the “DC Madam” – a rather hastily arrived at “suicide by hanging” was the finding.  Interestingly enough, the main person championing this finding – the only one to whom she seems to have said she was going to kill herself – was Dan Moldea, who’s been saying, “Nothing to see here, citizens…move along!” for many years now, explaining away the deaths of Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, and Vince Foster among others.  In Moldea’s world, covertly despondent people cap themselves in the back of the head from twenty-five yards all the time, don’tcha know*, and he seems to have been trotted out once again in this case.

Literary criticism has its “pre-critical response”; our trivia team at the pub has its rule of “the first answer is the one you go with”…I don’t know all the particulars of the case, and I’m not sure it’s germane to the real story**, but this certainly has a particular “feel” to it, to the point that some commonfolk called it in advance – and when that’s the case, someone – someone – should sit up and take notice.

* Being a subject of Dan Moldea’s writing must be similar to being a friend of Jessica Fletcher’s. If she arrives in town to catch up with an old friend and have a cup of tea, run, do not walk outta that town. You don’t want to be the latest subject for her investigation…

** You can study a tree right down to each crag in the bark, but that’ll never tell you where it is in the forest.

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