Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald
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And since no evidence has been provided that there are parallel worlds, the apparent ability to convince us that what is true is false, and that what is false is true, has the most disturbing implications, to wit:
The authorities promulgating the Lone Assassin Scenario, if it is indeed false, would be functioning like the confederates in the Asch experiment, telling you that lines A or C are the correct answer when it’s really line B. And if the true facts of the matter are unavailable to you, your only option is to go along . . .
Think about it: what is the ultimate hat trick of political power? To convince you that a shot from the front came from the back . . . or that a shot over 5 inches below the collar “really” entered at the base of the neck!
With power like that — the power to convince you that what is demonstrably false is true — what couldn’t the mythmakers do?
The power to modify our view of reality is a power that we have granted to our authorities when we ignore the fine print and put away the fine-tooth comb. When our authorities have talked, we, good citizens all, have listened. But that’s a power we only want to grant to authorities who have themselves correctly viewed reality. If they have not, the risk of being fooled — and all the consequences which naturally flow — are great. If the mind can be changed, can the soul be far behind?
In this book, we are going to focus predominantly on the physical evidence that has been proposed to buttress The Case Against Oswald. Because of this exclusive focus, you won’t find extensive information here about many familiar names in Kennedy assassination literature, such as Guy Bannister, Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Henry Luce, David Rockefeller, Edward Lansdale, David Ferrie, David Atlee Phillips, James Files, Chauncey Holt, “Tosh” Plumlee, Phillip Twombly, Johnny Roselli, Charles Nicoletti, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, Gerry Hemming, Charles Harrelson, George Bush Sr., E. Howard Hunt, William Harvey, Sam Giancana, Clay Shaw, Lloyd Cobb, Alton Ochsner, Walter Dornberger, Earle Cabell, William Gaudet, Donald Kendall, Richard Nixon, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, Ed Butler, Donald Byrd, Clint Murchison, Curtis LeMay, William Reily, Judith Vary Baker, Mary Sherman, and a host of other personalities who may or may not be related in one way or another to the events of November 22, 1963. Understanding who these people are, and the role they played or possibly played, is important, but until you are absolutely convinced that The Case Against Oswald is completely impossible, their relationship to the case, if any, will be perpetually mysterious.
With that in mind, let us continue. You are about to enter a world where black is white, but so is red. Where a fact may be true one day, but false the next. Where the innocent are guilty, while the guilty frame our perception.
Welcome to the world of Kennedy assassination research!
Once again, prepare to be amazed, and brace yourself for a brush with the impossible.
Introduction
You want a difficult, what some would call an impossible task? Try defending Lee Harvey Oswald. If the government and the mass media are to be believed, even thinking that he was not the sole assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963 certifies you as a bona-fide la-la-lander, proud possessor of a lifetime complimentary membership with the Flat Earth Society. (And yes, there really is one; visit http://theflatearthsociety.org if you feel so inclined.) Do you think that characterization unfair? If so, you probably weren’t reading the Dallas Observer on July 6, 2000, and if you were, you certainly weren’t reading this article by Robert Wilonsky: 1
The Nut lives just outside a small town called Paradise, a few miles northwest of Fort Worth. With his wife of more than 30 years, The Nut inhabits 25 acres of land deserving of its proximity to a town called Paradise, because even the still, damp air of summer feels light and sweet here. . . .
The Nut — with his short pants and denim shirt and hiking boots and straw hat and walking cane — and his four dogs walk up here when it’s time to think, to clear the brain and focus on shadow governments and assassinated Presidents and spacemen who live among us.
“This,” says The Nut, pointing toward the spectacular horizon, “is where I come to be alone.”
It is hard to reconcile such a placid, idyllic setting with the man who has lived on it since 1979. For a decade, The Nut — who has a name, Jim Marrs, a most appropriate moniker for a man who not long ago wrote a book titled Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us — has been among the most high-profile of conspiracy theorists . . .
Now, if you were a rigorous fact-checker, you would want to make sure that Mr. Wilonsky wasn’t telling a tall one. He wasn’t:
Ouch!
Well, you might think that the unfortunately-named Marrs is just a blip, and maybe he is, but he is not the only blip. To hammer home the point that “conspiracy theorist” = nut job, we have this fine work by Kenn Thomas which first graced our shores on May 31, 2011:
It is hard for me to imagine how the Kennedy researchers in the forums I have been perusing over the last few months have missed this scholarly effort: on the other hand, maybe they believe, like me, that if there is one time it’s okay to judge a book by its cover, this is it.
While it is safe to say that JFK & UFO is probably a long shot to be included in any Kennedy assassination bibliographies going forward, we can see that the Thomas book one-ups Marrs: while Alien Agenda happens to be written by the same author of Crossfire (a book on the Kennedy assassination cited in the previous chapter), the content of those two books is separate; this book, on the other hand, explicitly identifies JFK “conspiracy theorists” with people who believe in UFOs.
