Jango
Graduate Poster
Yes, you're right, being shot in body armor is entirely the same thing as being shot in the back of the completely exposed head. I can't believe I did not recognize that earlier.
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Moderated JFK conspiracy theories: it never ends III
- Thread starter HSienzant
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Yes, you're right, being shot in body armor is entirely the same thing as being shot in the back of the completely exposed head. I can't believe I did not recognize that earlier.
Axxman300
Philosopher
Here's the thing, that's not specific. There's no evidence of a second weapon being fired so you can't make the claim and just let it hang. Was he in the men's room? Where did he shoot from? What did this second shooter hit? Sure wasn't the motorcade, so what was the second shooter shooting at?
You can see the problem.
This is actually true, and the release of most of the documents in the 90s detailed exactly why the investigation went the way it did. RFK blocked avenues of investigation that would have revealed his and JFK's anti-Castro activities, or revealed ongoing CIA anti-Castro plots.
This is no secret three or four books have been written about it. So what's to point of releasing the rest of the documents if you ignore what is already known?
BStrong
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, you're right, being shot in body armor is entirely the same thing as being shot in the back of the completely exposed head. I can't believe I did not recognize that earlier.
Dodge to your heart's content, because there's this well known piece of video as well - graphic violence warning;
Point blank headshot, the head doesn't jerk with the impact. Victim collapses according to body attitude at the moment of death. Absolute text book headshot.
Is this a discussion angle you wish to pursue, because it might be a good time to post up some science or evidence rather than continuing to display your ignorance of the subject matter - or are you a guitarist that lives in San Bruno?
Willy Ekerslike
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2013
- Messages
- 70
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that a good score? He qualified in the middle level of Marine marksmanship- that sounds really, really good to a layman.
BazBear
Possible Suspect
Your radar seems to have a signal to noise ratio problem, as this is simply unsupported speculation, not reality.
I then suggest that you should read through all three iterations of this thread.
Jango
Graduate Poster
IT WAS NOT RANDOM! I was replying to a post.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Yes, you're right, being shot in body armor is entirely the same thing as being shot in the back of the completely exposed head. I can't believe I did not recognize that earlier.
Do you understand anything about physics? Getting shot in body armour means the entire momentum of the bullet gets transferred to the body. That means that there's even more tendency to get knocked over than when a bullet passes right through the head and emerges still possessing a large part of its initial momentum. So it should be rather obvious that the head shot is less likely to cause the body to recoil.
Dave
Belz...
Fiend God
Did you even read my response to that ?
Belz...
Fiend God
Yes, you're right, being shot in body armor is entirely the same thing as being shot in the back of the completely exposed head. I can't believe I did not recognize that earlier.
In real life, people who are shot, in the head or otherwise, don't fly backwards like in the movies. Re-read the post I made about this yesterday.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10439419&postcount=762
BStrong
Penultimate Amazing
Without providing anything more than a bald assertion.
How about facts rather than fiction? Please keep in mind that a half baked assertion repeated by more than one CT'er doesn't constitute evidence
turingtest
Mistral, mistral wind...
In any properly framed context, Oswald would be considered a good shot. His "sharpshooter" qualification was a Marine standard, so, compared to other Marines, he may have been considered only as an average shot. According to Wikipedia:
You'll notice the Marine testing was at a range of 200 yards, more than twice the distance of the longest shot at Dealey. That it was at a stationary target is irrelevant- since JFK's car was moving slowly away in a straight line from Oswald's position, it, too, was essentially a stationary target.
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Regnad Kcin
Penultimate Amazing
It's pretty remarkable that there exists video documentation of the shooting, that's for certain. Without it who knows where the entire subject would rest.
That's because the Z film reinforces the single-shooter narrative.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
Where did he shoot from?
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
That wasn't my point. You listed a bunch of high-end military units and said any of those would be capable of hitting a "head of state." What does it take to hit an ordinary man driving slowly through a city in an open car?
No, that's just proof that you don't understand what happens when a high-speed bullet hits someone's head. You think you know, but that's what separates real investigation from conspiracism. Real investigators are prepared to deepen their knowledge.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
And who was it?
