The House narrowly defeated an amendment today which would have ended the NSA’s surveillance program on Americans. Zero Hedge has the list of those who vote aye and nay, so you can see which side of this your own Congresscritter fell (mine, a liberal Democrat – and long-term political hack here in my State – voted to keep the NSA program…but don’t be fooled, this was bi-partisan both in voting to end and voting to keep).
Its good to keep in mind why we have this massive intelligence system – because on December 7th, 1941, we were caught with our pants down. From that day to this, the United States government has been determined not to be surprised – and so a gigantic intelligence bureaucracy has been built up, and like all government bureaucracies, it has become self-perpetuating – and the actual results of the bureaucracy are irrelevant.
Think about it – when you actually review the events leading up to December 7th, it is plain as a pikestaff that the Japanese were going to attack, and as they were going to attack, it is just a simple leap of logic to understand that they would attack the strongest military force the United States possessed in the Pacific – our fleet. The proper response to all this would have been aggressive patrolling by the entire fleet…seeking out any approaching threat and dealing with it in conventional, naval battle once the aggressive intent was determined (in this case, when the enemy fleet was found a thousand miles away from Japanese waters and heading towards US waters). But that entails risk – and the risk of failure; two things politicians and most senior military leaders shy away from (honestly, for the most part no one is more craven than a senior admiral or general…having risen to the top, their primary purpose in life is to remain at the top and eventually retire without any mishap…only a very few understand their actual job and are willing to put it all on the line for it). And, so, we were “surprised” – and the response of our leaders, political and military, was not to change to using foresight and courage, but to crouch down and build up an intelligence system which would, allegedly, prevent a repeat.
It didn’t work, of course. We still got 9/11 – heck, even earlier, back in 1950 we were caught flat-footed by hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops in Korea. Think about that! This was hordes of Chinese troops streaming in to the narrow peninsula of Korea and we missed it! It didn’t work because intelligence information is only useful if you are determined to act upon it – there were indications of Chinese intervention (just as there were indications of a pending terrorist attack in 2001), but its not like intelligence will ever give you the time and date of the enemy attack, except in the rarest of instances. In other words, unless you are a person determined to resolve the problem, no amount of intelligence will do you any good – no matter how reliable and comprehensive it is, if you’ve got no guts then you’re not going to do what is necessary to make having the intelligence worthwhile.
Had we desired to prevent war with Japan, win the war in Korea or prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then certain policies had to be enacted – risky policies which could go very wrong. We’d have had to been willing to go after the problem – to solve the problem. But, as I said, doing such risks defeat – and politicians and generals don’t like defeat. To put it harshly, a politician or general would rather have people and troops massacred in a “surprise” attack than risk their careers by taking actions which might forestall an attack and solve the problem. We’re in a defensive crouch with a massive, intrusive intelligence system because of this – and not only does it put our liberties at risk, it doesn’t even start to resolve the problems which face us.
We have to get out of the defensive crouch. Certainly, we need intelligence on enemy plans – but the intelligence is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And even without intelligence of enemy plans, we still need to act when a threat is perceived – and act in a decisive manner which will solve the problem, even at the risk of defeat to ourselves. Better, in the end, to be beaten in battle than to continue to have this continual erosion of our position as we sit crouched behind the NSA, hoping that we can just prevent a major attack until after the next election cycle.
End the NSA program – end all government data collection attempts which are not specifically directed at enemies. Build and maintain our military to a point where we can instantly apply American power anywhere in the world – and when a threat emerges, go after it. Sure, try diplomacy, first, but let all the world know that a threat to the United States will either be completely and finally resolved at the negotiating table or it will be completely and finally resolved on the battlefield…and we won’t be squeamish about attacking first if we believe that diplomacy is getting us nowhere.
Blogs For Victory 
as a nation we are toast. It will take a total collapse, a revolution, or both to save us.
I believe that is the master goal any way.
Mark
we are NOT in a defensive crouch…..we are in an OFFENSIVE DRIVE against our own citizens by this evil regime.
Does a conspiracy theory drive these beliefs? Just how far beyond “our respectful opposition” does “evil regime” lie? Just wondering.
” Just how far beyond “our respectful opposition” does “evil regime” lie? Just wondering.”
Don’t remember seeing you ask that kind of question of the people screaming “bushhitler” all those years. I would ask why. However it would be a pointless question.
GMB: Don’t remember seeing you ask that kind of question of the people screaming “bushhitler” all those years.
Then you weren’t paying attention. I did it more than once on this site, as well as others. E.g., on this site I took to task someone (I don’t remember the name, but he commented regularly) who tried to argue that 9/11 was a home-grown conspiracy, that the WTC towers were actually brought down by charges in the buildings, and that the Bush Admin. was behind it. Likewise, I took to task others who thought the invasion of Iraq was yet another conspiracy by the Bush Admin. to obtain oil. Granted, I had issues about the initiation (and conduct) of the war, but they didn’t involve thoughts of conspiracy. And many times I mentioned that I thought the notion of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was ridiculous ever since Hillary Clinton first brought it up.
Now it appears that the style of shoe extremists seem to prefer is on the other foot. But simply because a given conspiracy fits better when it’s on the right foot doesn’t make it any more true.
rico, you are the one who posited a “conspiracy theory” regarding the NSA issue, so this is all yours. You can simper and snipe all you want about a “… given conspiracy…… on the right foot..” but as you are the one who seems to want to find or create a conspiracy ( “Does a conspiracy theory drive these beliefs….?”) it looks like you are just going to have to play with yourself on this one.
Amazona: rico, you are the one who posited a “conspiracy theory” regarding the NSA issue, so this is all yours.
Actually, Mark is the one posited the “conspiracy theory regarding the NSA issue”, and did it by tying it in with other conspiracy theories. So what, exactly, are you suggesting should be “all mine”?
I’ve been wanting to talk about this overall topic for a while now.
First, to Snowden. He didn’t do a darned thing to endanger national security. Does anyone believe for a minute that it was not already common knowledge that the government was monitoring international phone calls and emails?
The horse business is heavily populated with people from other countries, particularly Central and South America and Mexico. I can’t even guess about how many times I have sat in on, or overheard, conversations about the fact that communications had to be carefully phrased to avoid catching the attention of the government, and this goes back more than 20 years. So the information about that kind of monitoring is hardly news, and hardly anything that could interfere with national security. If a Mexican horse groom knew this in 1998, you can be pretty sure terrorists knew it as well.
(Terrorists probably did NOT know how we used bank records and other financial footprints to track terrorists, until the NYT obligingly told them during the Bush administration, and that slipped by with hardly a blip on Leftist radar . THAT was a major security leak, but no one cared, because it was a Lefty icon blabbing about a Bush policy.)
We have hysterics about Edward Snowden, whose only real crime was telling Americans that THEY were having every single telephone call and email recorded by their own government. And this is something we needed to know, and we didn’t know it, and it pissed us off, and it was egg on the face of the people doing it, so they needed a fall guy.
Yet Joe Biden showing off how in the loop he was on the Bin Laden thing and telling the world the raid was done by Seal Team Six was fine, though it actually ended up costing American lives, and forcing families into hiding. No big deal, says the Left.
You know who REALLY needed taking down? Whoever talked about Valerie Plame, that’s who. Oh, not her husband, who bragged for years “..my wife works for the CIA..” or the government official who told Robert Novak “..his (Joe Wilson’s) wife works for the CIA, you know…”. Not them. Not any of those on the DC Beltway cocktail circuit who talked about it for years. Not even Richard Armtiage, who actually mentioned it once upon a time.
