single bullet theory is not true says Soily

[Fourbrick]

I could understand it if Soily couldn't get through all of Bugliosi's book and all of the supporting documentation included, but what about Posner's Case Closed? It's only 600 pages or so, and you can get a used paperback copy for cheap.

Posner makes so many mistakes and assumptions that it isn't a book worth reading.

Have a look here. at some of the mistakes he makes.

http://www.assassinationweb.com/Gal.htm

 

[Soily]

Posner makes so many mistakes and assumptions that it isn't a book worth reading.

Have a look here. at some of the mistakes he makes.

http://www.assassinationweb.com/Gal.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKposner.htm http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm some more examples of errors and dishonest arguments here.

Case closed and reclaiming history are lawyers prosecution cases, not an impartial attempt to find out what happened. I mean the idea that Bugliosi started his book with an open mind is ludicrous, since the book evolved from the Thames tv mock trial of Oswald in 1988, where Bugliosi acted for the prosecution!

 

[Dave Rogers]

Mmm if you want to provide the evidence CE399 was the bullet then please do and this thread would be over. My point is really simple so I'll repeat it again for the hard of understanding. There is no evidence CE399 was the bullet found at parkland. There is no evidence CE399 was fired at Kennedy.

You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "repeat". Here's your original statement:

And the single bullet theory is not true, thats a fact not an opinion and I'll happily prove it if you want, although this is probably not the right thread.

You have offered to prove that the single bullet theory is not true. This is not the same as casting reasonable doubt on the evidence supporting the single bullet theory; it is in fact a far higher burden of proof that you have chosen to assume. Please stop, therefore, avoiding the issue by repeating your personal opinion that CE399 was misidentified, and present your convincing evidence that it is impossible for a single bullet fired by Oswald to have inflicted the known wounds of both Kennedy and Connally.

Dave

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Really, where do these people come from?

 

[Soily]

You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "repeat". Here's your original statement:



You have offered to prove that the single bullet theory is not true. This is not the same as casting reasonable doubt on the evidence supporting the single bullet theory; it is in fact a far higher burden of proof that you have chosen to assume. Please stop, therefore, avoiding the issue by repeating your personal opinion that CE399 was misidentified, and present your convincing evidence that it is impossible for a single bullet fired by Oswald to have inflicted the known wounds of both Kennedy and Connally.

Dave

You're right, I can't prove that no evidence of something means its not true. I'm not interested in getting into squabble with you or arguing about arguing, posters motives or anything like that. If we genuinely want to talk about the SBT rather than win an argument, lets change tack slightly. I guess it would be best if we stuck to discussing what evidence there is to believe CE399 was either the bullet found at Parkland or was fired at Kennedy. Lets do this in a series of for and against arguments. I will post the against, obviously.

Against - the witnesses
Nathan Pool, Darrell Tomlinson and OP Wright are the 3 men involved with the discovery of the bullet at Parkland. Their description of the bullet they found was as follows.

Hospital employees Nathan Pool and Darrel Tomlinson are the 2 men who actually found the bullet. Pool told the HSCA in 1977 it was "long, pointed and smooth". Darrell Tomlinson,told Josiah Thompson in his book 6 seconds in Dallas in 1966 the bullet was a hunting round. Tomlinson gave the bullet to OP Wright, the personnel manager. He not only told Thompson it was a point nosed hunting round -"That bullet had a pointed tip", but produced a similar bullet to the one he saw at Parkland, which is pictured in the book. Its an entirely different type of bullet to CE399.

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/images/Slide4.GIF

Neither of these 3 men, or the FBI agents who also handled the bullet that day could ever identify CE399 as the bullet they saw at Parkland as shown by these suppressed FBI memos not shown to the Warren Commuision (no cover up eh?)
http://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/images/Slide6.GIF
http://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/images/Slide5-1.GIF

There was however, an FBI memo to the Warren Commision that stated FBI agent Bardwell Odum interviewed Wright and Tomlinson and they told him CE399 "appears to be the same" as the bullet they found. Unfortunetly, this seems to be a lie. Bardwell Odum was asked about this incident and he replied:

“I didn’t show it [#399] to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t have any bullet … I don’t think I ever saw it even.”

Could his memory be playing tricks after all these years? Well the FBI report detailing the interview appears to have never existed, its not in the national archives, and despite the reports been numbered consecutively, there are no gaps where it once might have existed.

Full details of this can be seen here - http://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/EvenMoreMagical.htm

I guess we should for now, probably discard John Hunts apperent evidence that Agent Elmer Todd's initials don't appear on the bullet in evidence today as CE399 until it can be fully confirmed, but if true would appear to be further evidence against the Parkland bullet been CE399.

