

Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy - standeven
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mosk-warren-commission-kennedy-assassination-20131027,0,4165051.story

======
hacknat
_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.

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

~~~
VLM
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?

~~~
DanBC
I guess that position is easier to hold if you're not the brown person being
given extra attention every time you enter the US. This happens even to
Olympic athletes.

([http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mo-farah-
reve...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mo-farah-reveals-he-
was-detained-in-terror-bungle-at-us-airport-8433440.html))

> Farah moved to America last year, but despite his international fame he says
> he frequently gets stopped at customs because of his Somali origin.

> He told the Sun on Sunday: "I couldn't believe it. Because of my Somali
> origin I get detained every time I come through US customs. This time I even
> got my medals out to show who I am, but they wouldn't have it."

([http://www.channel4.com/news/mo-farah-stopped-at-customs-
hes...](http://www.channel4.com/news/mo-farah-stopped-at-customs-hes-not-
alone))

~~~
VLM
I think our discussions are diverging in that I was specifically commenting on
the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theory as being pretty much irrelevant, and
you're referring to our countries long tradition of making life hard for brown
people since 1500 or so, which is not new or a conspiracy or a new result of a
conspiracy. Or rephrasing it we've never historically needed a conspiracy to
mistreat non-whites.

------
jstalin
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](http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_bullet_theory#Theorized...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_bullet_theory#Theorized_path_of_the_bullet_CE399)

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](http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm)

~~~
mhartl
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](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...](http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro/wound.html)
( _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.

~~~
jlgreco
> _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?

~~~
dllthomas
I don't really disbelieve the official account of 9/11 in any strong sense,
but your reasoning here seems silly. Why not hijack a plane and crash it into
a building? Maybe because you'd _really_ rather not be in a plane that crashes
into a building!

~~~
jlgreco
If we are assuming a shadowy organization of conspirators, the lead
conspirators don't have to be in the plane themselves. The idea that the CIA,
able to find people that are willing to remotely fly a plane into a building
full of people, cannot find somebody willing to actually get onto that plane
with some box cutters (or barring that, cannot coerce somebody into doing
that) is silly. Hell, they could keep it simply and just find some radical
muslims to do it...

Remotely controlled planes are needlessly complex with too many opportunities
for failure or discovery. Any weirdness surrounding the planes and their
alleged passengers is _far_ better explained by _" reality is weird"_.
Furthermore, that weirdness isn't resolved by "empty planes" since you are now
supposing that the conspirators introduced those weirdnesses while inventing
fake passengers. Why would they do that? Is that them tipping their hand to
the conspiracy theorists?

~~~
dllthomas
Remotely controlled planes is done all the time. I don't see how that's got a
significantly greater chance of failure or discovery. It also potentially
reduces the number of people needing to be involved.

~~~
jlgreco
The problem isn't remotely controlling the plane. The problem is all the
problems _not actually doing it_ introduces. You now have more, _many more_ ,
people that need to be involved because you now need to fake grieving families
for 246 different dead people who never died (or never existed, depending on
who you ask). You also need to ensure that nobody notices missing drone'd 757s
(or worse, make sure that nobody notices the planes weren't 757s...), you need
to ensure that nobody notices the planes are empty, and need to somehow get
those empty planes into the airlines systems without anyone becoming
suspicious of that, or trying to sell tickets for them. On top of all of that,
you then still have a few live pilots who are witnesses you wouldn't have to
otherwise worry about.

It is simpler to just find a few lackies to _actually do it_.

~~~
dllthomas
Oh, right, missed the "empty plane" in your original. I agree that would be
far more difficult. "Spooks crashing plane by suicide" vs. "spooks crashing
plane by remote" don't seem too radically different in likelihood. "There
weren't actually planes full of people" is unlikely even compared to these.

None of these, I should note, seem terribly likely.

~~~
jlgreco
Aye, rigging a real plane with a real schedule to be remote controlled would
make a great deal more sense.

------
podperson
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.

~~~
lazyant
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

~~~
podperson
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.

------
jakeogh
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...](https://archive.org/download/jfks19610427/jfk_1961_0427_press.flac)

~~~
adventured
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.

------
hitchhiker999
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.

~~~
stephen_g
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.?)...

~~~
fit2rule
They're only crazy until they're unproven. Beyond that, they become history.
Why everyone forgets that history is thus, crazy, beats me.

~~~
jlgreco
No, some very certainly are crazy, and are likely the product of mental
illness. See: The Queen is a lizard.

It's a shame that _" The CIA is making shit up again"_ and _" The CIA shot
somebody"_ gets mixed in with _" The Queen is a Lizard"_, and _" The CIA
orchestrated an absurdly needlessly complex plot to shoot somebody from all
sorts of bizarre angles in broad daylight in plain view of the public, when
shooting them from one angle would have sufficed."_

I mean seriously, if you tell me that the CIA goaded Oswald into doing it,
then had Oswald killed, that is something I'd consider plausible. I see no
proof for it, but it is something that could have happened; I'm not going to
say for sure that it _didn 't_, because I don't know that it didn't. When
people start ranting about magic bullets and multiple shooters though, that is
an express-line into crazy-town. It's just making shit up, and I don't
understand why. Was _" The CIA had Oswald do it"_ not a fun enough plot or
something?

Yeah yeah, _" The CIA had to be sure, so they had a backup sniper."_ Fine. Why
the hell would that second sniper not be in the book depository as well?

~~~
fit2rule
You never know. Maybe there is an uber-lizard-race ruling the world. It would
certainly explain a lot of the inhumane things going on.

:P

------
maxden
_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
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.

~~~
maxden
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.

------
ChrisAntaki
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...](http://themostdangerousbookintheworld.com/index.php/hot-
articles/item/1-the-strange-tale-of-eugene-dinkins-by-robert-mitchell)

*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...](http://www.examiner.com/article/congressional-report-john-kennedy-
assassination-probably-a-conspiracy)

------
Went2NZ4JFK
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.)

~~~
lazyant
that paper was printed in the afternoon
[http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/newspapers/sta...](http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/newspapers/star23nov1963/)

------
philwelch
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
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

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

~~~
pgreenwood
Some say the downvoters all died under mysterious circumstances.

------
singularity2001
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"

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

:)

------
mikiem
"Back, and to the left"

~~~
lazyant
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.

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

------
smegel
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
"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.

