I love being a trendsetter! You might recall that back in 2018 I suggested that we need to return to the Battleship concept for the Navy. To nutshell what I said, we should be building a massive class of warships which are heavily armored, fast and packing a gigantic punch. This isn’t to replace the carrier, but to give us a balanced fleet. Right now, we’re pretty much nothing but carriers and destroyers on the surface and while this has a lot of important advantages, nothing dominates better than massive power…especially close in to enemy territory.
I envisioned back then a ship of probably 100,000 tons, about a thousand feet long, low profile, taking full advantage of the new alloys being developed for armor protection and packed with missiles and carrying with it significant guns (to eventually be replaced by railguns if we ever work them out). It would be heavily automated and so probably have a crew of no more than a couple hundred and nuclear powered. Well, turns out I’m not the only person thinking along these lines – so is Trump.
It seems that Trump is dissatisfied with our fleet. Is it something he knows or is it instinctive? I don’t know – but while I discount those who say the era of the Carrier is over I do believe it is time for one of those evolutions of sea power, the last of which ushered in the Carrier as the dominate Naval asset. Do keep in mind that while I call this a Battleship, it isn’t to perform the role intended for those old castles of steel – that is, lines of them coming into conflict, guns blazing until one side is destroyed. The new Battleship is a strategic asset – it is designed to survive whatever you can throw at them and still arrive off your coast…carrying in her train, as needed, an invading army you cannot stop. Carriers can defeat enemy air power. Submarines can destroy your trade. But only a battle fleet can compel your surrender. Five such ships off Shanghai ends whatever point China would be trying to make via war with us.
The government is still shut down. I guess. Nobody cares.
Mamdani says his aunt faced anti-Muslim backlash in NYC after 9/11. Given that Mamdani is a Commie we can assume this is a lie…but even if it isn’t, so what? Who the heck cares if your aunt got some nasty looks after 3,000 Americans were murdered? Mamdani didn’t mention them. Because he doesn’t care about them. To him, the true victims of 9/11 were Muslims…just as he holds the true victims of 10/7 were the Gazans. Its some real sick, twisted stuff in that man…and all those like him (which includes, it should be noted, quite a few upper class liberal white women).
Trump’s plan to kill drug mules on the high seas seems to be accelerating. The latest tactic the Cartel apologists are using is “these poor people are coerced into shipping drugs”…which is probably true to a certain extent. To bad, so sad. Not our problem. As with all bad things, they only happen via cooperation. Sure, you and your family might suffer if you stand up to the Cartels…but by not standing up to them, you’re just moving the suffering around…from you and your family to some poor slob and his family in the USA. And, of course, the mules – under threat or not – are being well paid to make the runs. And that is the real key here.
As I’ve noted before, we can’t defeat the Drug Lords – simply because once you get one, you just get the next…who is probably going to be better at it as he’ll learn from the mistakes of his predecessors (and, indeed, often a major Drug Lord only goes down after someone below betrays him to us so that we’ll remove him, allowing the new guy to take over). The whole thing about this illicit trade is that it is massive amounts of stuff to be moved. Very different from days when we might be talking a kilogram or two…they are shipping tons of the stuff. And the return trip is literal tons of money. This takes huge infrastructure…and apparently we’ve known all along about these shipments (routes, timing, ports, all of it). By hitting the mules we’re doing the worst possible thing to the Cartels – denying them their ability to earn money. The money which, among other things, buys the bully-boys necessary to keep everyone in line (you know: if you threaten to kill a man’s family if he doesn’t cooperate this rings rather hollow unless you have some menacing guys around to back up the threat – menacing guys don’t work for free). We’re strangling the Cartels…and that is why everyone involved is blowing a gasket over it (huge numbers of supposedly honest people are hip deep in the Cartel trade). As per usual, Trump is simply doing what could have been done all along…which shows that all of our problems are actually policy choices.
Blogs For Victory 
Meanwhile, the Left is reduced to criticizing a Trump appointee for making a stupid remark about his “Nazi streak.” (after which he withdrew his name from consideration, something that Democrats are loathe to do when the shoe is on the other foot.) Talk about marginalized!
I’ve described myself as a “word Nazi”—-clearly I could never run for office now, and it’s surprising that Rocks hasn’t written screeds about my “admission” to being a “fascist”.