So, in terms of witnesses and identification, there is no evidence extant that CE399 was the bullet found at Parkland, and some evidence that it was not.

 

[Dave Rogers]

So, in terms of witnesses and identification, there is no evidence extant that CE399 was the bullet found at Parkland, and some evidence that it was not.

Even if that were accepted, all that you're suggesting is that a piece of evidence thought to be relevant is, in fact, not relevant. Since CE399 is not crucial to the single bullet theory - indeed, not a few conspiracy theorists believe that the relatively undamaged condition of CE399 refutes the single bullet theory - this doesn't change anything significant.

Dave

 

[dafydd]

Really, where do these people come from?

Their parent's basements?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Their parent's basements?

So, not "Twenty Thousand Fathoms". Color me shocked.

 

[Soily]

Even if that were accepted, all that you're suggesting is that a piece of evidence thought to be relevant is, in fact, not relevant. Since CE399 is not crucial to the single bullet theory - indeed, not a few conspiracy theorists believe that the relatively undamaged condition of CE399 refutes the single bullet theory - this doesn't change anything significant.

Dave

This ignores 2 vital points. The FBI, the Warren commission and it's supporters say CE399 was the bullet found at parkland, the bullet that they say was the single bullet in the SBT. If it isn't then several people are lying about a key piece of evidence in the case. You don't think this undermines it at all? Secondly, if CE399 is not the bullet found at parkland where the he'll did it come from? I know it's been labelled the magic bullet, but how much magic are you willing to believe in? That it spontaneously appeared in evidence out of nowhere and with no provenance? You don't think building a massive and key theory on such a shaky foundation is satisfactory do you?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"The Odyssey was not written by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name!"

 

[Dave Rogers]

This ignores 2 vital points. The FBI, the Warren commission and it's supporters say CE399 was the bullet found at parkland, the bullet that they say was the single bullet in the SBT. If it isn't then several people are lying about a key piece of evidence in the case.

Or they honestly believe it to be the truth, but are mistaken. Or the witnesses are mistaken about the precise shape of the bullet, human memory being a very imperfect thing. False dilemma.

Secondly, if CE399 is not the bullet found at parkland where the he'll did it come from? I know it's been labelled the magic bullet, but how much magic are you willing to believe in? That it spontaneously appeared in evidence out of nowhere and with no provenance? You don't think building a massive and key theory on such a shaky foundation is satisfactory do you?

I'm not willing to believe in any magic at all. "Magic bullet" is a conspiracist's way to sow seeds of doubt about a theory that actually simply requires the bullet to obey simple mechanics.

So let's look at the alternatives:

(1) CE399 is not the bullet found at Parkland, nor is it the bullet that wounded Kennedy and Connally. The origin of CE399 is a mystery, as is the fate of the bullet or bullets that wounded Kennedy and Connally. A conspiracy took place to substitute a bullet for the real bullet that bore no resemblance to it, in the vain hope that the witnesses would fail to notice the difference, this conspiracy is supported by the FBI, by the Warren Commission - despite the fact that three of its members did not support parts of its findings - and this still doesn't have any bearing on whether Kennedy and Connally could have been wounded by the same bullet.

Or:

(2) Witness recollection is fallible.

One requires the erection of a conspiracist house of cards. The other requires that something well-known is assumed to be possible. Occam's Razor is very simply applied.

Dave

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

I would say something, but you do realize that the job of a prosecutor is to assemble evidence and make a case right?

...?

 

[riptowtan]

I know I am not going to get around to address every claim, but I'd like to go back to where you said the first shot can't be linked to a deflection of a tree branch. Before presenting evidence, I would like to ask whether this would account for the huge margin of error. Looking at still frames from the FBI's reenactment of the shooting, frame 161 shows that a tree is in the way of the shot. This is approximately when the first shot is fired. If the tree was in the way of the shot, when the presidential limousine was first shot at, then it is very probably that the bullet was deflected from the tree branch.

There was however, an FBI memo to the Warren Commision that stated FBI agent Bardwell Odum interviewed Wright and Tomlinson and they told him CE399 "appears to be the same" as the bullet they found. Unfortunetly, this seems to be a lie. Bardwell Odum was asked about this incident and he replied:


Could his memory be playing tricks after all these years?

Yes. Remember this was 37 years after the event. Someone could have false memories about what happened yesterday. Do you know what the other FBI agents say about the report?

terms of witnesses and identification, there is no evidence extant that CE399 was the bullet found at Parkland, and some evidence that it was not.

But the bullet was fired from Oswald's gun to the exclusion of all other weapons. This matches the amount of gun shells found in the 6th floor of the book depository and has additional eyewitness evidence. There were three construction workers on the fifth floor who heard the three shots from above, including the shells hitting the ground.