Sheesh, the "back and to the left" meme is probably the oldest blunder in the whole JFK mythos.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Vague supposition is not proof.
Your assumption that whatever might be hidden will somehow prove your point is what we don't have to be concerned about. We don't have to be concerned about it because you've demonstrated you don't actually know what, if anything, might be hidden on this point. The intelligent man doesn't fear another person's unsubstantiated fear-mongering.
No, that's not right. You've given us no reason to believe that government secrets are what you say they are. We can believe in secrets without necessarily having to believe your speculation for what those secrets must be.
They did. There was enough furor over the Warren Commission report that Congress authorized yet another large-scale official investigation. And with few exceptions, they confirmed the conventional narrative.
One reality that doesn't fall on your radar is that people will continue to believe in conspiracy theories for reasons that matter only to them -- not because there is any objective value to them.
The other reality that doesn't fall on your radar is that people disbelieve conspiracy theories not because they're mindless sheeple, but because the conspiracy theories themselves are unconvincing. Why are they unconvincing? Because a moment or two of critical thought followed by a modicum of research shows them to be based on shady facts and faulty reasoning, and often offered up to the author's benefit. As such they continue to ensare the gullible as new generations of the gullible arise. But in the grand scheme of scholarship and the progression of mankind, they have no role. The parade marches on, while the conspiracy theorists are the kids standing by the side of the road stomping up and down in mud puddles for fifty years, getting nowhere.
Conspiracy theories are not based on new information or deeper information. They're based on the same marginalia beaten to death over and over for some people to get all excited over.
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Nick Terry
Illuminator
Not a whole bunch of information sharing over 50 years?
Let's see now, the Warren Commission report exhibit volumes numbered 26 on top of the 920-page report, and thousands of copies (initial print run of 2500) of the 26 volumes were printed up to be made available nation-wide in major libraries, as one would expect. 3,154 exhibits were made available in 1964; 16,000 pages of documents.
The files of the Warren Commission were sent to the National Archives as one would expect with any major federal investigation. Initially, the records were sealed for 75 years to address privacy concerns - other countries do the same thing except extend the privacy window to 100 or more years!
But the 1966/1967 Freedom of Information Act overrode this. That was of course passed under the Johnson administration, yet many conspiracy theorists finger LBJ as a co-conspirator; there was no veto. LBJ also expedited the transfer of Warren Commission records to the National Archives since he recognised they were of enormous public interest.
The 1974 Privacy Act modified FOIA and expanded it; this was vetoed by Gerald Ford, but Congress overrode his veto - the American system at work.
FOIA in its 1974 form meant a glut of requests for documents about UFOs and the JFK assassination filed with the FBI, CIA etc. The JFK assassination was also twice investigated in the post-Watergate era, with the House Select Committee Investigation publishing more volumes of material, while generating 414,000 pages of working files that were sealed at the time until 2029.
Oliver Stone's JFK movie prompted the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board in 1992, formed at the behest of Congress and signed into law by George H.W. Bush on October 26, 1992, i.e. just before the 1992 election. The ARRB was composed of academic historians and archivists not employed by the US federal government.
By the time of the JFK Records Act, 98% of the Warren Commission records had been declassified and were available in the US National Archives. The Warren Commission records would have included around 25,000 pages of FBI reports and interviews and another 4,000 pages of interviews conducted by the Secret Service. The remaining 2% of still classified documents concerned mostly tax returns and other private information - these documents were all released by 1998, i.e. 17 years ago. They amounted to 3,000 pages, i.e. nearly 150,000 pages had already been declassified and released.
The FBI, meanwhile, had released 220,000 pages relating to the JFK assassination under FOIA by 1992, with an estimated 260,000 pages still classified (ARRB Final Report p.4), although many of the declassified documents had significant parts redacted.
The CIA had released 11,000 pages of material by 1992, with an estimated 250-300,000 pages still classified.