No, for that alleged transgression, the appointed fall guy had to be someone—-anyone—from the Bush administration, and it was a twofer. It not only slimed an innocent man just because he was part of that administration, it provided cover for a blown CIA operation after one of those associated with it—-the aforementioned Ms Plame—-stupidly made a donation to the DNC under her own name and listed, as her employer, the supposedly secret phony business the CIA had set up as a cover for a supposedly covert operation.
Duh.
The cherry-picking by the Left regarding what leak of what information is how dangerous and to whom is ongoing Theater of the Absurd. Wikileaks/Julian Assange/Joe Wilson/Joe Biden/the New York Times—all OK. Scooter Libby, Edward Snowden—–get a rope!
As long as the administration can keep the spotlight focused on Edward Snowden, in a Where’s Waldo? scenario, they can keep us from thinking about the fact that it was so easy for this fairly low-level employee to get access to all this information, as well as the fact that our own government has been compiling information about us by spying on what we thought were our private conversations.
“Don’t give a thought to the fact that every one of your emails is in an archive somewhere—don’t you realize that SNOWDEN IS STILL IN THE MOSCOW AIRPORT !!!!!!!!!
Don’t be at all nervous about how porous our so-called security systems are, but focus on whether or not Snowden might go to South America!!!”
We had a low-level psychiatric basket case gaining access to all sorts of supposedly secret and important information he then handed off to Assange, and we’re not supposed to find that worrisome. We had a low-level employee learning about all this supposedly vital-to-national-security-super-secret-protected stuff, and we’re not supposed to question the competence of those in charge.
And we have Uncle Snoop prowling through our underwear drawer, and we are told it is necessary for national security. Oh, by the way, you just keep looking at this, and don’t peek over your shoulder that, at the fact that we couldn’t even identify and watch people who not only telegraphed the message WE ARE DANGEROUS TO THE UNITED STATES but who were identified as such in a warning to our government about them, from a government smart enough to recogize them for what they were.
Maybe we should worry less about recording Aunt Edna’s emailed recipe for Apple Brown Betty and pay a little more attention to people in a demographic known to be hostile to us.
Yes, I am talking about (gasp!) PROFILING !!! (As an aside, isnt’ it funny to see how quickly some of the sheeple have picked up on that word?) But yeah. When it is spring and you know bears are coming out of hibernation hungry and grumpy, with new cubs, you don’t warn people to watch out for bunnies and bluebirds. You PROFILE and tell them to watch out for bears.
“when you actually review the events leading up to December 7th, it is plain as a pikestaff that the Japanese were going to attack, and as they were going to attack, it is just a simple leap of logic to understand that they would attack the strongest military force the United States possessed in the Pacific – our fleet. ”
Except it wasn’t that obvious then. Hindsight is 20/20. The reason it’s considered a “surprise” attack is because we weren’t expecting it.
Casper,
As a teacher of “history” you sould know better than most this was not a matter of 20/20 hindsight. Radio signals, et.al., warned everyone including the 2,335 U.S. servicemen that were killed and 1,143 were wounded.
“…we weren’t expecting it” is total Liberal BS. If you are going to “teach” history–at least learn it first.
db, remember, with a Dem in charge things like Pear Harbor and the Boston Marathon massacre are never failures of intelligence—or, rather, the treatment of what has been learned—while under a Republican president 9/11 was thoroughly telegraphed and a failure at the highest level.
“If you are going to “teach” history–at least learn it first.”
We could (and have..) said the same thing to him about the Constitution. I wonder if his Hillsdale course changed his mind about any of the wackadoo Lefty spins he used to put on THAT—such as the belief that if you believe in the Constitution as it is written that means you believe in a return to slavery, etc.
casper is probably still teaching that FDR’s policies pulled us out of the (first) Great Depression. You know, the one caused by capitalist greed…..
” Basically, DB is suggesting that Casper is teaching a revisionist version of history
Or he is totally ignorant of the REAL truth, OR he is lying…..take your pick
Ricorun, and in part-Casper,
From An Interview with Robert B. Stinnett by Douglas Cirignano
On November 25, 1941 Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto sent a radio message to the group of Japanese warships that would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7. Newly released naval records prove that from November 17 to 25 the United States Navy intercepted eighty-three messages that Yamamoto sent to his carriers. Part of the November 25 message read: “…the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow…”
is just one of many sites, book and other material that support exactly what I stated. Have you even looked at some of the books that they use in the public
indoctrinationeducation system system today? It is a whole cloth rewrite of history.You can also start at places like Naval Messages Intercepted between 6 September and 4 December 1941 at: Navy Department Library http://www.history.navy.mil/books/comint/ComInt-A.html
or just type in “pearl harbor radio intercepts” to any search engine where you will need to sort out the truth from “conspiracy.”
Happy hunting for the truth–I am sure it will be of little effort for such a scholar and an educator to find.
dbschmidt,
Do you actually read any of the sources you link to? If you had you would have read this:
“This appendix contains seventy-two selected Japanese naval messages intercepted between September and 4 December 1941 by Navy intercept sites at Hawaii, Guam, and Corregidor; these messages were not decoded and translated until September 1945-May 1946.”
In other words, while the messages were intercepted, nobody had access to them until 4 years after the attack. In other words, they back my contention.
Mark,
No one is arguing that war was expected. I’m arguing that the specific act of attacking Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th. wasn’t expected.
As I said, when you go about provoking war you have a responsibility to ensure that you’re ready for it – FDR was also provoking war with Hitler for a year before Pearl Harbor…and yet he also made no real preparations for the eventual war, and we had a massacre of American shipping on the Atlantic seaboard. Yet another failure on the part of FDR.
FDR didn’t have to know the time, date and location of the Japanese attack – he was responsible for ensuring that we were ready for the attack which everyone was certain was coming because we had emargoed Japan’s oil supplies. There was no surprise at Pearl Harbor – just massive failure on the part of FDR.
dbschmidt,
So as not to be accused of cherry picking parts of the site you linked to I feel I should included the following:
“At the end of the appendix are three diplomatic messages pertaining to the crisis which were translated on 8 and 30 December 1941. The Japanese naval messages are part of a total of 26,581 Japanese dispatches examined by U.S. Navy cryptanalysts.”
So three of the messages were translated on 1941. However, both where translated after attack.
BTW, I am still working on the Hillsdale courses. It hasn’t gone as fast as I wanted as I have also taken 4 other courses this summer, 3 which are required by my job.
Casper,
Why do you think I included them? Because the facts have no agenda. I have read, re-read and verified all of the links I make in any post in addition to all other material used. Actually, you were an afterthought in this post which was (yea, I know, Do not feed the trolls) towards Ricorun’s blind faith in whatever government says. I do not put you into that category. I, also, was just presented a starting point–not the definitive answer. Did you bother to research Robert B. Stinnett? Or anything else?
There are also a couple of other resources I used including the author of “I was there” who was the signalman who intercepted, decoded and passed on the message from Admiral Yamamoto which I also included in the post.
FDR knew and did nothing to prepare or prevent. Russians and Japanese off our West coast, Germans on the East coast but no worries? You do know that we shot down a Japanese Zero over the Aleutian Islands–right? That is also American soil. Then again, on a similar but different subject, I guess you have never heard of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident (aka. the USS Maddox incident) either.