Secondly, if CE399 is not the bullet found at parkland where the he'll did it come from? I know it's been labelled the magic bullet, but how much magic are you willing to believe in? That it spontaneously appeared in evidence out of nowhere and with no provenance? You don't think building a massive and key theory on such a shaky foundation is satisfactory do you?

I don't see why the chain of custody for CE399 is hard to believe. If you probe any murder case to the extent of which the JFK conspiracy researchers do, you will find small pockets of inconsistencies or anomalies. I do not agree that they can undermine all of the really clear evidence that we have about the case. Namely, all of the evidence linking the shots to Oswald on the 6th floor. (Palm print, finger print, 3 gun shells, eyewitness testimony, Oswald's neighbor reporting that Oswald brought in "curtain rods" that morning) I don't think the memory of an event that happened 37 years ago trumps all of the documents and physical evidence, nor do I think any rational person would.

 

[Fourbrick]

Regarding the "curtain rods", the neighbour was one, Mr Frazier

"Officials assumed that the package Oswald carried to work that morning was the Italian-made rifle he used to kill Kennedy.

Mr. Frazier still doesn't believe it.

When Oswald got in his car that morning, Mr. Frazier hardly noticed the bundle Oswald laid on the back seat.

"He told me he was taking some curtain rods for his room," Mr. Frazier said. "I didn't think much about it."

Mr. Frazier parked his car behind the depository building and revved his engine for a few moments, charging his low battery, and watched Oswald walk about 200 yards into the building with the package under his arm.

In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Mr. Frazier said the brown paper package Oswald carried that morning was too short to contain a rifle. Oswald cupped the package in his hand, he said, and it fit under his armpit. "

Re the palm print, This is what the later commission found about that.

"Lieutenant J. C. Day, the man who claimed he discovered and lifted Oswald's palm print off the barrel of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building, was not properly questioned by the Warren Commission (WC). Years after the WC disbanded, it came to light through an internal WC memo that the Commission was suspicious of the manner in which the palm print was obtained. When Day appeared before the Commission, the questioning to which he was subjected can politely be called unproductive and overly friendly. Later on in the investigation, when the Commission's doubts about the palm print began to come to a head, chief counsel J. Lee Rankin asked the FBI to secure more information from Lt. Day about the palm print. Day refused to make a sworn statement regarding his handling of the print, and there the matter has rested ever since."

The three gun shells prove nothing.

The sloppiness of the Dallas police was amazing.

 

[Soily]

Against - CE399 the physical evidence

Since CE399 was never found in the body of either Kennedy or connally, the witnesses, documentation and chain of evidence all testify against it, we need to look at the physical evidence.

CE399 is alleged to have made entered the bodies of Kennedy and connally 4 time, through flesh, clothing and bones. Yet there was no blood, human tissue, bone or clothing fibres on the bullet.

http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0219a.htm pgs 428-440

The Warren commission did ballistics tests with the same rifle and ammunition to see if they could match their test bullets with CE399. The got in the armies top ballistics expert, Dr Joseph Dolce, who concluded that Connally was shot by 2 bullets and CE399 could not have caused the damage attributed to it without been significantly more damaged. He did tests at an army base with Oswald rifle, firing 100 shots at various goat carcases and cadavers wrists. On every occasion the bullets were significantly more damaged than CE399.

Here's an interview with Dolce where he explains his findings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pi-O_Rjh7g#t=03m35s . The Warren Commision ignored and suppressed the report because it didn't fit in with the single bullet theory they were concocting.

Ahh, but neutron activation analysis probed that bullet fragments found in he limousine were from CE399 right? Well no, not really. The NAA tests have been all but invalidated by numerous scientists. A paper by Pat Grant and Erik Randich first brought the results into question - http://www.dickrussell.org/articles/mason.htm

"It basically shatters what some people call the best physical evidence around," said chemist Pat Grant, director of the lab's Forensic Science Center.

A whole slew of experts in the field corrobatered Grant and Randich's findings.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...05/16/AR2007051601967.html?hpid=moreheadlines

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

So where does that leave us? With little or no physical evidence that CE399 was ever fired at Kennedy, let alone was the the 'magic bullet'.

 

[riptowtan]

Regarding the "curtain rods", the neighbour was one, Mr Frazier

"Officials assumed that the package Oswald carried to work that morning was the Italian-made rifle he used to kill Kennedy.

Mr. Frazier still doesn't believe it.

Come one now. Do you really think Oswald was bringing curtain rods into work?? He had to have some excuse for why he was bringing in a paper package. The reason why it looked to short to be a rifle was because it was disassembled.

