PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY
Gil Jesus
YoHarvey
> http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/physical.html
Logic and the Killing
Of John Kennedy
By Gary Sumner ©2002
There is not the slightest chance on earth that a conspiracy was
involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy.
While such a bold statement may shock and infuriate true believers in
the Kennedy conspiracy, I intend to support it with what I believe is
a new approach: an appeal to reason. (I believe it’s a new approach,
but considering that more than 2,000 books and God knows how many
articles have been written on the assassination, I can’t possibly know
that for sure.)
Anyone acquainted with the real evidence in the case knows that it all
points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin. Beyond question, he
shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository
as the presidential motorcade moved down Elm Street below him. And he
was the only shooter. However, I’m not going to deal with evidence in
this analysis. The evidence is there, it is overwhelming, and it has
already been massively written up. That hasn’t prevented unscrupulous
(or misguided) writers and at least one movie maker from trying to
convince people that Kennedy’s death was the result of a mysterious
conspiracy. Probably more nonsense has been written about the Kennedy
assassination in the past 40 years than on any other subject.
There is something as important as evidence—as long as it is not
contradicted by it—and that is reason. Was there a group of men who
planned and carried out the murder? (Excuse me, ladies, I don’t think
any women would have been involved in those days.) By following out
certain logical processes, we should be able to determine the
likelihood of that. Don’t underestimate reason. It can be a powerful
tool in uncovering the truth. Evidence is certainly vital and in some
situations can make a conclusive case all by itself. But evidence can
also be manufactured, distorted and misinterpreted—which it certainly
has been in the Kennedy case—while reason is pure. It’s right there in
front of us and it can’t be faked or twisted.
At the outset let’s be clear that there is a large difference between
a lone assassin and a group of conspirators. The lone killer will
generally have an irrational motive that appeals only to him. John W.
Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981 with the bizarre notion
that actress Jody Foster would admire him and even fall in love with
him because of it.(1) Arthur Bremer shot presidential candidate
George Wallace in 1972 to make a name for himself and also because he
thought it would be a riotously fun thing to do.(2) (Wallace was
permanently paralyzed from the waist down.) Sirhan Sirhan, a
Palestinian immigrant, fatally shot Sen. Robert Kennedy in 1968 in a
Los Angeles hotel because of the senator’s backing of Israel in its
conflicts with its Arab neighbors.(3) Oswald, who was himself shot to
death two days after the Kennedy assassination, never explained his
motive, but it’s known that he was a communist who was filled with
hatred of the United States and who had defected temporarily to the
Soviet Union. He was also an antisocial loner in a bad marriage and a
dead-end job who had nothing to lose.
Each of these assassins had his own twisted motive that would appeal
only to him. As Jim Bishop, author of The Day Kennedy Was Shot,
observed, “A history of assassins is a glossary of persons sick and
obsessed.”
Nature of Conspiracies
But for a group of conspirators to come together to plot the death of
the president, there must be a rational motive, however evil and
immoral. The president’s death must result in some clear-cut,
practical benefit to all the members of the group. And the benefit
must be so great, the motive so powerful, that the conspirators are
willing to risk everything—imprisonment, death, disgrace, loss of
career and family—to reach their goal. These mysterious men in our
hypothetical conspiracy had to know that the odds were heavily against
them. In Lincoln’s day, presidential assassination was easy. But since
at least the middle of the Twentieth Century, it has been a task of
the most extreme difficulty. Getting away with it is probably
impossible. Men intelligent and capable enough to plan and carry out
an assassination would be aware of the odds against them. What would
drive them to undertake a mission that would almost certainly fail and
bring them to ruin? And whatever benefits they thought they would
obtain, wasn’t there some simpler, less risky path to the same goal?
Did they really have to kill the president? These questions would
apply as much to foreign conspirators acting for a government as to
domestic ones.
We could try to discover the motive by asking “cui bono,” who
benefited from the murder. You could say that Vice President Lyndon
Johnson benefited because Kennedy’s death vaulted him into the
presidency. And there have been suggestions that, indeed, Johnson was
the mastermind who plotted the assassination.