I guess in a Clintonese way “It is only 2,335 U.S. servicemen dead–What difference does it make anyway?”
dbschmidt,
I did look up Stinnett and his book and I found this:
“Most, if not all, scholars of this topic are dismissive of Stinnett’s claims, as many of his claims appear to be baseless.[4] An article in Salon quotes CIA historian Donald Steury:
[Stinnett] concocted this theory pretty much from whole cloth. Those who have been able to check his alleged sources also are unanimous in their condemnation of his methodology. Basically, the author has made up his sources; when he does not make up the source, he lies about what the source says.[2]
Nor has evidence of the enormous conspiracy required to substantiate his claim, which has to number in the low hundreds, been uncovered.[5] Stinnett’s evidence the memo went to Roosevelt is illusory.[6] His promise to provide all his documents and recordings and thereby prove his allegations, made when Day of Deceit was published, as of 27 June 2009 remained unfulfilled.[7] Stinnett’s premise that a US war with Japan would benefit the UK is widely challenged: such a dividing of American military attention was contrary to Britain’s best interests, and Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler knew it.[8][page needed] Certain points in Stinnett’s argument were disputed by many reviewers. His characterization of the McCollum memorandum was not accepted by Conrad Crane, who wrote:
A close reading shows that its recommendations were supposed to deter and contain Japan, while better preparing the United States for a future conflict in the Pacific. There is an offhand remark that an overt Japanese act of war would make it easier to garner public support for actions against Japan, but the document’s intent was not to ensure that event happened.[3]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Deceit
Casper,
It was only a “surprise” in the sense that our military and political leaders on December 8th had a vested interest in asserting the story they had no idea it would happen. Outside of that, any assertion of “surprise” is BS. As far back as 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the then-Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, urged upon President Hoover an oil embargo – this, in Stimson’s own words, was a “calculated risk of war”, because such an embargo was such a crippling blow that Japan would either have to surrender their conquest or attack us. As it was in 1931 as well as 1941 only a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that Japan would agree to surrender because of an oil embargo, such a move was tantamount to provoking war. No American political or military leader with an IQ above room temperature could understand otherwise than that an embargo meant almost certain war – and, so, the act of war we sustained on December 7th was no surprise.
That, of course, was in the larger sense – getting down to the nitty gritty of the particular attack on Pearl Harbor, that also wasn’t much of a surprise. We were attempting to provoke Japan in to attacking (we were also attempting to provoke Hitler in to declaring war on us by very aggressive anti-German actions in the Atlantic submarine war…but Hitler didn’t take the bait until after Pearl Harbor – which, incidentally, proves him to have been, at bottom, a monumentally stupid man). We had intel as good as that which prompted us to warn Stalin in June of 1941 that Hitler was about to attack him – we even had a pretty good idea of the day of the attack. Even without knowing that a specific Japanese task force was en route to Hawaii, basic common sense dictates that if you are set on provoking war – and we were – then you’d better be ready. There are two possible explanations for all that we did which ensured that the Japanese attack would be a success (in the narrow sense – in the long run, the attack was a waste of time and material on the part of the Japanese – the fleet wasn’t as important a goal as the harbor, itself…had they conquered the Hawaiian islands, our task in the Pacific would have become monumentally more difficult):
1. Complete, slipshod incompetence – our leaders, from FDR on down, were playing with fire and trying to get us in to the war and didn’t have the foggiest notion of what it really meant to be at war…and thus were dooming thousands of Americans to death and captivity in the hands of a savage enemy simply through bad leadership.
2. Cynical ploy – our leaders, from FDR on down, wanted us to get in to the war (this is an established fact) and were willing to sacrifice our obsolescent battleship fleet and our garrison in the Philippines in order to strike an outraged chord in the American people (“those dirty Japs attacked us!”) and thus secure national unity for the war.
We’ll never know which it was – or if it was a combination of both.
Now, don’t get me wrong – the United States had to get in to the war. The imperial ambitions of Germany and Japan had to be curbed – and their brutal rule reformed. But the manner in which we got in was miserably bad and whether it was definite policy or sheer idiocy, the end result was Americans dying and being taken captive when they didn’t have to be. A modicum of foresight on the part of FDR and the rest of our leadership could have got things squared away so that, at the least, when Americans did go in to the fight they were 100% prepared for it…then, even if defeated, it wouldn’t have been as sordid as the eventual defeats were. We’ll leave aside, for now, just how badly FDR and the military leadership botched the conduct of the war to the point where all our efforts and blood were robbed of their due reward.
Amazona: db, remember, with a Dem in charge things like Pear Harbor and the Boston Marathon massacre are never failures of intelligence—or, rather, the treatment of what has been learned—while under a Republican president 9/11 was thoroughly telegraphed and a failure at the highest level.
I take it from the careful wording of this response that you disagree with DB’s criticism of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Ricorun,
I doubt that – after all, GW was President less than 8 months when 9/11 happened – FDR had been President more than 8 years when Pearl Harbor happened, and Obama President more than 4 years when Boston took place. Essentially, until about 18 months have passed, one can’t really hold a President fully responsible for such things…it takes a long while to immerse one’s self in the daily briefings and get a clear picture of how the world is going.
Mark: There are two possible explanations for all that we did which ensured that the Japanese attack would be a success…:
1. Complete, slipshod incompetence…
2. Cynical ploy…
Both of those very same explanations have been used to explain why the GW Bush administration didn’t prevent 9/11. For the record, I don’t believe either set of explanations in either scenario. But I do have to say that one thing I HAVE noticed is that many of the regulars on this site really enjoy a good conspiracy theory. It goes without saying that they enjoy it much better when it fits their extant ideology, but the inclination is still quite remarkable.
As I noted – Bush was President less than 8 months when 9/11 occurred…he was still working almost entirely in the intelligence, diplomatic and military house he inherited from Clinton. The ultimate reason 9/11 happened wasn’t because Bush was incompetent or engaging in a cynical ploy, but because President’s prior to Bush had failed to take the necessary actions to forestall such an attack. Would Bush have done so over his term if 9/11 hadn’t happened? We’ll never know – the attack happened and that changed whatever course of events President Bush was considering up to 9/10.
As for FDR, I tend more towards incompetence to explain his actions – he was a miserable failure in policy, domestic, military and foreign, from start to finish. The only thing he was good at was getting elected and re-elected – in this he was helped greatly by the fact that the MSM loved him dearly from start to finish…even colluding with him in hiding the fact that he was crippled…and as the 1944 election approached, that he was massively physically unfit to carry on the duties of President and should not have sought re-election (I do forgive FDR’s failures at Yalta on this ground – he had no business being there contending with a fit and determined Stalin – by that conference, he was simply not mentally or physically capable of even closely following the discussions, let alone keeping a clear eye on US requirements).
Liberals, especially back in 2009, liked to compare Obama to FDR – in this, they were dead on, though not for the reasons they thought. Liberals view FDR as a stunning success and believed that Obama would be another FDR – another success, that is. Obama’s problem isn’t that, like FDR, he’s ignorant of the world, of economics and of history, but that by January 20th, 2009, there was no chance that there would be the ability to present himself, as FDR did, as the savior of the country without dissenting voices getting any traction. Had FDR pulled his first term nonsense with a New Media around, he still might have gotten re-elected in 1936 (as Obama did in 2012), but not nearly with the stunning victory he got…Obama’s failures are coming to light, FDR’s never really did (once he was dead, it was politically maladroit to point them out – the dead Victor Over Fascism ensured that the full story of FDR’s idiocy would not come to light).
I’m sorry Mark. I didn’t realize your affinity for conspiracy theories ran so deep. But it is pretty much consistent with what I’m saying.
Nice attempt at dodging – but there isn’t even a hint of conspiracy theory in what I’ve written…unless you believe that to criticize your heroes amounts to a “conspiracy”.