Yes, it is true that at least two of the millions of people who claim to believe that the evidence supports a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy also claim to believe in . . . dare I utter the word . . . aliens. Ouch again!
So now we know that at least two of the defenders of the thesis of this book are potentially off their rockers. Hardly an auspicious beginning!
Armed with book covers like these, the defenders of the lone assassin thesis feel emboldened to stipulate that what they have to say is the gospel truth, as we learned in this article in the Digital Journal on September 11, 2011: 2
[A]ny individual who claims Oswald did not shoot the President or that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by fanatics with hijacked commercial aircraft is prima facie unworthy of belief with regard to any discussion of world affairs, because the failure to accept the absolutely overwhelming evidence adduced in support of these two propositions is indicative of a totally denialist mentality.
The Wilonsky article pairs JFK assassination researchers with people who believe in aliens, and this uncredited Digital Journal article pairs the hypothesis that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy with the unsubstantiated belief (held by some) that the twin towers were not felled by hijacked commercial airliners. In both cases, these articles leverage the inertia of a discredited known A (aliens/no aircraft) to pair with an unknown B (conspiracy), and through the pairing attempt to identify B with A, and thereby drag B through A’s mud.
You have to admit, it’s a pretty successful technique. Who wants Marrs and Thomas on their side? If you don’t — and you can be forgiven for that — your tendency is to want to go to the other side, where all the well-thought-of authorities await your companionship.
Faced with this, we have to ask, why not join the “responsible” crowd, Asch theory be damned?
Yes, for the most part, that “responsible” mass media crowd is in agreement. Say you were going to watch the miniseries The Kennedys (which was originally lined up to air on The History Channel, and later Showtime, but was not shown on either of those networks), available at the time of this writing on Netflix. If you hover your mouse over a description of Episode Seven, the callout gives you that miniseries’ version of reality — “Lee Harvey Oswald finalizes his assassination plan”:
And, if you decided to watch that episode, over 2/3 of the way through, you would be treate
d to this image of Oswald loading up:
Not a television watcher? Readers of mass-market books received the same information. At the top of the bestseller lists in 2012 was Stephen King’s book 11/22/63, whose primary thesis was that Oswald was the lone assassin:
A TV series. A book. But just the iceberg’s tip. Over the years, the following respectable entities have, at one time or another come out in favor of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of President Kennedy: high school textbooks, college textbooks, at least one Nobel prize winner (Luis Alvarez), a chief judge of the Supreme Court (Earl Warren), the PBS series Nova (“Who Shot President Kennedy?”), the PBS series Frontline (“Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”), CBS (“A CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report”), ABC (“The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy”), the Discovery Channel (“JFK: Inside the Target Car”), Showtime (“On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald”), Life magazine (multiple articles in the 60’s identifying Oswald as the assassin), the Journal Of The American Medical Association (which published a series of articles in 1992 attacking the credibility of Dr. Charles Crenshaw and Gary Shaw (who co-authored a book called Conspiracy Of Silence), resulting in a defamation lawsuit settled favorably in Crenshaw and Shaw’s behalf after the JAMA agreed to pay $213,000 [see Journal of the American Medical Association, May 24/31 1995, v. 273, No. 20, p. 1632, and Assassination Science, p. 19]), Wikipedia (article on Lee Harvey Oswald, etc.), and The New York Times (articles too numerous to mention, with several examples in this book).
Yes, there are exceptions, such as the Oliver Stone film JFK, and a series which appeared on The History Channel called The Men Who Killed Kennedy, and several others which have appeared over the years, including documentaries by Jesse Ventura, but these have to be seen as mere ripples in a much larger pond, especially when you consider that the most potent evidence of conspiracy was contained in the last three episodes of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, episodes which were subsequently banned from distribution (go to Amazon to buy the DVDs: you can buy six, but there were originally nine).
But for the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, additional high-profile Lee-Harvey-Oswald-dunnit works are planned, including a book by Bill O’Reilly, and a movie slated to be made from Reclaiming History (the extremely well-documented Bible of the lone assassin position), with Tom Hanks handling the role of executive producer. From an appeal-to-authority standpoint, it looks like those not kowtowing to the party line should, like Marrs, run for the hills.
Now, all of this really looks bad for those who want to challenge the lone assassin position, but if you are an independent thinker, you’re going to be brushing all of this off. Sure, anyone can focus on a lone nut or two who happen to believe in aliens, and ignore the thousands of responsible people — forensic pathologists and investigators and attorneys and radiation oncologists and philosophy professors and physicists and educators — who believe that the evidence does not support the official version of what transpired in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Those individuals look at the evidence, and ignore the two dozen+ media outlets who have reported the alternative view as true; as history shows, two dozen media outlets, and even twenty dozen, can be wrong wrong wrong, as we saw with respect to the “weapons of mass destruction” rationale for the Iraq war. Just because people are marching together in lockstep . . .
. . . doesn’t mean that what they have to say is legitimate.