The ARRB was able to declassify unredacted copies of documents previously released under FOIA in heavily blacked-out form, as discussed in their Final Report (link in the Wiki page for the ARRB). The ARRB speeded the declassification of around 5 million pages of documents - there are only now an estimated 50,000 pages awaiting release in 2017, all because of the necessity to protect sources, methods and identities. The HCSA records and other major investigations are all available, accelerating the intended declassification schedule by 35 years.
Not long afterwards, the US federal government went through the same process all over again with the Nazi War Crimes Records Disclosure Act of 1998, forcing mass declassifications of OSS, CIA and State Department records (to name the most important cases) relating to Nazi war criminals.
Since the US government has declassified millions of pages of documents about the JFK assassination, then there's been enormous transparency,to the tune of more than 99%. The remaining lack of transparency is down to protecting sources, methods and identities, exactly the exceptions to freedom of information that are reasonable for states to claim when rival states are even less transparent than the US.
Other sources will come to light because of further FOIA declassification requests finding new sources in unexpected places in the archives. The media and CT-world went a bit bananas in April 2011 when a researcher found that JFK asked that files on UFOs be analysed more thoroughly, in a request to the Director of the CIA ten days before his death. This wasn't an 'assassination record', so wasn't released by the ARRB, but was fair game for a FOIA request, which was duly made and honoured. JFK's request to the CIA was made in conjunction with a proposal to cooperate more closely with the Soviet Union on space exploration, and was designed to interface with the existing US government UFO monitoring programs, the existence of which were hardly classified. Since many UFO reports were misidentified missiles, satellites or spy planes, it made sense to be open with the Soviets, to avoid a repetition of the U-2 shootdown crisis. Both sides in the Cold War took an interest in UFOs for this reason. Therefore, it does not provide a motive for a hypothetical 'government within a government' to have ordered JFK's assassination.
As for "the government" hiding anything: we don't know that it is and we don't know that it isn't, if by hiding you mean concealing anything truly nefarious. We know that US government agencies continue to classify documents from the 1960s because they have asserted that secrecy is needed to protect sources, methods and identities. We also know that the same secretive government agencies have released documents all the way up to the 1990s, since they can be downloaded from the CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room.
We know that the CIA has released thousands of documents pertaining to the context of the JFK assassination, LHO, Cuba etc. Based on these sources, it seems extraordinarily improbable that the CIA is still 'hiding' anything that would prove a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States in November 1963. The more sources that are released, the less likely a conspiracy seems to be.
This doesn't rule out the possibility that there's still something out there, but c'mon, if there were true smoking guns, don't you think they were destroyed long ago, or never existed in the first place?
Finally: the really embarrassing stuff was disclosed about 40 years ago, with a torrent of revelations about e.g. MK ULTRA (CIA) and COINTELPRO (FBI). By the time these revelations emerged, key figures like Hoover and LBJ were dead (1972 and 1973 respectively). If there had indeed been a conspiracy inside part of the US government, then the post-Watergate era was the perfect time to expose this, excise the malignant growth, and move on. It didn't happen.
It's not the job of the media to report afresh on events that happened 51 years ago or to invest resources doing so.
It's the job of historians and researchers. Journalists are not trained to sift through and analyse 100s of 1000s of pages of documents, whereas historians are. Amateur historians can also learn the skills and can access the documents in the National Archives.
The media still 'reports' on the JFK assassination, but only by reviewing a certain number of books published about the subject, and by noting anniversaries, or reporting major breaks or discoveries generated by researchers and historians. This is exactly what the media does with science news - newspapers and TV stations are not trained to do laboratory experiments any more than they really know how to cope with archives. This is also exactly what the media does with every other piece of news about historical events.
TV has, of course, produced numerous documentaries over the decades addressing the JFK assassination, many of which have given airtime to conspiracy theorists pushing their pet theory. But these documentaries tend to be produced by production companies and not the news channels, and they tend to feature talking heads, professionals or self-appointed/actual experts on the subject. JFK is not a subject that can be covered properly in a 5 minute interview segment on CNN or Fox, but even if they did, they'd invite a talking head on to the show. There are very few investigative journalism documentary shows - 60 Minutes being one of the better known examples, but they, too, would be forced to rely on talking heads, experts or professionals of various kinds, and are visibly forced to rely on outside expertise for many of the subjects they investigate. This is why there are thousands of resumes and author bios noting media appearances.