Mamdani is Obama 2.0 … but worse. He is a propped up Soros puppet with the same empty resume of Obama. Mamdani has never accomplished anything in his short miserable life. He is not American, and he is not a man. He is some squishy, empty vessel that will say and do anything to please his leftist pay masters. I hope some real American men take him out. Red blooded American men need to start showing up. Muslims should never have any power in America.
The Cartels will get more violent, rest assure of that. There empire is being threatened end and the only thing these guys know is violence and death. I suspect they will try and take out Trump, or worse, so I hope the administration is thinking of that.
I think Obama was a test, to see what we would tolerate. He was marginally sanitized with most of his Marxist ideology disguised and only let out a little at a time; Now the Left has tested the waters in NYC and is ready to go all-out with a full-fledged anti-American Communist.
I ended up with two different thread ideas both based on the writings of Robert Tanenbaum. The first:
I have been trying to clean up my vast e-book library and in going back through it have become distracted by old favorites and done some binge-reading of some series. I had once loved the Butch Karp series till it went off the rails (research told me they had been mostly ghost-written and a new writer had been brought in who was downright goofy as well as a bad writer) and I found myself reacting differently to the books this time around. With good writing and material, that happens—-I still find new reactions to Patrick O’Brien books after reading them as well as listening to them several times over the years.
Anyway, Tanenbaum has some creds. He was NYC Assistant District Attorney and his books are dense with information about the legal system in NYC. What prompted me to think of writing about this was his description of a massive, chaotic, barely-under-control system totally overloaded in which criminals are allowed to plead major crimes down to misdemeanors and then set free not due to political considerations but the simple inability of the system to handle them.
Whoever did the writing in the first few books did a great job. They are beautifully written, with great characters. I have since realized that Tanenbaum’s main protagonist, Roger (Butch) Karp, represents how he sees himself—-incorruptible, a secular Jew ferociously dedicated to the law and totally morally upright. I never saw overt political messaging, though the characters ARE in NYC so there are some toss-away comments about not wanting “the Republicans” to take over, etc.
Anyway, in the context of the Butch Karp series, I wholeheartedly recommend them, at least for the first dozen or so. Butch is a secular Jew, his wife a fallen-away Catholic who becomes something of a vigilante dealing with abusive men and his daughter becomes something of a mystical Catholic, so there is lots of content there about religion, spirituality and so on, with plenty of action and courtroom stuff.
I don’t doubt the details of the broken legal system in NYC, and it comes across as a simple matter of volume—–so many millions of people, so many of them so dysfunctional, that no system can really handle them without becoming so massive it couldn’t be controlled. It was a new perspective for someone (me) who has seen the casual attitude toward criminals in NYC as purely a function of Democrat undermining of our legal system.
And then, Part Two…..
My e-book library has a list of Tannebaum books, and one caught my eye—–“That Day In Dallas: Lee Harvey Oswald Did NOT Kill JFK”. Well, I couldn’t pass that up, so I bought it on Audible, after reading some reviews.
The first few chapters are pretty dry, merely Tanenbaum patting himself on the back for his stellar integrity, matchless honesty, dedication to the truth, blah blah blah blah blah. But then he gets into the exact kind of prosecutorial detail he brought to the District Attorney’s office when they were able to take cases to court, and it is riveting. Mark, given your acceptance of the Warren Commission, I think you would find this book very interesting. As much reading as I have done on the assassination I still found new information here, including proof (not just speculation) that Oswald worked for both the CIA and FB,I and forensic details either hidden or ignored by the Commission. I think if you were to get the book and just skip the self-aggrandizement of the first few chapters and go straight to the actual evidence and testimony you would find your assumptions shattered.
It turns out that Mr. Tanenbaum is a pretty interesting guy. Something of a pompous prig, perhaps, but a good investigator and a good prosecutor and a good story-teller—and I admire his integration of the spiritual in his work.