"Lieutenant J. C. Day, the man who claimed he discovered and lifted Oswald's palm print off the barrel of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building, was not properly questioned by the Warren Commission (WC). Years after the WC disbanded, it came to light through an internal WC memo that the Commission was suspicious of the manner in which the palm print was obtained. When Day appeared before the Commission, the questioning to which he was subjected can politely be called unproductive and overly friendly. Later on in the investigation, when the Commission's doubts about the palm print began to come to a head, chief counsel J. Lee Rankin asked the FBI to secure more information from Lt. Day about the palm print. Day refused to make a sworn statement regarding his handling of the print, and there the matter has rested ever since."

FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona resolved this issue in 1978. He has said he has "no doubt whatsoever that the palm print Day had lifted had come from Oswald's rifle." (Reclaiming History pg. 803)

This is also taking issue with one of the palm prints. There were two. Not to mention the fingerprint found on the trigger of the Mannlicher Carcano matches Oswald's fingerprint by 18 points of identity.
"These are definitely the fingerprints of Lee Harvey Oswald and... they are on the rifle. There is no doubt about it." -Vincent J. Scalice, leading fingerprint expert for the NYC police department in 1993.

The three gun shells prove nothing.

The sloppiness of the Dallas police was amazing.

The gun shells along with the fact that they were fired from Oswald's gun proves that someone used Oswald's gun in the book depository 6th floor. The construction workers on the 5th floor heard the shells hitting the ground and the gunfire right above them. This along with the fingerprint, and palm print evidence conclusively links Oswald to the assassination.

 

[JerryGarcia]

And interestingly, no curtain rods were even found in the Texas School Book Depository. And when Oswald's apartment was searched, it found to already have curtain rods hanging up.

 

[Soily]

Occam's Razor is very simply applied.

Dave

You're mangling the whole concept of Occam's razor. A theory with the least number of steps is a great rule of thumb, but parsimonous theories should not exclude data in order to reach the neatest solution. A theory with the least number of steps is not in itself proof of that theory and doesn't trump dissenting information I'm afraid. It's a neat debating trick on messageboards but rhetoric is no substitute for evidence. You're very fond of false dilmemas, yet you've offered one yourself. If you discard everything else, then a grand conspiracy versus some people were mistaken is a no brainer, but you make a whole slew of assumptions and discard a whole slew of other information in order to get there. So the memory is faulty? How can 3 men have a faulty memory in the same direction? If the memory is faulty, how come contemporary FBI documents say nobody could identity the bullet? If Odum's memory is faulty, where's the FBI report detailing his interview with Wright and Tomlinson? What about the physical evidence I just posted, you also have to exclude all that for your Occam's razor to apply. Where's the evidence that switching a bullet is a house of cards?

In truth you're not applying Occam's Razor to the argument, but Occam's Eraser.

 

[Soily]

Would it be possible to spin off the posts about the other aspect of the case into other threads and keep this about the single bullet theory? it's going to get really messy otherwise.

 

[riptowtan]

CE399 is alleged to have made entered the bodies of Kennedy and connally 4 time, through flesh, clothing and bones. Yet there was no blood, human tissue, bone or clothing fibres on the bullet.

The Warren commission did ballistics tests with the same rifle and ammunition to see if they could match their test bullets with CE399. The got in the armies top ballistics expert, Dr Joseph Dolce, who concluded that Connally was shot by 2 bullets and CE399 could not have caused the damage attributed to it without been significantly more damaged. He did tests at an army base with Oswald rifle, firing 100 shots at various goat carcases and cadavers wrists. On every occasion the bullets were significantly more damaged than CE399.

Dr. John Lattimer, who himself conducted tests with the Carcano bullet had said: "the warren commission did not conduct proper experiments. They fired a 6.5 mm bullet traveling at over 2000 ft. per second directly into a wristbone."

Larry Sturdivan, the HSCA's wound ballistics expert concluded that the CE399 was quite capable of passing through both Kennedy and Connally's bodies, striking the bones they did to end up in the same shape CE399 is currently in.
And when they retested the experiment at proper speeds. (1200fps) They came out with a bullet that looks just like CE399. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bullet1.jpg

So where does that leave us? With little or no physical evidence that CE399 was ever fired at Kennedy, let alone was the the 'magic bullet'.

Like I've already said, you are the one who has the magic bullet. A straight trajectory from the 6th floor of the book depository lines up with all the wounds. I hope you don't use the seating arrangements from the JFK movie in your theory because those are erroneous. We are left we plenty of clear evidence that links Oswald to the assassination, you just keep cherry picking anything you can find that supports your theory while rejecting everything that contradicts it.