And maybe you’re right, Mark: the only way to avoid a juicy conspiracy theory is to eliminate any possibility of foreknowledge that might be provided by one or another intelligence agency by eliminating all of the intelligence agencies. That’s really what your post is saying, isn’t it? Or maybe you’re only in favor of doing that (1) only when there’s a Democratic president, and (2) whenever the folly inherent in (1) should occur, keep the ban in place for another 18 mos after a Republican president takes office.
The answer to those queries is in my article – intelligence is necessary, but it is worthless if the political and military leaders refuse to act upon it with foresight and courage and a willingness to incur risk, including the risk of defeat. Might as well have no intelligence agencies, at all, if we’re not going to draw from the intelligence rational policies.
Ahhh, more rico jibber-jabber. He must find it so liberating to not even try to make sense any more.
Perhaps he got completely derailed when asked just what kind of government one might believe is best if it is not the Constitutional model of a severely restricted federal government or one that is not restricted by the Constitution regarding size, scope or power. At least I see he has abandoned that folly in favor of simply typing syllables.
jibber-jabber
Amazona: speaking of jibber-jabber, what point on the topic were you addressing in your last comment? Or were you just engaging in a pure, ad-hominem attack? If it is the latter, I thought those weren’t allowed anymore.
Not an attack, merely an observation of yet another jibber-jabber sighting.
Though conspiracy theorists might pick up on the fact that the JJDU (Jibber-Jabber Detection Unit) does switch on automatically whenever you post.
The point being ignored in favor of blindly oppositional jibber-jabber was made quite clearly:
“…. intelligence is necessary, but it is worthless if the political and military leaders refuse to act upon it with foresight and courage and a willingness to incur risk, including the risk of defeat. Might as well have no intelligence agencies, at all, if we’re not going to draw from the intelligence rational policies.”
Mark: there isn’t even a hint of conspiracy theory in what I’ve written…
Actually, there’s more than a hint, there’s a pretty strong stink of it.
..unless you believe that to criticize your heroes amounts to a “conspiracy”.
I’m not criticizing anyone — YOU are.
My above comment wasn’t supposed to appear here. Apparently this site never got their thread issues resolved. But anyway, yeah, at least one of your comments above really does stink of conspiracy theory. It also smells of partisan hackery, meaning that not all conspiracies are equal — to be believable they also have to be consistent with one’s ideology — or at least spun into a narrative which is consistent with one’s ideology. Sadly, I guess that covers just about everything.
At the very least that covers why no one took issue with DB’s criticism of casper when he said, “As a teacher of “history” you sould know better than most this was not a matter of 20/20 hindsight. Radio signals, et.al., warned everyone including the 2,335 U.S. servicemen that were killed and 1,143 were wounded.
“…we weren’t expecting it” is total Liberal BS. If you are going to “teach” history–at least learn it first.
Come on guys, are you really going to let that stand without so much as a single question to DB? Basically, DB is suggesting that Casper is teaching a revisionist version of history when in fact he’s teaching what is in the approved text books. Not only that, but it is what MOST AMERICANS BELIEVE. And for good reason, because that’s what the vast majority of professional historians have documented and maintained. Said in another way, Casper’s version is accepted by the consensus of historians. Then again, maybe historians too have joined the VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY, along with geologists, oceanologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, biologists, geneticists, and virtually every other stripe of scientist.
It’s getting quite ridiculous.
Ricorun,
Most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy – even though 100% of the evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy. When lies get repeated enough, they get believed – the Big Lie theory is actually a proven fact. We’ve had people endlessly repeat the lie that a conspiracy killed Kennedy, and these days north of 70% of the population believes it. So, too, with FDR’s record – it has been endlessly repeated that he did a great job and was a stunning success. FDR usually arrives in the top 5 of Presidents when not rated number one. The truth of the matter is vastly different – his New Deal deepened and lengthened the Depression. His “New Deal” was nothing more, anyways, than putting Hoover economic policies on steroids. FDR was relentlessly dishonest (one man who knew him well commented after his death, “so passes Roosevelt; a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve”, or words to that effect). FDR’s Administration was riddled from Day One with communists and fellow travellers (there is no proof that Hopkins was an actual Soviet agent, but he worked very hard to ensure US policy followed Soviet desires – and there is abundant proof that White, Hiss, Currie, Coe and very many others in key Roosevelt Administration positions were Soviet agents). FDR’s economic minions expressed admiration for the methods and goals of Mussolini’s Italy. FDR tossed off the “unconditional surrender” demand on Germany and Japan without consultation with his senior political and economic advisers, to say nothing of our allies during the war. FDR felt that Stalin’s communist Empire was a force for good in the world while Churchill’s British Empire was a baleful influence. FDR made a hash out of it in our China policy. FDR’s influence was strong in ensuring that our military expedition to Europe would go precisely where Stalin’s policies wanted it to go – as far away as possible from Berlin, Prague and Vienna.
FDR was a disaster for the country – but, he gets credit for “ending” the Depression even though he did nothing of the kind and for winning World War Two, which was next to impossible for us to loose (at peak production, we were producing more military material than Japan and Germany combined). It’ll be another century before a true understanding of FDR is presented to the American people – but this isn’t conspiracy, its just the way things work.
even though 100% of the evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy.
Only if you believe that Oswald, who only ever qualified Sharpshooter on one occasion (not Expert, but Sharpshooter) while in the Marine Corps, was a better shot with an inferior weapon than a dozen of the FBI’s best marksmen. This would actually make a great thread sometime.
Spook,
Given the conditions in Dallas the only surprising thing about Oswald’s shots is that he missed with one. It is also rather probative, in my view (and left out of all conspiracy theories that I’ve seen) that Howard Brennan was an actual eyewitness to Oswald first peering out of the Depository window prior to the assassination (Brennan was 120 feet away and had a clear view in to Oswald’s window), and then witness to him firing his three shots.
“100% of the evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy.”
Actually, it doesn’t, which is why the theory has been questioned for so long. For every hair-on-fire hysteric there is also a calm and rational person wondering why certain testimony was never admitted.
I tended to dismiss the doubters, until I actually visited the book depository and saw the site and the area, and at that time the whole government explanation became very questionable as far as I was concerned. There can never be absolute proof of any of it, but the preponderance of evidence does not support the official finding if you consider the testimony of witnesses to various aspects of the event.
Amazona,
I commend to your attention – and your reading pleasure, as well – Case Closed by Gerald Posner. It explodes all the myths surrounding the Kennedy assassination and demonstrates conclusively that Oswald, acting alone, killed the President. The Kennedy Assassination blog also details all the conspiracy theories, and debunks them very well. Oswald, a nut acting alone, killed the President for no particular reason whatsoever.
“…maybe historians too have joined the VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY, along with geologists, oceanologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, biologists, geneticists, and virtually every other stripe of scientist.”
….speaking of “conspiracy theories”….
You have become quite ridiculous.
Mark effectively demolished the rico acceptance of consensus to determine reality approach when he went through some of the many failures of FDR and then compared them to the legend that has been created around him—-and accepted, and taught, and believed.
That is, compared reality to the ‘consensus’.
Ama
a low information voter making low information accusations…..from the land of nuts and fruits.