Lets not place me in the rely on Warren box! Especially after all we’ve learned, only a complete fool would rely on anything produced by the US government since WWII. Any particular report might have bits and pieces of useful information in them, but the bottom line is that these reports are generated to obfuscate rather than elucidate. Their basic character is always CYA. Lost in all the crush of history since 1945 is the United States Congressional Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack. This was a laughable bit of whitewash…the Committee was created and headed up by an ardent FDR loyalist and so was geared from the start to not find out who was responsible…which, of course, would have been FDR along with Stimson, Knox and Marshall (respectively Secretary of War, Secretary of the Navy and Army Chief of Staff at the time of the attack). The GOP was in the Congressional minority and tried to inject a note of reality but first Truman attempted to stonewall on info and, when thwarted at that, buried the committee under so much info that it simply didn’t have the time – even if it ever had the inclination – to sift through it and get to the total facts. As has been noted, the Pearl Harbor attack was the most anticipated secret attack in history. We were reading Japan’s mail – we knew they were going to attack. No, we didn’t have their order of battle nor their exact plans, but everyone in senior leadership knew it was coming.
And all it would have taken to prevent disaster at Pearl Harbor was placing a combat air patrol up each morning and evening. Just a half dozen planes above Pearl Harbor would have given sufficient advance warning to scramble our fighters and get the ships to general quarters with steam raised…we still would have been hit and maybe pretty hard, but we wouldn’t have had complete disaster. Seems to me that a crisp order from the President to all Pacific commands to be ready for attack anywhere at any time would have been sufficient. Instead jejune messages were sent completely open to misinterpretation by the commanders on the spot…without telling them that we knew, for certain, the Japanese were going to attack somewhere and perhaps anywhere, so be sharp.
And this is why I keep saying we’re living under the rule of lies – so many lies told for so many years, building one lie upon another, that getting to the reality is difficult. And mostly can only be done by thinking it over after making a full mental effort to simply not accept anything received as true until you’ve tested against what solid facts you can discern filtered through common sense and historic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the human race – how we’ve done things and why over the ages).
As far as what happened on that day in Dallas: we’ll likely never know for certain at this point. Everyone is dead, decades for records to be destroyed or falsified. We can only go with a few very solid facts – one of which was my father watching the Zapruder film and confidently asserting that all three shots must have come from above and behind…I know that some people have looked at the physical reaction of Kennedy’s body and figure one shot must have come from the front or at least not from behind but I’ll go with my dad on this…he was a literal ballistics expert and, if you really wanted, could math it out for you why that kill shot came from above and behind.
That aside, there were eyewitnesses who literally saw Oswald in the Book Depository just before and during the shooting…it was really unfortunate that one reporter perfectly placed to take a picture of it had just started to reload his camera before the shooting started. He recalled hearing the first shot and another reporter started pointing at the Depository saying “he’s shooting from up there! From that window!” and pointing right at where Oswald was shooting. I find it curious that both the “Conspiracy Theory” and “Nothing To See Here” sides have totally downplayed the eyewitness reports. This, in my mind, is because it was a Butler, PA sort of thing – someone screwed up very badly and the only question is whether it was intentional screw up or not…with, of course, a cover up because intentional or not, those responsible wouldn’t want to feel the heat.
Good to keep in mind that one of the most effective means of covering up is obfuscation…not outright lying, but just putting up a fog of bullsh**. At this point, I’m fairly confident that at least some of the Conspiracy Theories were created to assist the cover up. That is, have things produced in public which generate more questions than answers but which collectively obscure what really happened. Remember that within 24 hours of Butler we already had “experts” telling us that Trump couldn’t have been hit by a bullet and a lot of people expended time and effort on that when the only issue was who in command neglected to order a police officer to guard that roof. It was the only thing that matters and finding that out would tell us (a) who screwed up and (b) lead us to determining if it was intentional or mere incompetence.
Shot from up and behind. Oswald was seen. We know he shot.
But to this day we don’t know why – the only explanation was “he went insane”.
Sure was lucky Oswald got the job at the Depository on October 20th, 1963…I mean, figure the odds that an insane man would get hired at the place perfectly positioned for a shot just over a month later…weird. Especially since it was September 24th when Kennedy decided to accept a previous invitation to visit Dallas. Like “its a go…now, how do we get our guy in position?”.