Let’s deal with that allegation. The mere fact that a man is in the
office of vice president when a president is assassinated hardly
constitutes evidence that he was involved in the killing. The last
president to be assassinated before Kennedy was William McKinley, in
1901. (Shot by another nutcase, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.)(4)
McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded to the
presidency. As far as I know, nobody has suggested that Roosevelt was
involved in the murder. And as for Johnson, was he so power crazed
that he couldn’t wait for the election of 1968, when he might well
have become president in his own right? The idea is supported by
neither evidence nor reason.
But for the sake of argument, let’s pursue it briefly. Any plot
masterminded by LBJ would have required the collusion of a great many
people. He couldn’t have pulled it off by himself or even with a
handful of loyal associates. Some of Kennedy’s closest advisers, in
fact, would have to have been involved in the plot. Kennedy’s entire
trip, including the motorcade route through Dallas, would have to have
been arranged so as to get the President in the gunman’s crosshairs.
At this point the whole idea of a Lyndon Johnson conspiracy collapses.
The theory that Johnson was part of some deep-cover network including
some of Kennedy’s own people who manipulated the president into going
to Dallas, where their assassin waited, is so silly that only a true
paranoiac could believe it. If there was massive evidence to support
it, of course we would have to accept it—but there isn’t any.
Motives and Men
Who are the other suspects that have been suggested by various
theorists as forming the deadly conspiracy? The FBI, the CIA, the
Secret Service, the U.S. military, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans,
Jews, the “Communist Conspiracy,” Big Oil men, the Dallas police, and
some combination of these. One writer even claimed that TV newsmen Dan
Rather and Robert MacNeil were involved.(5) It’s hard to imagine what
benefit the individual members of these groups thought they would
realize from attempting such an audacious undertaking as the
assassination of the President of the United States. They had to be
aware that the odds against them were close to prohibitive. Yet they
went ahead—and (if there really was a conspiracy) succeeded beyond
their imaginings.
The absence of a believable rational motive that couldn’t be satisfied
any other way than killing the president is itself a powerful argument
against the existence of a conspiracy. Various motives have been
suggested, and I have no intention of going down the list and refuting
them one by one. Some are fantastic and some merely mundane, but none
are believable. None describe a goal that couldn’t have been achieved
in far easier and less risky ways than killing a president.
And think about the men who planned this presidential assassination,
prevented any leaks, executed it to perfection, and escaped. They
would have to be highly intelligent, knowledgeable men of the world,
men who know how to kill, who know guns and explosives, who know
military and paramilitary operations, who know law enforcement and how
to evade it. They would be the cream, the smartest of the smart, the
toughest of the tough. Before proceeding, they would devise an
airtight plan that would ensure the success of their operation.
(Incidentally, some theorists hold that Oswald was part of the
conspiracy, but didn’t do the actual shooting, or that he did shoot,
along with one or more additional gunman, but that he was set up by
other members of the group to take the fall while they got away. Some
have even argued that Oswald was a patsy, a nice young man who had
nothing to do with the crime.)
A Double Objective
Now let’s consider the conspirators’ goals, which were twofold. One
was to kill the president—not wound him, not scare him, but kill him.
For whatever reason, they wanted Kennedy dead. The other goal was to
get away with the crime. We assume that this was not a suicide
mission. (After all, unless you count Oswald, the conspirators got
away, didn’t they?)
Now, when you set out to kill a president, you don’t want to try
something haphazard and hope for the best. What you want is something
close to a foolproof plan that will result in the success of your
mission and your escape. So what plan did these mysterious
conspirators come up with?
Let’s start with their choice of weapon, a gun. Is there anything
foolproof about the use of a gun? Hardly. A gun, in fact, is a very
unreliable means of killing a person. Certainly a gun will kill, and
sometimes one quick shot is all it takes. Many people have died that
way. But a gun will kill reliably only when the shooter is in a
controlled situation, has the victim cornered in some way and has the
time to shoot and shoot again until the person is unquestionably
dead.