Im with ya spook.
also the fact LHO he had just got him self hired at the BD, just happened to bring a rifle with him that day, the SS broke ALL the rules by allowing the car to travel through an S turn at 3-4 MPH with a multi story building at their back with open windows…..a Mafia and CIA hit.
neo, the very act of abruptly changing the motorcade route to force it to slow nearly to a stop, make a right angle turn to the right, move slowly along at a walking pace, then do a near-stop to make an S turn to the left leading to an overpass, pretty much shouts some sort of sabotage of normal security procedures. And I am not much of a shooter, but if I were in the BD I think I would have shot across at a lower angle before the motorcade turned toward the overpass, instead of shooting nearly straight down. The first shot could be done with only the tip of the barrel sticking out the window—the second should require leaning out at least a little. None of the witnesses thought the shots came from the BD, a nurse at Parkland stated that she had come on duty and seen the limo parked out front and spent some time explaining to a friend how you could tell that a bullet had come through the glass from the front because of the pattern of the hole, etc.
While the hysterical conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 all came back to BDS and required a lot of convoluted efforts by a lot of people, the Kennedy questions are not specific to just Castro, the Mafia, Johnson, the CIA, etc. but tend to focus on simple logic and questioning of wildly improbably explanations.
I commend to your attention – and your reading pleasure, as well – Case Closed by Gerald Posner. It explodes all the myths surrounding the Kennedy assassination and demonstrates conclusively that Oswald, acting alone, killed the President.
Well, Posner certainly claimed that his book was the definitive book on the subject. But he made the mistake all the other lone gunman advocates made. He tried to make Oswald out to be a great marksman, and he simply wasn’t.
That is such utter BS. Last time I checked, the bullseye on a Marine rifle qual target was 12″. Perhaps Neocon can verify. If Oswald had put 8 out of 10 in an 10″ circle he would have qualified Expert, not barely Sharpshooter by only 3 points. Posner made it sound like Oswald’s last qualification attempt was something to be proud of, but 2 points less and he would have been a complete fail.
Mark, you should read Oswald’s service record and interviews with men who served with him (and shot with him) The guy could barely hit the urinal.
Spook,
All he needed was basic skill in hitting a urinal to hit Kennedy – it was an easy shot. Kennedy was 81 meters away from Oswald. The Presidential car was moving slowly. There was little to no wind and visibility was perfect. Not only was Oswald trained to shoot, he had recently practiced shooting the weapon he used to killed Kennedy. As I said, the only thing startling about the Oswald shots is that he missed one for three – which would be in line with the skill level he had combined with the basic shooting problem he encountered. Computer analysis of Kennedy’s wounds indicate the the only place the shots could have come from was the window Oswald fired from. The gun used was Oswald’s gun. Oswald’s prints were on it. We know for certain that Oswald was in the building where the shots originated. Had Oswald gone to trial, this would have been a slam dunk for the prosecutor – all the evidence goes to prove Oswald did it beyond a reasonable doubt – there is no evidence that anyone else did it, or was even remotely involved in it.
Spook
to qualify we had to shoot from 50,150, 250, 500 METERS. We had to fire several rounds at each distance. We also shot from a standing, sitting and prone position.
Kennedy was rescheduled to Dallas from Miami because of a known assassination plot there.
Did anybody see the series The men who killed Kennedy by national geographic?
It was shown once then disappeared forever. They named the shooters 3 of them imported from France for the mafia (Marcello) and CIA (bay of pigs) retribution.
Neocon,
My grandfather knew a lot of Cubans as he had done a lot of business in Cuba prior to the revolution (in fact, in the family archives is a letter from a Batista aide indicating that Grandpa could rest assured that those commies would be routed in short order and he could get back to business). The story I got from my Dad is that a lot of Cubans did want to take a shot at Kennedy; they related such desires to my grandfather. But all the evidence indicates that if some Cuban did want a bit of revenge, Oswald beat them to it (another small bit of family history: Raul Castro once attempted to recruit my Uncle Mike in to supporting the communists in Cuba…this in Mexico City in the mid-50’s).
here
Mark, I looked up Posner and found that your good impression of him, and your belief that he provided the last word on the assassination, are not shared by everyone who has read his book.
http://dperry1943.com/closed.html provides quite a bit of rebuttal, points out inconsistencies, and in general skewers the book from a factual perspective.
And Posner himself is not exactly the most credible guy on the authors’ circuit. From Wikipedia:
Posner was the chief investigative reporter at the Daily Beast. Following the revelation that a number of Posner’s stories for the Beast contained portions plagiarized from articles in other publications, Posner resigned from the Beast. According to Posner, the plagiarism was inadvertent and the result of the “compressed deadlines” of the Beast and confusing his assembled research with his own writing in the “master files” he assembled on each story. Allegations of plagiarism also surfaced concerning his latest book, Miami Babylon (October 2009). Posner said the Miami Babylon plagiarism occurred because of a new system of “trailing endnotes”, because an individual he interviewed read one of the plagiarized sources and reiterated it during the interview, and because he mistook other people’s writing for his own after scanning source documents into a computer database.The Miami New Times also found that Posner “seems to add, subtract, or misattribute quotes” and displayed a series of such “apparently altered or misattributed quotes”. For all the examples shown, Posner cited a source article, where an examination of the source showed that the quote given in Posner’s writing was either substantially altered (e.g. words added), never said by the subject, misattributed, or used out of context.
Gerald Posner subsequently hired attorney Mark Lane, threatening litigation against the Miami New Times on grounds of tortious interference (i.e. that its investigation and reporting of this case damaged Posner’s business relationship with his publishers) and emotional distress In a press release, Posner stated “Although I’m convinced Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, I’ve always believed that had Mark Lane represented Oswald, he would have won an acquittal. That’s why Mark Lane was the obvious choice as my own attorney.” Soon thereafter, the Miami New Times published evidence of additional plagiarism from multiple sources in both Secrets of the Kingdom and Why America Slept. According to Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark, “This constitutes plagiarism by any definition I can think of….The capturing of someone else’s material that is this extensive cannot, in my opinion, have been done accidentally.”
Evidence was also presented indicating that Posner had repeatedly “scrubbed” elements of the journalism scandal from his Wikipedia page. According to Posner, the media reports detailing his journalistic transgressions were actually the result of a “coordinated effort” to “discredit my book Miami Babylon” because of the book’s “unvarnished and investigative history”.
Harper Lee lawsuit
On May 3, 2013, Posner was named in a federal lawsuit brought by famed author Harper Lee in Manhattan. Lee claimed that Samuel Pinkus, her literary agent’s son-in-law, tricked her into signing away her rights to To Kill a Mockingbird, directing the royalties to be paid into a corporation formed by Posner for that purpose.”
Amazona,
So, Posner got himself in to some trouble – but there is nothing out there which controverts his evidence in Case Closed. Its pretty air tight – as it would be, because 100% of the evidence indicates that Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy.
neo, was that national geographic show a short series, with tons of interviews and documentation? My brothers and I watched a show like that and at the time it was offered for sale, but we didn’t buy it immediately and then have not been able to find it.
Whatever it was that we were watching, it was riveting, compelling, and answered a lot of the questions the government commission just ignored, such as the forcing of the Parkland doctors to change their stories about the nature of the wounds, and the testimony of the nurse who saw the bullet hole in the windshield of the limo.
Mark, a lot of information has been ignored, including that of the doctors at Parkland, who saw gunshot wounds every day, identified Kennedy’s as an exit wound on the back of his head, and later testified that they were forced by the government to change their original analysis. After being reminded by neo of the series on the assassination I went back and looked up some things,and there is a youtube video of the woman who saw the bullet hole in the windshield. (The interview with her on the documentary was longer and more detailed.) She was not a nurse, but a medical student—my mistake.
There is also a lot of information about Oswald that has never been covered.