These are the things that nobody asks about – why was Oswald hired? He was a drifter who routinely got into fights with fellow co-workers and failed to live up to performance metrics. He had just applied at another place and got turned down because of his poor work history. All of a sudden he gets a job and gets along with everyone and is putting in a hard day’s work. Doing nothing which would jeopardize his ability to remain there. This is what doesn’t add up…this is what makes no sense. And this is what nobody looked into. How did he get into position? The Official Narrative is that Ruth Paine got him the job … ok, but if she was such great friends with the Oswalds why did Marina Oswald essentially break off all contact after the assassination? Almost like Marina suddenly realized that Paine was a threat somehow. We know Paine was a big, ol’ Lefty Commie her whole life…but also seems to have been friendly with the CIA. Another aspect not looked deeply into by either Conspiracy Theory or Nothing To See Here.
As I said, we can’t really know now – nothing can be held as absolutely certain. So, we can only ponder the why of it all and see where that leads.
Unless Oswald was insane – and I see no indication that he was – then someone put him up to it. That he managed to get into perfect position is too much of a coincidence. But why would someone do it?
I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather had extensive business dealings in pre-Castro Cuba and retained a lot of Cuban friends after Castro came to power. A side note here is that given my grandfather’s connections in Cuba, prior to the revolution Raul Castro tried to recruit my uncle Mike to the cause…with, of course, a mind towards recruiting my grandfather and his business partners to the cause of revolution. Main thing is that it indicates that grandpa really was “in” with a lot of influential Cubans. Now, family legend is that grandpa was visiting some of them in Florida when the announcement of the Kennedy visit to Texas came over the radio…the story is that grandpa’s Cuban friends immediately said, “well, he’ll never get out of Dallas alive”. I can’t confirm this story – everyone involved is dead. Even those who related it to me second hand are dead. But it always lead my dad to suspect that the genesis of Dallas came in the Bay of Pigs: that Kennedy’s failure to back the Cuban rebels got some Cubans in a mood to take revenge. The main thing is that everything about Oswald indicates he could easily be suckered into going along with such a plan. But, we’ll never know.
LBJ? Only path to the White House? Maybe.
The Russians? Unlikely as discovery meant WWIII.
The Deep State? Possibly. The reason dad didn’t vote for Kennedy in 1960 (in spite of our family being solid Democrats at the time) was he rated Jack too inexperienced to be President. That is, Kennedy was the privileged rich boy who was being orchestrated into the White House by much cleverer men who hoped to control things in Kennedy’s name. None of the Kennedy’s have ever given indications of real genius – they do get by on looks and money. RFK, Jr is the first of the clan who seems to have actually done some thinking…unless his uncle John also did some thinking. One of the Conspiracy Theories is that JFK was set to gut the Deep State…that the blowups of the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the continually worsening situation in Vietnam had opened Kennedy’s eyes to how compromised and incompetent the CIA/FBI were and he was determined to make big changes…so, they shot him before he could, knowing that Johnson was Establishment to the bone and would go along with whatever the Experts said. Outside pissed off Cubans, this is the most credible theory as to why it happened – and if so, then it happened like Butler was supposed to happen.
“We know he shot”
Yet repeated paraffin tests on his hands, cheeks and clothes showed no GSR
“Shot from up and behind”
Yet every doctor at Parkland, every doctor at Bethesda, autopsy experts, a mortician, etc.—if I remember correctly, 66 medical experts—recalled a massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. Bethesda records were altered and Parkland doctors were just dismissed saying they had been “mistaken”.
I only heard Tanenbaum’s account of the evidence he referenced but if it exists then everything we were told was lies.
I’m probably going to have to buy the book to be able to look up what he said. Audio books are not great for these kinds of details.
That gets me right to the fact that both the Conspiracy Theory and Nothing To See Here sides keep missing the primary target…from what I can determine from the record of definitely known events, Oswald went home after leaving the Depository where he probably changed clothes and may well have taken a shower. In all that I’ve read, I’ve never seen any definitive statement about what Oswald was wearing when picked up and was it the same as what he had been wearing earlier at the Depository. A washed and changed man isn’t going to have nearly as much gunshot residue on him. But, we simply don’t know – these things weren’t deeply looked into at the time and have never been looked into since and its all too long ago for us to find out for sure (and all of this is aside from the really poor performance of the local police holding Oswald…people wandering in and out of the building, almost random interviews with Oswald…nobody trying to preserve evidence in any systemic way).