Because JFK is old, cold news, then the only way that any real media attention would be aroused is if someone came up with a true smoking gun - this hasn't happened. It hasn't happened even though there are hundreds of researchers out there who have desperately searched for a smoking gun in all of the declassified records or when doing their own research, e.g. interviewing witnesses or chasing leads.
The media has a demonstrably short attention span and has to cope with ever more breaking stories, with each story possessing a certain half-life that might sustain reporting and investigation for several years. At an undefined moment some years after the event(s), newspaper journalists or TV journalists lose interest in producing books or documentaries on hot current affairs topics, because there are newer hot current affairs topics out there. They might revisit recent news events but increasingly they do so as historians - and many newspaper journalists publish works of true history dealing with WWII or events many decades in the past. Any journalist who wanted to investigate the JFK assassination would have to take a leave of absence, and even one year is clearly not enough to digest the 5 million or more pages of material that are available on the assassination.
Historians do have the time, thinking in terms of multi-year research projects, but academics are rewarded for originality and breaking new ground. JFK's assassination has become like Jack the Ripper - a subject that is of abiding interest to amateur researchers, and not very interesting to professional historians. Unless there was the prospect of really crucial or interesting new information, then historians won't bother when there are many more subjects out there to research regarding recent American history.
Historians will also synthesise other people's work for overviews, long term thematic studies and textbooks - but there is simply no work that can be cited as conclusive proof of a conspiracy surrounding JFK's assassination in a biography (eg of Hoover or Johnson), institutional study (eg of the FBI or CIA), diplomatic history (eg US-Cuban relations), or anything else. Because there is no academic consensus around a conspiracy in JFK's assassination, any assertion of such a conspiracy would require strong proof to back it up, unless the historian wants to risk their book being criticised and dismissed.
I'm a professional historian, and have taught at university level among other subjects, the Cold War - naturally we covered CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and elsewhere, Nixon and Kissinger's various sins, JFK's foreign policies, the Cuban Missile Crisis and US-Cuban relations, along with the US intervention in Vietnam and escalation under LBJ, to name but a few topics.
JFK's assassination merited 2 minutes out of 11 hours of lecturing across the whole course covering 1945-1991 worldwide. It came up when concluding on the Cuban Missile Crisis - noting the possibility of unintended 'blowback' in the shape of Lee Harvey Oswald being enraged by US policies towards Cuba - and again when discussing the US commitment to Vietnam from Eisenhower to LBJ. Each time it was worth a minute at most when discussing very complex subjects. With Vietnam, I certainly didn't neglect to discuss the multiple interpretations of why LBJ escalated the US intervention in Vietnam, nor did I leave out the divisiveness of the escalation issue within the US military and foreign policy establishment - covered very well in Robert Buzzanco's work - nor the exact sequence of events in 1965 that led to the commitment of US ground troops. Counterfactuals and might-have-beens get you only so far, so the question of what might have happened in a fantasy alternative 1960s in which JFK lived is best left to novelists. Historians prefer to deal with what actually happened.
This year I taught a course on JFK's Presidency, from the 1960 election to the assassination. We covered the immediate media reactions to the assassination and then the emergence of conspiracy theories about the assassination in the mid-1960s, using contemporary primary sources, including a CIA memo from 1967 covering the first wave of Warren Commission critics - this memo has been grossly misinterpreted by a number of conspiracy theorists. That meant 4 hours of discussing the assassination and its aftermath, based on readings assigned before class. Naturally we also watched the Zapruder film, which provoked a 'ewww' from nearly everyone in the class. The students were exposed to a number of different theories and claims, and found most of them to be completely bemusing.
But then, these were British students, and I'll acknowledge that there is a temptation among Europeans to regard the American obsession with JFK as completely nuts.