I suggest that at this late date, with nearly everyone involved dead, and probably few if any real records kept, we will never know exactly what happened. But there is such a huge amount of evidence that contradicts the Warren Commission (and Posner’s) version that it is foolish to simply dismiss it. The evidence ranges from the incontrovertible facts that the route of the motorcade was inexplicably changed and the assignments of some Secret Service men were altered to the number of people who were absolutely sure the shots were not all fired from the building. Even the facts of Oswald’s behavior after he left the building leave a lot of questions.
And I don’t think Cuba has been definitively identified as the origin of the plot. There seems to be a lot more evidence pointing to LBJ and/or the CIA. Certainly the betrayal of Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs—-a truly shameful episode in American history and one that would tarnish forever any lingering sheen on the image of JFK if it were more widely known and understood—-had a lot of Cubans outraged, and certainly the clumsy plots to assassinate Castro had the Cuban government ticked off as well. But Kennedy also betrayed the Mafia that got him elected, turned his back on the people he had called friends when he needed then and then sicced Bobby on them, and he had a viper in the White House in the form of a power-mad LBJ whose history was full of dark secrets, including rumors of murder of opponents.
To ignore all of this, and the huge amount of testimony and evidence that rebut, or at least do not comply with, what was evaluated to come up with the Warren report and/or Posner’s book, just to focus on one man with a vague and often assumed motive just seems shortsighted.
Amazona,
You’re with north of 70% of the American people – but everything I’ve looked at, not just the Posner book, demonstrates in a conclusive manner to me that Oswald, a nut acting alone, killed the President for no particular reason. The Kennedy assassination is going in to my book, though my book is not about the Kennedy Assassination – as an example of how we live under falsehoods these days. The unanswered questions are only possible by ignoring vital aspects of the hard evidence, or by twisting the evidence (the most infamous of these was how, for years, people held up the “magic bullet” as “proof” that something was fishy about the Kennedy Assassination…of course, once some forensic scientists actually got a look at it, it was shown that the trajectory of the bullet given the relative positions of shooter, Kennedy and Connolly could not have gone any other way…and that the explanation for why the bullet wasn’t more deformed is explained simply by the physical material it traversed through).
As for the Kennedy autopsy, I’ve seen the actual pictures – it is clear that there’s an exit wound in the President’s neck precisely where Oswald’s second shot would have put it. Kennedy’s head wound, meanwhile, is consistent with being shot from above and behind (some theorists have harped upon the “missing” brain…implying that someone messed with the physical body post-mortem to remove evidence of a shot from a different direction…well, the brain is actually missing because it was blown to pieces and ejected from Kennedy’s skull by the force of the bullet…those around Kennedy were drenched in blood and great gobs of brains).
We can all go round and round on this, but views won’t be changed by argument – but I refer you back to your one-time conviction that Hiss was framed…just as in the Kennedy theories, the Hiss story of innocence was based upon deliberate falsehood and twisting of evidence. Hiss was a commie, Oswald was the killer.
BTW, Mark, I was just as convinced about the innocence of Alger Hiss as you are about the guilt of Oswald. I read a very compelling book called “Fraternity or Fratricide” that had me so convinced that even long after I turned my back on the Left and became a conservative I still thought HIss had been set up.
Even after years of being stridently anti-Left, it was a shock to me when the KBG released some old records that proved that Hiss really HAD been a spy for the USSR. I don’t use that word lightly—I was stunned.
So I know how a book, written the right way, read at the right time, can appear absolutely incontrovertible. Been there, done that. But looking back I can see that a lot of the case against Hiss was not addressed in the book, or was spun and explained away in a way that made complete sense to me at the time. And the reviews of Posner’s book indicate that the same thing happened there.
Mark
It was stunningly coincidental that LHO just happened to secure a job in that building immediately before the JFK trip, the motorcade just happened to pass through an intersection which contained S turns and a perfect line of fire from several directions, and LHO just decided to bring a rifle to his place of employment that very day and NO one saw him with it?
I do not believe in coincidences, this was a coup and was 100% covered up.
Neocon,
Oswald bounced from job to job – never keeping one long; he was, in this, just an economic loser who couldn’t hold a job…which probably built in to him, among many other things, the resentments which eventually came out in the shooting of the President. He got the job at the Depository on October 15th – in one of the small twists of history, had he got the job Padgett Printing (for which he had been turned down on October 4th), Kennedy might never have been killed.
Meanwhile, Oswald had the weapon he used for more than 6 months by the time he killed Kennedy – and he had bounced around from Dallas to New Orleans to Mexico City during that time…hardly the sort of actions one would expect of someone who is being tasked with an assassination…but definitely keeping in line with Oswald’s normal mode of living…which is to move and move and move, in the manner of a misfit who just can’t grab hold of normal life.
As for Oswald bringing in the rifle – at least two people witnessed it; but the rifle was disassembled and in a bag. Face it, you and I see something like that and it might stick in our minds a bit, but its not like we’re going to go, “hey, what’s in the bag?”. And even if we do, any plausible explanation would serve – and the chances that any particular person would ask to see what is in it are billions to one against.
Meanwhile, to get to the nitty gritty – the gun was Oswald’s. His prints were on it. He had plenty of time and the requisite skills to make the shots. He was witnessed at the firing position just prior to the assassination by people both inside and outside the building. He was witnessed firing the shots. The shots could only have come from the position Oswald was witnessed to be in just prior to the shooting. This is open and shut – Oswald did it; and there is zero evidence that he knew anyone or had any connections to anyone who even in the remotest degree might possibly engage in a conspiracy to kill the President.
Mark
everything you stated about LHO was spot on, However I believe he was the dupe set up to take the fall. Did you watch the video I posted? Makes one think beyond the warren commission findings. I would like to hear your take on it.(the video) I find this fascinating.
Mark
an excellent video that supports your take on the assassination……
Neocon,
Good show – interesting about shot 1, especially. Bet that bullet is lying under the grass somewhere in that plaza…anyone who has the time can take their metal detector and get to work. But the concluding bit explains why the theories are believed regarding the Kennedy assassination…Kennedy was the President, Oswald was a complete zero. The scales don’t balance – and so it had to be something else. As for why the theories were created – that will be explained in Blinded by the Lies.
Mark, I have no dog in this hunt. Nothing about the truth of any of the theories would bother me at all. I have no personal investment in one theory over another, and am perfectly happy to have any of them proved to me.
The problem is, the one of LHO as the sole shooter simply has not been proved to me. I understand the inevitability of the conclusion based upon the evidence presented. My problem lies in the vast amount of evidence that was not presented.
For example, I find it impossible to simply dismiss the account of a very intelligent, calm, rational woman who had spent her whole life around guns, who was quite knowledgeable about guns, a medical student, who spent some time examining a bullet hole in the windshield of the limo and explaining, in detail, to a friend how you could tell that the bullet came from the front of the car based upon the spalling of the glass on the inside. She didn’t know what was going on, she just saw the car, saw the windshield, talked about the hole with her friend, and suddenly when someone noticed the two women at the car and examining it someone jumped in the car and abruptly drove off—while she was still leaning against it. Not only the story of the hole in the windshield but the reaction when someone noticed the car was being examined ring quite true.
Everything about her and what she said was completely credible. I can’t just toss that aside because another theory might be more attractive to me. And there are dozens of other witnesses who are also credible, who have had no reason to lie, who have been consistent and rational in telling their stories. The narrative about Oswald has been so carefully constructed, edited, and repeated, yet when one looks deeper one finds a very different story about the man. To accept the official narrative of Oswald one has to make huge leaps of faith, accepting things that simply do not make sense. The ostentatious effort to attract attention to someone identified as Lee Harvey Oswald has something a little fishy about it, and it took about 40 years till OJ Simpson did his slow-mo “escape” to see a a fugitive less interested in making a quick getaway—-strolling along, flagging down a taxi, and then offering it to an elderly woman and saying he could catch another. Even the oddities surrounding the transfer of Oswald from the jail, which resulted in his being shot to death, were inexplicable. If one applies Occam’s Razor to the testimony and ALL the facts, the conclusion is not that things happened as the Warren Commission said they did.