A few things we do know: Oswald definitely worked at the Depository. Multiple witnesses place him in the Depository mere minutes before the shooting. He was the only Depository employee who left the building after the shooting (this is why there was an APB out on him which officer Tippit responded to). Oswald was seen in the Depository window where the shots came from moments before the shooting. It was definitely his rifle found in the Depository (leaving aside any attempt to make a final determination on whether it was the actual murder weapon). All in all, we’ve got “opportunity” in the “motive and opportunity” part of any investigation. There is no real doubt he was there, that he had the requisite weapons skill and there was a weapon present that could have done the deed.
And then he left. Big flashing red light that he had something to do with it. Nobody else left because nobody else at the Depository had any direct involvement…so of course they’d stay and answer police questions and be all sad and shocked at the day’s events. The guy who flees is almost certainly involved. Period.
As for multiple shooters – I discount that because the more people directly involved, the higher the chance operational security will be blown. Even when the Brits were planning on killing Hitler with Operation Foxley, the team was a spotter and a shooter. That’s it. Too risky to try to insert more and, of course, more wouldn’t help…if your first shooter can’t do it, the chances of a second being successful are nil simply because the target hits the deck.
As I said, I rely on dear, old Dad on the placement of the shooter – absolute ballistics expert. He died in 2009 so some of his last internet arguments were making fun of 9/11 truthers who figured a plane couldn’t bring down a building…ballistics, ballistics, ballistics; in things like that, this is all that matters. Dad was dead certain the shooter in Dallas was behind and above JFK. The wound to his head indicates the shot came in at an angle from behind and above with the kinetic force blowing off the top of his skull, the blood and brains ejecting from this resulting in Kennedy flopping to the side (that is, sort of into Jackie’s lap). Additionally, no doubt that the bullet which struck his upper back and exited his throat came from behind.
But we’re still entirely without motive. Why did he do it? Why did he get a job at the one place he needed to be? Why after multiple failed jobs based on personality and performance did he suddenly become the model employee at the Depository? Why did all sorts of odd people seem to rush to help Oswald and his wife over the years? Let’s face it, the White Russian emigre guy is just freaking bizarre in this whole thing…”we went over to see Oswald’s apartment and, oh yeah, saw the gun he’d use to kill Kennedy”. Seriously? A lot of the Conspiracy Theory types hold the Russian was Oswald’s handler but he doesn’t fit the type for a spy master..who are usually very discrete, boring people…not at all like the Russian. Why was the general public allowed into the building when Oswald was being transported? You know: to almost make sure that Ruby or someone else could tie up the loosest of loose ends. These are the “whys” which would need an answer if we were ever to determine just what happened…from whether or not Oswald actually did it (as opposed, to say, being the patsy he claimed to be) and who set up the whole chain of events. For every other assassin we’ve got a motive, even if its a stupid one (like Garfield shooter Charles Julius Guiteau who believed he was owed a job in the Administration). Oswald…nothing. Some insinuations that he was angry about how JFK was treating Castro’s Cuba…but the Bay of Pigs was over and there was no indication that we were planning an attack on Castro.
Lots of questions, none of which even come close the idea that Oswald was carefully set up to be the patsy for a CIA assassination. According to Tanenbaum, citing evidence, it has been proved that Oswald was not the person in Mexico City impersonating him. Paine was linked to the CIA and got Oswald the job at the book depository, which was owned by someone else linked to the CIA.
JFK had stated that he had lost faith in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was in constant conflict with his ambassador to Viet Nam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who ignored his directives and supported the 1963 coup against Diem and his murder. Kennedy was in conflict with Big Business, particularly after he went after Big Steel when the top steel manufacturers went back on an agreement and raised prices. Kennedy moved all Defense Department steel purchases to smaller companies that had kept their word and kept their prices stable, earning the enmity of Bethlehem and U.S. Steel among others and sending a message to Wall Street that he was not a Big Business president. Secret Service agents joked that if someone shot at Kennedy they would get out of the way. Kennedy flubbed the Bay of Pigs fiasco, first letting himself get sucked into a guaranteed-to-fail enterprise and then pulling out his support for it, infuriating people on both sides of the Cuba situation.
But most of all he was planning, after he won the 1964 election, to withdraw American troops from Viet Nam.