Otherwise, especially in a public place where the gunman may have a
window of opportunity of only a few seconds, he is likely to miss his
target altogether. There are no statistics on how many people have
been shot at and missed, but the number must be huge. Second, even if
the gunman hits his target, the shot is most likely to be nonlethal.
As far as I have been able to determine, the FBI doesn’t keep
statistics comparing the number of people who are wounded by gunshots
with those who are shot fatally. However, all it takes is the daily
reading of a newspaper for several years to teach anyone the truth
that most gunshot victims recover from their wounds.
I think true believers in the Kennedy conspiracy—as opposed to those
who pretend to believe it for the sake of monetary gain—are people who
have had little or no experience with firearms, who have no idea how
difficult and tricky guns are to use in real life, especially at long
range. These people see cowboys and detectives on TV casually dropping
their victims with a single shot at a distance and it looks easy. All
you have to do is pull the trigger and, poof, your victim bites the
dust. You want to kill the president? Sure, just shoot him and he’s
gone.
In real life, the thing is somewhat more difficult. Hinckley’s
attempted assassination of Reagan perfectly illustrates the difficulty
of killing with a gun, especially in a public place. Actually,
Hinckley was lucky to get as close to the president as he did. Secret
Service agents are well trained to spot a concealed weapon and are
constantly running their eyes over a crowd. But there is always that
chance event that isn’t supposed to occur. Hinckley did get close, on
March 30, 1981, when Reagan was walking from the Washington Hilton
Hotel, where he had given a luncheon speech, to his limousine. The
President reached the car, turned, smiled and started to wave to the
crowd.
There was Hinckley’s window. It lasted perhaps three seconds.
He jerked out his .22-caliber revolver and began firing explosive
“Detonator” bullets. Presidential press secretary James Brady, Secret
Service agent Timothy McCarthy and Washington police officer Thomas
Delahanty were all wounded—Brady the most seriously—but all survived.
Of the six rounds Hinckley fired, only one hit the President, and that
was a ricochet from the limousine. The bullet ended up in Reagan’s
left lung and he was whisked away to George Washington Hospital.
Hinckley was wrestled to the ground and taken off to jail.(6)
The point here is that neither of our conspirators’ twin goals—
assassination and escape—was met. Reagan fully recovered from his
wound, was reelected by a landslide in 1984, and at this writing, 21
years after the attack, is still living. And Hinckley, far from
escaping, remains in custody. Of course, he wanted to be caught, or at
least identified. Otherwise he wouldn’t have become famous and in a
position to impress Jody Foster.
In fact, it’s typical of lone assassins that they don’t expect to get
away with their crime. Their motive may be to achieve notoriety, e.g.,
Hinckley and Bremer. Or they may be so fanatically devoted to their
cause that they are willing to trade their life or freedom for the
life of their victim, e.g., Sirhan. That’s why lone assassins aren’t
bothered by another disadvantage of using a gun—i.e., that the shooter
has to be close to his victim, making escape all but impossible. Even
a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight requires the shooter to
be close enough to his target that detection of the marksman’s
location is certain and escape virtually impossible. So—wherever you
have a lone assassin with an irrational motive for killing a
president, there you can expect the absence of a getaway plan. And
there you have Lee Harvey Oswald.
One more point about guns before we analyze our conspirators’ plan: A
moving target, even a slowly moving one, is much harder to hit than a
stationary one. The gunman has to lead the target the exact right
amount so that victim and bullet converge on the same point
simultaneously. Oswald didn’t have to concern himself with much, if
any, lead because the presidential limousine would be moving almost
directly away from him as he looked down from the sixth floor of the
school-book depository. (The car may have been trending very slightly
to his right.)
If there were additional gunmen, however, such as the one that has
been claimed to have shot at the oncoming president from the infamous
“grassy knoll,” they would have been obliged to calculate lead—
probably a good bit. They would have to have been positioned some
distance to either the side of the street rather than being directly
in front of or behind the president’s car. Furthermore, any gunman at
ground level would have faced the difficulty of shooting at precisely
the right moment, to coordinate with the shots from the depository,
while keeping himself concealed from the numerous spectators lining
the motorcade route—an impossible task.