If you were serious about investigating the JFK assassination, you'd read Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, including the PDF files of Endnotes and Source Notes, from cover to cover and end to end. It might take you a month or more, but you'd be taken through the evidence relating to the assassination, and the history of the various investigations, and also exposed to a more than representative selection of the theories and hypotheses of three generations of Warren Commission critics.
This does not mean Bugliosi's book is beyond criticism, but the criticisms thrown at him by conspiracy theorists (and please don't try the lazy tactic of googling up some criticism then asserting that Bugliosi is wrong without reading the book yourself) don't refute the validity of reading his book, since he covers an enormous range of issues and subjects, all of which need to be considered if you are to reach a proper judgement on the case. There isn't a more comprehensive book out there on the subject - which is not to say that someone might not produce one in the future.
The alternatives would be to read through 5 million pages of primary source material, or pick a conspiracy book that was shorter than Bugliosi, but which would almost certainly omit significant information.
Bugliosi lists all the conspirators and actual shooters who have been alleged by different 'assassination researchers' over the decades - the lists are soberingly long. Precisely because previous researchers have fingered so many specific conspirators and assassins, any further discussion must 'eliminate them from enquiries' or it must strive to locate evidence amounting to probable cause. But this has to be set against the overwhelming proof of LHO's guilt, and the lack of evidence that he acted in conjunction with anyone else.
Since 1964, there have been more than 1,000 conspiracy books levelling allegations against hundreds of conspirators and assassins. Any new allegations must logically eliminate all the other previously accused suspects, since each new theory will compete against other theories and must establish itself as superior. This basically amounts to a circular firing squad for conspiracy theorists, since conspiracy theorists cannot agree on the most probable suspects, and often refuse to criticise the allegations of other conspiracy theorists even if they directly contradict their own beliefs or claims. Until JFK conspiracy theorists can eliminate people from their 'enquiries', then they deserve nothing more than the kind of ridicule seen in The Onion's infamous satirical front page.
From your performance in class, proof of the following: failure to read or read for comprehension; someone failed to study before coming to class.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Jango, when we ask you to give your analysis of what's allegedly known and what's allegedly still be kept secret, Nick's essay here is the depth of analysis we expect. Not just vague handwaving about Gubbermint Seekrits.
This is what so many conspiracy theorists don't factor into their thinking. The government, or employers, and various other organs of society compel us to reveal private information about ourselves in order to do business with us and for us to conduct our lives. But by the same token, those receivers are compelled to keep those secret from idly prying eyes. That's the condition.
If I am injured in an accident and sue for damages, the defendant has the right to see the medical records pertaining to my injury and its treatment, and the court in general has that same right in order to assess the amount of damages to award me. However, access to my medical records would not include, as a hypothetical example, unrelated potentially embarrassing details such as treatments for sexually-transmitted infections or for prior psychological depression.
The bottom line is that there are legitimate reasons even for governments to keep secrets. With that premise in place, asserting that because a secret is kept it must therefore be both relevant and nefarious is quite spurious.
When the astronauts returned from the Moon, they were extensively debriefed. Those debriefings were classified for 25 years according to policy. Those conspiracy theorists went nuts, of course, assuming that the debriefings revealed details about aliens on the Moon or methods used to hoax the missions. Also per policy, after 25 years we got to see what the big deal was all about. Predictably enough, they concerned details of how our space hardware operated -- obviously something we didn't want the Soviets knowing about in the middle of the Cold War. They also contained private health information. The astronauts were compelled to reveal those details as a condition of their employment, because how their bodies reacted to space flight was a legitimate concern. But the general public had no business knowing about it.
The government has even declassified documents that paint agencies of government in extremely poor light, such as the MKULTRA documents you mention.
Given that there is a legitimate official need to keep secrets; that the amount of material kept secret is invariably miniscule compared to the overall amount of relevant publicly available information; that, contrary to claims, things once secret are and continue to be released; and that, contrary to insinuation, the government will release documents that prove it engaged in shady -- even illegal -- activity, therefore:
The proposition that secret documents exist whose contents vastly rewrite the conventional narrative incurs a substantial burden of proof. Conversely, the proposition that some particular conspiracy theory would be conclusively proven but for the inaccessibility of this alleged material, attaches to a low order of probability.