Yes, a study showed that the trajectory of that bullet could have been consistent with being fired from a certain location. But it is not the simplest explanation, and it still leaves a lot to be explained, such as the pristine condition of the bullet. A bullet chipped a curb, with flying concrete chips cutting a bystander, yet the trajectory from the book depository would not explain this, nor would the 3-shot theory.
You say “…just as in the Kennedy theories, the Hiss story of innocence was based upon deliberate falsehood and twisting of evidence.: Here we are in agreement, and this is pretty much what I was saying. It’s just that then we diverge, because here you make the arbitrary decision that the “..deliberate falsehood(s) and twisting of evidence…” took place only regarding the account of Alger Hiss and his supposed innocence, and not about the story behind the assassination of JFK. You know this, and then you pick the Kennedy theory that you personally prefer—–“…. Oswald was the killer.”
I am intrigued by your insistence that any information or conclusion other than the official one put out by the government is really a Big Lie.
Amazona,
If there were a bullet hole in the front windshield, that would be something – but, on other hand, we only have uncorroborated testimony and no forensic evidence. Additionally, If you were going to shoot Kennedy, shooting from the front would be just about pointless – you’d have to get through the driver or through Connolly to get at the President. Additionally, if you were shooting at the front of the car, you’d have to be either right in front of the car or on the railroad overpass – in front the car is not practical because the car is coming at you…as for the railroad overpass, there were construction workers on it who presumptively would have noticed someone shooting at the President (in fact, the President’s Secret Service detail had noticed the workers up there just prior to the shooting and were upset about it…it was a security violation).
As for why the ladies would have been shooed away or that the car would have been taken away – simple: it was a car which contained classified material and was evidence in a murder case.
Mark, have you ever been to Dealey Plaza? In the Book Depository Building looking down at the area where JFK was shot?
As I said, it was being there, seeing the place, looking out a window about 20 feet from the window in question, that made me rethink the whole thing. The layout, the elevations, the tiny size of the area, the proximity of things like the wooden fence along the railroad tracks and the overpass itself, all lent themselves to the realization that of all the vantage points in the area, that window of that building was one of the least desirable if one wanted to shoot someone driving down that street.
The Secret Service, after the fact, claimed to have been upset about seeing people on the overpass. Well, what did they do about it at the time? The area was never cordoned off before the motorcade was supposed to pass. And a railroad employee sitting in the tower where he could see the entire area testified that he saw several men there, behind the wooden fence, and that one of them appeared to be carrying a gun.
I have a feeling that the metal detector idea is not new. But it’s not just the missing bullet, it is the trajectory of a bullet to cause that specific damage to that curb.
As for the “missing brain” no one is talking about the part that was shot out by the bullet. No, there was a large amount of brain left, and it was examined, and then it disappeared. The most logical explanation is that it ended up in Kennedy family hands along with a lot of the other evidence. I doubt that they would have a vested interest in hiding evidence, so I doubt that they have kept it hidden for some nefarious reason, but the fact is that the location of the intact portion of the brain is no longer available for examination
As for “uncorroborated testimony” you seem pretty comfortable with ONE man claiming to see not just a man but a specific, recognizable, man, who then shot 3 shots, with no corroboration from anyone else. The medical student testified that when she saw the limo, a few days later, in some video footage of it being moved somewhere, the windshield was intact. That got her attention, because of her close examination of the car on the 22nd. She didn’t say she saw something from a distance that kinda looked like it might be a hole in the glass—-she was leaning over the windshield, pointing out the characteristics of spalling to a friend.
No one denies that Oswald took a package into the BD, and it is certainly probable that it was the gun in question. This is where everything gets more deeply into tinfoil hat territory, because this is where the claim of Oswald being a patsy comes into play. He was not concerned about being arrested. He was completely confident that he would be released. His demeanor from the time he left the BD until he got shot was just not consistent with a guilty man, but it was consistent with a man who thought he had a role to play. He was quite confident that when the facts came out he would be exonerated, which says to me that he had a different set of facts than we did. As none of the profiles of Oswald called him delusional, it is hard to understand why he was so complacent. The only comment he ever did make was that he was a “patsy” which was a clear statement that others were involved. Standing alone, this attitude could be considered a ruse, or proof of mental disturbance, or whatever. But when put in the context of other things, it no longer seems to brand Oswald as delusional or trying to create a defense, but as a man convinced he is part of something bigger and only playing his part in it.
I have no personal theory about who did what. I merely point out that the very convenient government conclusion ignored or dismissed a vast amount of testimony that contradicts it, and based it upon some very shaky evidence, such as the theory that a bullet could hit a bone, be deflected through a body, hit another body and hit two bones in that body, pass through it and penetrate a leg, and still be pristine and not deformed. I, too, have seen the zigzag “trajectory” posited by the experts, and although I suppose a series of richochets through a couple of bodies could result in that kind of pathway, the condition of the bullet at the end of this ought to be pretty damaged. I have seen recorded testimony that was quite credible, from people with no involvement, no ax to grind, no agenda to promote, just normal people reporting what they saw and experienced. I’ve seen a lot of goofball testimony, too, and some conspiracy theories that are pretty wild and unbelievable.
What I have done is look at all this evidence, including the carefully constructed narrative of Oswald that has been contradicted by people who knew him, and the fact that the government ignored, overlooked or dismissed evidence to arrive at their conclusion, and what seems most likely to me is that a government agency was behind the killing. This would explain the pressure on the Dallas police and on the Secret Service to suddenly and inexplicably change the route of the motorcade and some of the security assignments, the sloppiness of security at the scene (such as not securing firing positions like the overpass and rail yards), the ability to create the LHO bio, the subsequent arrest and then killing of Oswald, and the need for the government to go along with a fragmented case to arrive at a necessary conclusion.
Without that, the whole story is one of one astounding, inexplicable, coincidence after another. One or two or three, maybe. It could have been a perfect storm, a situation where a series of unrelated events somehow came together to make another event possible. If you stop at the moment of the last shot being fired, you really do only have three or four events which could, theoretically, be considered coincidental. You change the route, you change the SS assignments, you move the city motorcycle cop to a different position, you fail to secure the vantage points of the hillside, rail yard and overpass—-while it looks fishy as hell, it COULD just be a coincidental collision of assorted sloppiness. When you factor in the LHO aspect, before and after the shooting, right up till the moment he was killed, the “coincidences” pile up a little too high and a little too quickly to just dismiss.
Every other theory works with some of the evidence but this seems to me to be the only one that is consistent with all of it. The Mafia did not have the ability to pull the strings that would have to be pulled, or the influence over local law enforcement necessary to do what we KNOW was done. Castro? He just got lucky. Yes, life is full of random events that result in various outcomes. If you had not had to go back in the house to get your phone, you would not have been at a certain intersection when a truck ran a red light, and so on. Maybe it is just an arbitrary and personal decision about when to stop seeing random coincidence and start wondering if there is something else going on. All I know is, I passed that point.
My PREFERENCE is the simplicity of a lone, crazed gunman. I would much rather have the whole thing explained in such a neat tidy package and then put away on a shelf as a closed case. It’s just that I don’t see this as the most likely scenario.