To think that one single “one wolf” with no prior political position suddenly decided on his own to kill the most powerful man in the world who was up against his own government, his own military, his own business community and his own intelligence communities simply does not make sense. Then when you look at the involvement of the CIA in setting up the fake Oswald sightings in Mexico, the placing of Oswald in a building along the presidential route and the subsequent manipulation of evidence and testimony he is more and more clearly just a chess piece on a much larger board.
He could definitely have been the fall guy – the person “there” to take the rap, which would explain his desire to get out of there as fast as possible (but this would mean he was in on it to some extent…like maybe just bringing the rifle there). One thing we do know is huge numbers of people in the mix and around the edges had intelligence connections…and on that we go, “figure the odds”. And, never forget that he was, once again, another “lone wolf” who was on the FBI’s radar before the event.
As noted, it could have been sheer Deep State – same thing that tried to take out Trump (multiple times). If JFK was getting ready to rile up the Deep State after the 1964 election, that would put lots of people on edge…not just in the sense of their personal positions, but in the fact that a great deal of them were compromised. Always good to remember that the CIA wasn’t vetted. The FBI wanted to vet them – and probably would have been pretty good at it given Hoover’s known hatred of Communists – but this was denied. The nascent CIA vetted itself…which means if even one of the people doing the vetting were Soviet agents a whole host of Soviet agents were allowed in. The Democrats had managed to destroy McCarthy (at the time a friend and ally of young Senator Kennedy) and they certainly didn’t want to go through that again…that is, the full exposure of Communist penetration of the US government with the active or passive cooperation of Democrats all up and down the line.
I’m still not convinced that the balance of evidence indicates a JFK desire to withdraw from Vietnam – “pay any price, bear any burden” was his ringing call to battle, after all. But I can easily see him frustrated with the conduct of the war…and killing Diem, allegedly signed off by Kennedy, simply makes no sense. As far as dictators go, not nearly the worst and a lot better than, say, Ho up north. He was a vigorous anti-Communist and patriot…but he also refused to play the part of puppet. He was going to fight the war his way…while the Deep State over here was figuring that he who has the gold makes the rules…and what did the Deep State want? Soft blows against the VC, cooperation with Southern elements compromised by the VC…and a negotiated settlement which meant that South Vietnam had to give concessions while North Vietnam gave nothing…no surprise that Diem didn’t want to commit suicide by going along with that. Nothing better shows that we were wrong in dealing with the government of South Vietnam than what that government did after Tet – armed the populace. The official word was that the people of South Vietnam largely favored the VC and so Saigon must cut a deal with them…the people being armed after Tet and settling scores with the VC showed that no matter how much the people might dislike this or that aspect of the Saigon government, they were in no mood to concede to the Communists. And just who would set America on a path to mistrust of the Saigon government to the point where we’d pressure it to make deals with the enemy? Traitors, of course…and maybe even in 1963 Kennedy was starting to understand that our Vietnam policy was largely being shaped by people who clearly weren’t working for American victory?
“I’m still not convinced that the balance of evidence indicates a JFK desire to withdraw from Vietnam”
On October 11, 1963, he issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263. “In the month and a half before his death, this welcome decision received front page headlines in both the military and civilian press: In the Armed Forces’ Pacific Stars and Stripes, “White House Report: U.S. Troops Seen Out of Viet(nam) by ’65”; in the New York Times, “1,000 U.S. Troops to Leave Vietnam”.
“never forget that he was, once again, another “lone wolf” who was on the FBI’s radar before the event.” There is evidence that Oswald acted as an agent for the FBI as well as the CIA, and any attention paid to him by the FBI was not in the context of him being a “lone wolf” but rather part of some large conspiracy, a CIA agent, etc. The FBI’s involvement has always been suspicious: for example, they examined recordings of the calls made by someone posing as Oswald from Mexico City and said the voice was not Oswald’s and the tapes were then put in FBI custody—where they were apparently erased. The entire “lone wolf” theory was invented by the Warren Commission, or those feeding information to the Commission, as it was important to cover up Oswald’s deep connections to the intelligence community.
” figure the odds that an insane man would get hired at the place perfectly positioned for a shot just over a month later”
“Insane”? He was very intelligent, had a high-level security clearance, and was employed by both the CIA and FBI. There has never been any indication of mental instability.