Or sometimes just because of the backlog. To classify something takes only the stroke of a pen from someone empowered to do so. Hence it is done routinely, even for trivial reasons or out of an abundance of caution. To declassify something that doesn't follow a programmed schedule of classification downgrades requires an explicit review, which costs money and takes time. The resources devoted to such efforts are scaled prudently, not according to the impatience of conspiracy theorists.
As I'm sure you're aware, the conspiracist approach to such proportions is always to pin their hopes on whatever tiny percentage of secrecy remains and to assert that that unknown material "must" be the smoking gun. And since such percentages are always reckoned according to what is known to exist, the conspiracists hold in reserve the assertion that more must exist of which we cannot be aware -- and that this hypothetical material "must" be the smoking gun. No amount of disclosure has been observed to satisfy a conspiracy author.
It's a never-ending parade of supposition.
Various smoking guns such as the alleged Hunt confession have been proposed, but they never last very long.
The notion that proof of a conspiracy exists and would not be destroyed is supplied by the Grand Conspiracy ploy. Supposedly each new U.S. President, upon taking office, is ushered into a room by the CIA (or the presumptive puppet master du jour) and shown the damning evidence of the government plot that killed Kennedy. The presumption is that he''ll mind his P's and Q's during his term for fear he'll be next.
The idea of novelty is important. As you note, the subject of Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath has been picked clean by historians. But if, hypothetically, new evidence were to arise that materially altered the staid narrative, and that evidence were sufficiently probative, then an academic historian could potentially make his career on it. The perception in the conspiracy world is that academics are universally concerned with preserving the status quo, never changing their minds or considering new ideas. In contrast, as with every other academic field, the pressure is to publish. And that generates a frantic search for new ideas. So why not publish a conspiracy theory? Because you can't just publish fluff, you have to publish something that has meat on its bones. Hence it's most parsimonious to consider the conspiracy theories to really be the dry wells they appear.
Necessarily so. Conspiracism, as opposed to history or science, is not about following the evidence to a the conclusion around which the informed consensus grows. It's about fleeing headlong away from a conclusion that has been decreed untenable for largely ideological reasons. If you excise the information that supports the consensus, you're left with nothing but marginalia, and naturally that marginalia leads you in any of an infinite number of alternate directions, none of them compatible with another and none able to build a consensus.
I think this is why so many conspiracy claimants recast the question to be some sort of hypothetical criminal trial. In this way they can propose to raise the bar for their critics to require the "reasonable doubt" legal standard of proof, invoke the legally-necessary but otherwise irrelevant and pollutive standard of legal admissibility, and change the footing to require only the supposed exoneration of Oswald and not the comparison among affirmative claims.
The authors do this. Their readers are left awash in this sea of ambiguity. Their bookshelves full of conspiracy literature collectively leave them high and dry on the subject of an alternate assassin when they come to forums like this to advocate. Hence around here you see an almost fanatical aversion to naming a suspect, and even the emerging disavowal of any need to do so.
The end goal of the readers of these books is merely to "question the official story" -- and no more. They interpret their critics' dissatisfaction with that approach as an unwillingness to follow them even that far, when in fact it's an unwillingness to follow them that far and then be left with nowhere else to go.
Seen right here. In order to create the illusion that there is a consensus among JFK conspiracy theorists, one of our resident conspiracists has recently had to boil down the conspiracy narrative(s) to an unrecognizable gray mush of vague memes and MacGuffins. Occasionally you will see one author gently disagreeing with another on an individual point, such as the utility of the Hunt confession. But I have yet to see an admission or accusation that such gaffes arise out of a fundamentally broken methodology.
DGM
Skeptic not Atheist
This seems surreal to me. Not wanting to wade through the post after this. Has the poster acknowledge the damage could have been caused after it was fired? If not..............WOW.
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