Some authors have theorized that there were assassins in other
buildings as well as on the ground. One writer of a popular book said
there were three shooters, each of whom fired a “volley” at the
limousine.(7) Another claimed that there were nine gunmen.(8)
Imagine it! Nine men out there banging away at the president in full
view of the public and nobody saw anybody but Oswald leaning out the
window of the book depository with a rifle.
To sum up what we’ve discussed so far. A rational motive for killing
President Kennedy that would produce enormous benefits for a group of
conspirators cannot be found. A gun is an unreliable means of killing
a person. And the use of one requires the shooter to be so close to
his victim that—especially if the victim happens to be president—
escape is all but impossible. (I leave it to the reader to determine
what would be a reliable means of killing a president and getting away
with it. Probably there isn’t one.)
The Master Plan
Now let’s consider the plot. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy
was going to be riding through Dallas in a convertible and he would be
visible from about the chest up—a small, moving target, with other
people in the car. Huge crowds would be watching—the Secret Service,
the press, the public, with TV cameras set up along the way. So what
brilliant plan did our conspirators come up with? The plan was to
shoot Kennedy as the motorcade passed by. Oh, of course. That way his
death would be certain and the conspirators would all get away with
it.
Such a plot seems more likely to be concocted by the Three Stooges—
perhaps working with Bozo the Clown—than a coldly intelligent,
knowledgeable group of men. Yet one thing nobody can deny: if there
was a plot, that was it. And on that hard rock all the conspiracy
theories must sink. Nothing else matters. Bullet trajectories, the
number of seconds that elapsed during the shooting, the supposed puff
of smoke from the grassy knoll, the three tramps supposedly running
down the railroad tracks, the fact that Jack Ruby murdered Oswald
“before he could talk.” None of it matters. The plot—to fatally shoot
Kennedy in a moving car out there in front of the whole world and get
away with it—is so laughable that nobody with an IQ above the moron
level would believe it would work. Certainly no group of worldly men
would gamble their lives and careers on such a preposterous scheme.
But an individual might try it, if he was a hate-filled loner with
nothing to lose and a practiced marksman who discovered that the
president was going to cruise right by the building where he worked.
No complicated planning would be necessary, no coordination with
others, no concern about somebody with a loose tongue giving away the
plot in advance. All that would be required would be a high-powered
rifle and a reasonably secure place to shoot from. What the hell, fire
off a few rounds at the presidential limousine and see what happens.
You might get lucky and suddenly be transformed from a nobody into the
most prominent personage in the world, the Man Who Killed the
President of the United States.
Perfection Achieved
Now let’s apply reason to two additional aspects of the Kennedy
assassination: the perfection of the operation and the unbroken
silence of the killers. According to well-known Murphy’s Law, if
anything can go wrong, it will. Imagine all the things that could have
gone wrong in attempting a difficult, dangerous operation such as
killing the President of the United States. Considering the idiotic
nature of the plan, the slightest mishap, the tiniest unforeseen
circumstance, could have brought the operation to ruin. But nothing
went wrong. The killers achieved perfection.
And since then they have successfully resisted the urge to talk about
it. Various authors have postulated anywhere from a couple of dozen
conspirators to several hundred. At this writing the assassination
took place 40 years ago, yet no conspirator has talked. Not one has
gotten drunk and revealed the murder to his wife or mistress, who has
then gone to the authorities or the media. Not one has made a death-
bed confession. Not one has left behind a letter of explanation in his
lawyer’s safe to be opened after his death.
Think about it. These mysterious men, many of whom must not even have
known one another before the plot was hatched, got together, planned
and carried out the crime of the ages, in public and on television,
then vanished ghostlike into history. Nobody saw them and they didn’t
make any mistakes. None of them ever talked. They committed the
perfect crime, using the stupidest plan imaginable, and got away with
it. (All except poor Oswald, who of course was set up by the others.)