There is no real doubt he was there, that he had the requisite weapons skill and there was a weapon present that could have done the deed.
That’s part of the smoke and mirrors. Oswald was repeatedly described as a Marine sharp shooter. The problem is that he qualified sharpshooter once in his military career (barely). He contemporaries described him as an extremely poor shot. And sharpshooter is the middle of the three marksmenship levels, Expert being the highest. As far as the weapon is concerned, the FBI had to shim the scope in order to duplicate the shot.
You are right in that we’ll probably never know the whole truth. There are a lot of moving parts, and pretty much everyone involved is dead.
Side note – but is it?
All of a sudden there’s no USAID money and Millei’s party totally trounces the Establishment Peronistas in Argentina…even in alleged Peronista strongholds.
Almost as if the Deep State is the source of Establishment power around the globe…
“Almost as if the Deep State is the source of Establishment power around the globe…”
Yeah. Weird, ain’t it?
The acknowledged best military shooter in the United States, Carlos Hathcock, tried to replicate the sequence of shots allegedly fired by Oswald with that rifle and could not. The scope not only had to be shimmed on the rifle found in the book depository, it had to be reset every time it was moved. One report was that if the rifle was carried as it supposedly was, wrapped in paper and presented as a “curtain rod”, the scope would have had to be reset before it could be fired with any degree of accuracy at all. That is, the gun could not just have been unwrapped and then shot, but would have needed adjustment which could likely not be done in that room in the book depository.
The sheer volume of detail surrounding the assassination is so vast that sorting through it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. This is exacerbated by the efforts of various actors to add to the confusion, for their own reasons, so there is a mishmash of real and artificial “facts”. At the time of the assassination, if there was a serious effort to determine what had happened, a lot could have been documented, but it was not. An example is the fact that on the day of the murder the room in question was being refloored, with the old oil-stained wood being removed and replaced as the building had fairly recently been bought and was being repurposed. There was never any mention of the disorganization of the room, the partially replaced floor, the large table saw sitting on the floor, or the piles of boxes scattered rather helter-skelter around the room, setting the stage for the alleged shooting. A man who reported being in the room and shooting out an open window at the other end of the room from the “sniper’s nest” described the room, and his report was later verified. It was later verified that while the window in question, the one he said he shot through, was closed when people started looking at the building, a photo had been taken at the time of the shooting showing it open. There was never any mention of an unidentified fingerprint on one of the boxes near the “sniper’s nest” much less that it was identified, years later, as belonging to a man known to do dirty work for LBJ.
The geopolitical environment of the time was chaos, with Cuban affairs a hot mess and constantly being stirred up by people in the United States and the recent missile crisis in Cuba involving Russia. Organized crime was involved, with drug money linked to Cuba and Mexico. American intelligence agencies were deeply involved in agitating, not just monitoring, and James Jesus Angleton was neck deep in manipulations and various antics with the CIA. Kennedy was involved in back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev, with the prospect of Castro getting involved in a tripartite peace effort, while Kennedy was trying to navigate the shoals of the whole Vietnam mess and butting heads with his own military and the military-industrial Cold War-dependent establishment. The CIA had Oswald handing out anti-Castro pamphlets on one street corner and pro-Cuba stuff around the corner, after he was sent to Russia to do who knows what there, with the payoff to Russia of secret information about the U-2 program. Then they brought him back, and made a big deal out of how they had to rush to change the program to deal with the fallout from his turning over of the radar information—but he was never charged, just allowed to come back with his wife, the niece of a highly placed KGB official, to then be placed with CIA operative Ruth Paine. Monty Python could not have invented a more convoluted, internally contradictory, confusing mess of political chicanery
One thing seldom addressed is that an officer on the scene did find some prints on the rifle and dusted them and covered them with clear tape, but then they were never linked to Oswald—-but then the rifle itself was taken to the mortuary where Oswald’s body was being held, after which an Oswald “palm print” was discovered, though in a place where a palm would not ordinarily rest.
What in the hell is wrong with the NY Republican Party????? 10 million people and the best you can come up with is Sliwa???? Are they even trying?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G4Ozff9W4AAn_cX?format=jpg&name=small
ROTFLOL!