Remember the Asch effect! We learned a powerful lesson from that experiment: make your decision exclusively by looking at the facts, and ignore what the crowd says. This can take some guts, and can on occasion be hazardous to your health:
So, inspired by the latter of the photographs above, we decide to take a chance and look at the facts related to The Case Against Oswald. Unfortunately, we have a problem there too, and at first glance, it is a big one.
When we examine the data on a cursory basis, it appears that this time the mass media may have got one right; the evidence against Oswald does indeed initially appear overwhelming. There is not just one piece of evidence which goes against him, not even two, nor three, or four, but dozens upon dozens of isolated facts which, when added up together, apparently point out — seemingly irrefutably — to his guilt.
Let’s start from where the shots were fired. According to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee On Assassinations (HSCA), all the shots that were fired in Dealey Plaza on November 22 originated from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was employed. Whose gun was found on the sixth floor? Oswald’s! A bullet was said to have been found on John Connally’s stretcher, and from whose gun was it fired? Oswald’s! Three shells that were ejected from Oswald’s rifle were claimed to have been found on the sixth floor, and since the majority of witnesses reported that only three shots were fired (according to the Warren Commission), the most likely perpetrator had to be — of course — Oswald.
And further . . . Oswald’s palm print was found on the rifle; his fingerprints were found on some of the boxes; Oswald was observed to be in the building at the time of the assassination; a bag was found on the sixth floor, and Oswald had told a co-worker the extremely suspicious story that the contents of a paper bag he was going to carry into the building contained curtain rods; however, this bag could have also held a disassembled rifle, and considering what happened, a far more likely alternative.
And if you needed any more evidence than the hard data items listed above, just consider the fact that Oswald was a “loner,” a Marxist, a person who defected from the United States, a person accused of earlier firing a shot at another public figure, General Edwin Walker (the natural inference: if true, his alleged attack on the President would not have been an isolated incident), and to top it all off, a person suspected of killing a police officer in an “escape from the scene of the crime.”
Let’s see . . . killed a cop? Check! Fled from the scene? Check! Caught red-handed in a photograph holding a rifle and two militant newspapers? Triple-check!
“It’s not Oswald”???? . . . who else could it be?
Do you really need any more facts? Let’s face it, just based on the above, you have to conclude that this guy was a sure candidate for the electric chair. Jack Ruby did us all a favor, and saved us the cost of what could have been an extremely expensive trial. And did the Warren Commission really have to write over 24,000 pages of documentation proving Oswald’s guilt, supplemented by several thousand more by the HSCA? Why did Vincent Bugliosi have to write Reclaiming History? His 2800+ page extensive analysis proves, in Bugliosi’s schema, that Oswald was guilty far beyond a reasonable doubt.
Forget Stephen King and The Kennedys. That’s just fiction anyway. If you want the facts, Bugliosi is your man. The eminent district attorney and author told us just how difficult defending Oswald is, and how naïve Warren Commission critics and “conspiracy theorists” are, and given the evidence, who could blame him? (RH 952)
[T]here is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world — you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera — you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you. That’s just not what happens in life.
Bugliosi then went on to quote his opening argument to the jury in the 1986 mock trial of Oswald broadcast on Showtime, with Bugliosi successfully squaring off against famed defense attorney Gerry Spence (RH 952; emphasis supplied):
I articulated this fact in my opening argument to the jury in London: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when a man is innocent of a crime, chances are there isn’t going to be anything at all pointing towards his guilt. Nothing at all pointing towards his guilt. But now and then, because of the very nature of life, and the unaccountability of certain things, there may be one thing that point
s towards his guilt, even though he is innocent. In an unusual situation, maybe even two things point to his guilt, even though he is innocent. And in a very rare and strange situation, maybe even three things point to his guilt, even though he is completely innocent. But with Lee Harvey Oswald, everything, everything points towards his guilt. In fact, the evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80 percent of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.”
And then, in case his level of doubt was in doubt, Bugliosi removed all doubt (RH 952; footnote omitted, emphasis supplied):
Indeed, the evidence against Oswald proves his guilt not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt, or, as they say in the movies, beyond a shadow of a doubt. In other words, not just one or two or three pieces of evidence point toward Oswald’s guilt, but more than fifty pieces point irresistibly to his guilt. And not only does all of the physical, scientific evidence point solely and exclusively to Oswald’s guilt, but virtually everything he said and did points unerringly to his guilt. Under these circumstances, it is not humanly possible for him to be innocent, at least, as I said, not in the real world in which we live. Only in a fantasy world could Oswald be innocent and still have all this evidence against him. I think we can put it this way: If Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, then Kennedy wasn’t killed on November 22, 1963.
Powerful words. Persuasive words. Unambiguous words. And Bugliosi was no wet-behind-the-ears kid fresh out of law school. As a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney, he won 105 out of 106 felony cases. 3 Who could possibly want to begin to try to refute the remarks of an extremely competent prosecutor with seemingly every fact of the Kennedy assassination at his fingertips?