Now, reason may not tell us that such a flawless operation is
impossible, but it does tell us that the odds against it are millions
to one. Reason, in fact, tells us that it never happened.
The principle in logic known as Occam’s Razor holds that in choosing
among the possible solutions to a mystery, the simplest one—if it is
in accord with the facts—is most likely to be correct. The simplest
solution to this “mystery”—and in fact there is no mystery—is that Lee
Oswald shot John Kennedy with his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a
sixth-floor window of the school-book depository and that he acted
alone.
The Judgment of Reason
The contribution I have tried to make to the Kennedy assassination
saga in this essay has been to apply reason to it rather than
quibbling over evidentiary minutiae. Using this technique, I believe I
have made a strong case that there was no conspiracy. The truth of the
following four statements I consider to be certain:
· No believable motive powerful enough to lead a group of
rational men to kill the president can be produced.
· Intelligent, knowledgeable men determined to kill wouldn’t
have chosen an unreliable weapon such as a gun.
· Having made that bad choice, they wouldn’t have compounded it
by planning to hit a small, moving target.
· They wouldn’t have planned to assassinate the president in
full view of a huge crowd, including a television audience, and
expected to get away with it.
The truth of the final two statements, if not certain, I consider to
be of the highest probability:
· The conspirators would have made mistakes, or encountered
unexpected situations, that would have caused their operation to fail,
or at least would have led to their apprehension.
· In all the years that have gone by, at least one of them
would have talked or left behind a confession at death.
This concludes my application of reason to the Kennedy assassination.
I have tried to create a framework of logic showing that, in the
circumstances, a conspiracy could not have been responsible for the
murder. I believe the logic is impeccable and I challenge anyone to
refute it. If you want to refute it, don’t start talking about
evidence. What you need to do is explain how a bunch of imbeciles,
operating with the silliest plan on record, could have brought off a
presidential assassination without a hitch and gotten away with it.
Also explain how they were able to make themselves invisible. After
you have pinned down these two points, then you can start telling me
about the evidence.
I know that many people will not be satisfied with logic, no matter
how irrefutable. They have been exposed to so many lies and half-
truths about the assassination that they can be forgiven for believing
vaguely that there must have been a conspiracy. Otherwise, why would
all these accusations keep circulating on the Internet and elsewhere
on an almost daily basis? People who have been subjected to this brain-
washing naturally want certain questions answered. For example:
· Was there a bullet (the “magic bullet”) that had to change
directions three or four times to accomplish what was attributed to it
in the assassination?
· Was the well-known photograph of Oswald holding the
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle faked?
· Was Oswald’s mini-biography accidentally leaked to the press
before he was even charged with a crime?
· Was Oswald photographed standing in front of the depository
when he was supposed to be up on the sixth floor shooting a rifle out
the window?
· Did a mysterious man finger Oswald for the police in Texas
Theater, then vanish?
· Did Jack Ruby kill Oswald to keep him from talking?
· Was Ruby himself murdered in jail?
· Have numerous men who seemed to have a connection to the
assassination, and might have revealed the conspiracy, died
mysteriously?
The answer to all these questions is NO and I can do no better than to
refer you to the book that proves it, Gerald Posner’s masterly Case
Closed. If you want evidence, the real evidence, this is where you
will find it. Other good and true books have been written about the
Kennedy assassination—notably two by David Belin—but one of the great
values of the Posner book is that it was published 31 years after the
murder, in 1993. By then, all the lies, distortions, rumors, errors
and myths had had time to surface and circulate, and Posner demolishes
them all.
Whatever conspiracy theories you hold about the Kennedy assassination,
they will not be able to stand up under Posner’s relentless assaults.
Read his book if you dare. Or if you’re afraid, hide from it and sneer
at it. If you don’t want to read all 499 pages (including the
appendix), go to the index and find the subjects you want to check.
They are all there. Many libraries have the book and all bookstores
can order it.
As much as I admire Posner, I want to make it clear that he did not
influence me in my use of reason to explode the idea of conspiracy.