Amazona,
We could go round on this forever – but over the years, all I ever get in hard evidence is more and more proof that Oswald, a nut acting alone, killed the President. I was unaware until Neocon’s video of that then-15 year old who was pretty much right below the window when the shooting occurred. Well, strictly speaking, I had probably heard of him tangentially – but the thing in dealing with Kennedy conspiracies is that you’re always dealing with the conspiracist narrative…and such narratives will ignore such rock-solid evidence as the kid right below the window…just like they like to ignore or at best gloss over such facts as the ballistic trajectory of the two bullets which were recovered (and the bullet which hit Kennedy and Connolly didn’t ricochet around – it blasted right through both men – as can be expected from a jacketed round fired from a bolt-action rifle at relatively short range…and the Carcano rifle Oswald used is a military-grade weapon which is noted for its range, penetrating power, light recoil and flat trajectory…in other words, its just about perfect for a sniper; on the other hand, one of the main drawbacks is the fact that the bullets don’t tend to tumble or break up upon impact with a person and thus are considered by some to be less effective in “stopping power”…but such concerns don’t enter in to the equation when you’re trying to murder, rather than stop an attacking enemy). The gun was Oswald’s. His prints were on it. The range was short and the shot easy. Eyewitnesses place him in the building. Other eyewitnesses testify to the shots coming from the place where Oswald’s gun and three spent shell casings were found in a “sniper position” created by the shooter.
Its open and shut.
Mark-Ama
personally I believe in a conspiracy weather one shooter or multiple. The first video I posted showed interviews with people who put LHO at Jack Ruby’s night clum and personally introduced to them by Jack days before the assassination. Also the Mafia don who had set up a foiled attempt in Miami only weeks before Dallas was have been said to have jumped up and screamed “WE GOT HIM!!
many other accounts which several that Ama has also pointed out that LHO did not act singularly but **COULD** have been the lone shooter, (which I still also doubt).
good exchange though…..still a good mystery after all these years….
PS
I also am 100% convinced that a muslim, Palestinian just happened to be in a kitchen in a hotel with a loaded firearm just inches from RFK was NO accident.
seems ole REEK-O forgets the trashing of the WH, files, computers which exceeded $100,000.00 damage by bent willy and his goons, Took months to recover from this crime, also the donk controlled congress fought tooth and nail to halt every one of W’s appointments, after 8 months he only has @ 20% of his appointments in place….seems the leftist loons forget about this……Oh Wait!! it HAS to be a “conspiracy” theory…….soo alinsky, so predictable, so simple an explanation, by a simpleton!
According to the report, about a quarter of the four hundred White House offices that were being vacated by Clinton staff suffered damage of one kind or another.
The other shoe dropped eight years later, when the Bush staff vacated the White House in January of 2009. Demonstrating once again that conservatives have more respect than liberals for other people’s property, the Bushies left a neat clean White House behind them for the Obama team. No one in or around the White House has reported a single incidence of vandalism from that Republican-to-Democrat transition.
sorry buttttt a!! politics now????????
Bwaaaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha EPIC FAILURE LESS traffic than the fork…..even with all the usual trolls…..ROTFLMAO!!!!!
Really??
Chris Christie: ‘This Strain of Libertarianism That’s Going Through Both Parties…Is a Very Dangerous Thought’
“I’m very nervous about the direction this is moving in.”
Sorry TUBBY but I worry about you RINOS and THIS much more………
Obama Salutes Muslim Americans, Hosts Ramadan Dinner at the White House
“a time of reflection, a chance to demonstrate one’s devotion to God through prayer and through fasting…”
“Sorry TUBBY but I worry about you RINOS and THIS much more………”
Are you insulting that fat ass in New Joisey? Are you insulting that humungous tub of lard that the tax payers of Newark keep shoving anything edible into? Are you insulting that pig in Armani? Are you insulting the portly politico nosehorn who lives in Trenton? Are you insulting His Chubbiness, Christopher the First? Are you insulting the blimpish, bovine, Governor of the Garden State?
If you are, I am just shocked, shocked I tell you!
All hail McCain 3.0 We’ll get em in 2016!!!!!
GMB
Yes the rotund RINO from Joisey!!
“Yes the rotund RINO” I LOLzered when I read that. In my native tounge it is “Das Bille Nashorn”
An old joke that spans two different languages and cultures. Maybe someday in an open thread I will share the story.
But thank you so much for bringing back a very great memory of my geliebte Ompa. (beloved grandpa)
🙂
Enjoy your days my friend.
🙂
GMB
Bille Nashorn”
maybe a relative to this guy……
say I say…….
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQlHeF16rr2_uaSIknftRWsPuYCnMxlYl4kauM-3lzId7XCtTMVFQ
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that eliminating a certain type of person from the blog has clearly NOT resulted in an echo chamber in which we simply admire each other’s commentary. I see differences, disagreements, debates and discourse, none of which would have been possible with the constant interruptions and bickering of blog vandals whose only goals were to disrupt the blog and attack anything deemed “conservative”.
I really appreciate the courage of the blog owner in going along with this change, and I think it has vastly improved the blog.
just opened my E mail and saw this on AOL………
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/jfk-second-shooter-documentary_n_3667317.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-sb-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D350520
We’ll get more like that as the 50th anniversary approaches – there is money to be made, after all.
there is money to be made, after all.
yeah……a REALLY far out story, just thought it interesting and timely in respect to this thread.
This general reply as I have had better things to do over the course of the past few days. This is not to degenerate the blog but rather address my lack of response to a few counter-postings among others.
In one posting referring to 9/11 & President GW Bush’s lack of knowledge / action excluded all mention of the “silo / wall” created between information sharing of government agencies like NSA, FBI, CIA via Jamie Gorelick. You know– Jamie Gorelick who served as a Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1997. You know– Jamie Gorelick who was trying to prevent people from linking Clinton to his dirty deals / bribe money from the Chinese which ended up getting 3000+ people killed in the WTC.
What—you say? Shortly before 9/11, Gorelick’s wall “specifically impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui”, the so- called “20th hijacker.” Her 1995 memo, entitled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations”, stated explicitly that they would “go beyond what is legally required, [to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”
As to whether a revisionist history of America is being taught is easily provable and not just the parts about what occurred on the lead up to our (American) entrance into WWII—those that slavishly toe the government line need to do more research and not just accept Pavlov-like belief in what the government claims–no matter which party is in power.
They should start by pulling their “consensus” head out of their neither regions because consensus is rarely the truth. Hand you all a radioman the intercepted, decrypted and passed along the message of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor and all one gets in response is “consensus” and “conspiracy.” How about we move forward into the current time period and some of the “phony” scandals of this administration. Please teach me which are phony, a conspiracy or consensus.
Well, actually, the only consensus that I can think of was the consensus of this administration to promote a bald-faced lie about Benghazi. That is was a “spontaneous” reaction to a never seen video. 4 dead including an ambassador and 1 in jail to appease the masses. Just through them on the woodpile of dead from “Fast & Furious” which has well over 200+ dead including two US agents. Nothing to see here after throwing the Harry Potter “Cloak of Invisibility” over the entire investigation. IRS targeting of Conservative groups—not an issue even as news is leaking of illegal collusion (emails, etc.) between Lois “I did nothing wrong but plead the fifth” Learner and outside agencies. This could continue for pages and equally in almost any administration. Thank –this is the “Most Transparent Administration in History.”
Wake up is what I am trying to pass along. Do your own honest research. Teach our kids the truth—not the crap that is part of the Public
IndoctrinationEducation system. This country is heading down the death spiral of Rome with the “Bread & Circus” crap in lieu of personal responsibilityTime for me to step down from the soap box.