http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/jfk_truthers_finally_losing_gr...
" Oswald left enough evidence behind
to be convicted multiple times"
American Thinker May 11 , 2008
By John Huettner
Before the 9/11 truthers came the JFK truthers. Fantasies about dark
machinations surrounding the death of President Kennedy laid the
spiritual groundwork for today's claims of bizarre plots behind the
events of 9/11. In both cases, the obviously guilty culprits are
ignored in favor of more desirable political targets.
It has been forty-four years since Lee Harvey Oswald killed President
Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Oswald was silenced two mornings
later;
but only after a bizarre getaway, cop killing, capture and brief
notoriety, culminating in his televised shooting by Dallas strip club
owner Jack Ruby. Not until 9/11 did live television again witness
such an American tragedy.
In 1964, the Warren Commission correctly decided that Oswald was the lone
assassin. The "truthers" of the era who initially challenged the Warren
Commission's findings - a few having direct links to communist
organizations -- were hardly taken seriously at first. But mistrust in
the government's case grew as a cabal of fellow travelers, showmen,
ambitious coroners and other conspiracy mongers coalesced throughout the
late Sixties, taking advantage of the relatively few mistakes or
inconsistencies in the Warren Re****t's narrative.
Despite all of the scrutiny, absent a breakthrough piece of evidence, we
will never know whether Lee Oswald was (or believed he was) part of some
larger plot. His service in the Civil Air Patrol and the Marines,
defection to the Soviet Union, visits to the Soviet and Cuban consulates
in Mexico less than two months before the assassination, and
correspondence with the American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers
Party, will all raise the same unanswerable conspiracy questions 100 years
from now as they do today.
But there is no longer much doubt that Oswald was the lone assassin, as
the Warren Commission concluded in 1964. The answer to this question
should narrow the conspiracy inquiry, because the most credible of those
theories rest on the assertion that Oswald could not have been the lone
gunman in Dealey Plaza. Otherwise, there is scant independent evidence of
any plot.
The Warren Commission Re****t
The Warren Commission Re****t was discredited primarily by claims that
Oswald could not have been the lone gunman; hence, there may have been two
or three gunmen. This hyperbole came to fruition in the late 1960s with
the bizarre Garrison investigation in New Orleans, concluding there were
gunmen all over Dealey Plaza. All of this speculation was rooted in the
basic notion that the same bullet could not possibly have wounded
President Kennedy and Governor Connally seated in front of him, as the
Commission found probably happened.
Added sup****t came from witnesses who honestly believed they heard two,
four or even six shots rather than three shots fired in Dealey Plaza. In
1978, a congressional committee concluded (based upon an audio recording
analysis now itself thoroughly discredited) that four shots were fired,
more "proof" of a second gunman.
Then there is the claim that the fatal shot came from President Kennedy's
right, forcing his head back and to the left.
As far as another gunman is concerned, that is about the totality of the
evidence. There has never been any affirmative proof of more than one
gunman, only doubt about elements of the existing overwhelming evidence
pointing to Oswald as the lone assassin. Thanks to the work of careful
investigators over the years, however, previously overlooked information
along with modern technology have fundamentally reinforced the lone gunman
hypothesis; while debunking virtually all of the conspiracy theories.
The Lone Assassin
The Rosetta Stone for conspiracy buffs has always been the Warren
Commission's "magic bullet" (a/k/a the "pristine" bullet) theory, holding
that the same bullet struck both President Kennedy and Governor Connally.
Almost as soon as the Warren Commission Re****t was released making this
claim, conspiracy theorists pounced; arguing that a bullet fired downward
from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository couldn't
physically have struck both Kennedy in the neck and Connally in the upper
torso without changing directions. They also argued that the bullet fired
from Oswald's location to the right of the motorcade couldn't have struck
Kennedy in the throat and Connally forward of him in the right shoulder.
Allegations grew that the entire Warren Re****t was erroneous or worse,
faked.
The uncertainty was not entirely unjustified. Researchers starting with
the Warren Commission simply failed to take into account what became
obvious years later: Governor Connally was sitting in front of the
President on a floor-mounted "jump" seat, about seven inches lower and
several inches to the left of the President -- exactly in Oswald's line of
sight from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
Moreover, as the Warren Commission noted, the Presidential limousine was
moving downhill from Oswald's position, reducing the angle from his point
of view, and Connally had turned slightly right in reaction to hearing the
first shot. Computer reconstructions using virtual reality techniques
have since shown beyond any shred of doubt that, with these facts
accounted for, the "magic" bullet traveled in a straight line directly
from Oswald's rifle striking President Kennedy in the neck and Governor
Connally in the upper back and exiting the lapel of his suit.
Accordingly, debunking has conclusively disproved the sine qua non of the
second gunman theory, the notion that the same bullet from Oswald's rifle
could not have hit both men. Yet, truthers still argue about "evidence,"
while missing the essential point: if another gunman took a shot that day,
he missed, because all of the wounds to the President and Governor
Connally are accounted for by two shots from Oswald's rifle. Just as the
second gunman theory rose with doubt about the single bullet theory, so it
must fall, as the single bullet scenario becomes accepted fact.
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