That idea came to me about a year before Case Closed was published. I
had read a couple of other books, including one of Belin’s, and had
done a good deal of thinking about the assassination. I was already of
the opinion that there had been no conspiracy. Then one night in 1992
as I was watching a TV documentary on the 30th anniversary of the
assassination, all the circumstances surrounding it came together to
form a whole in my mind. And out of that whole there rose before me a
clear, pure logic by which I suddenly saw that Kennedy’s death was not
the result of a conspiracy and could not have been. The next year Case
Closed was published and I was gratified to see that all the evidence
supported my logic.
The case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin is as open and
shut as anything could possibly be. There is simply no reasonable
doubt about it. But there are those who will never accept this truth.
They want there to have been a conspiracy. I admit I felt the same way
when my interest in the assassination was rekindled during a trip to
Dallas in 1975, when I stood in Dealey Plaza and took pictures of the
school-book depository, Elm Street and the grassy knoll. I determined
to read up on the subject when I got back home, and I had visions of
encountering traces of a shadowy, mysterious conspiracy of evil
geniuses who had killed the president and were still lurking out
there. If Oswald did it by himself, that was boring. But if there was
a conspiracy, now that would be fascinating!
However, I finally realized, to my disappointment, that the whole
conspiracy idea was nothing but a fantasy. As for those who are
determined to believe in it, I sympathize with them. But there comes a
time when all little boys and girls must grow up and put away their
conspiracy theories, just as they gave up their bubble gum, comic
books and yo-yos when they were growing up the first time.
Notes
1. Deborah Hart Strober & Gerald S. Strober, Reagan, the Man and His
Presidency, p. 120. Also http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/HBIO.HTM
2. Arthur H. Bremer, An Assassin’s Diary.
3. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy, His Life, p. 386. Also
http://w.who2.com/sirhansirhan.html
4. Dictionary of American Biography, p. 109
5. www.skolnicksreport.com by Sherman Skolnick This material is hard
to find on the site now, but on 10/9/01 it read, in part: “With flimsy
excuses, several reputedly venal and for-sale reporters were right
there, available in the murder zone, to be later rewarded for false
reports, opening the way for their promotion to highly-lucrative TV
network status, such as Dan Rather, later CBS Network anchor face, and
Robert MacNeil, later PBS co-anchor and co-owner of his own network
program with Jim Lehrer.”
6. Lou Cannon, Reagan, pp. 403-404.
7. Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.
8. Penn Jones, author of four self-published books on the
assassination, cited by Posner, p. 483.
Sources
Belin, David W. November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury. New York:
Quadrangle/The New York Times Books, 1973.
_______. Final Disclosure, New York: Scribner’s, 1988.
Bishop, Jim. The Day Kennedy Was Shot. New York: Funk & Wagnalls,
1968.
Bremer, Arthur H. An Assassin’s Diary (Introduction by Harding Lemay).
New York: Harper’s Magazine Press; published in association with
Harper & Row, 1972, 1973.
Clarke, James W. American Assassins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1982.
Cannon, Lou. Reagan. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.
Dictionary of American Biography
Volume VI
CR 1933, New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. New York: Carroll
& Graf, 1989, 1990.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination
of JFK. New York: Random House, 1993.
Strober, Deborah Hart, and Strober, Gerald S. Reagan, the Man and His
Presidency. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998.
Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy, His Life. New York: Simon & Schuster,
2000.
tomnln
"However, I’m not going to deal with evidence in
this analysis."
ENOUGH SAID ! ! ! !
"YoHarvey" <bail...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:78814543-da88-4927...@p20g2000yqi.googlegroups.com...
Gil Jesus
Hey Ed, What is this guy, the cook at the local McDonald's ?
YoHarvey
> He LOVES that Gary Sumner, doesn't he ?
>
> Hey Ed, What is this guy, the cook at the local McDonald's ?
Know what I love even more "Loco"? When one CT quotes another CT who
has quoted another CT and calls it evidence roflmao. You kooks are so
damn entertaining. Just think Gilbert. If your father wasn't a
homosexual, he might still be driving that bus!!! Ain't life grand?