I watched the show on ABC the other night about the JFk assassination and essentially it convinced me that Oswald acted alone. Sure, the show was only 2 hours and didn't make an attempt to debunk every conspiracy theory, but it certainly presented the case for Oswald acting alone. His own brother even commented on it saying that he doesn't believe anyone else had anything to do with it. What do you think?

PS - Let's keep this polite too, no attacks, just opinions and open minds.

I don't care what anyone says: the headshot came from in front of Kennedy, ergo there was a conspiracy.

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i have watched the Zepruder film (sp?) and from the look of it, the front part of the head "exploded", meaning that a bullet had to come from behind. Conspiracy? I dont think so.

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Vega is correct, the shot came from behind. Here is an experiment youi can try if you shoot. Put a cantelope on a post and shoot it with a high powered rifle. It will fall towards you. Just a quirk of physics. The bullet does not tranfer much momentum to the melon, but it does cause the pulp to be forcebly ejected from the far side. The "Up and back" that Oliver Stone's movie repeted like a mantra was just a Holywood thing.

I will say this though, the invenstgation was very poorly handled. I doubt we will ever have any closure on it.

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You forgot the "I'm not sure" option.

Ripper, one of us might want to explain how a bullet impact works, the physics of it and what it does on penetration.. Of course I'm not sure if the BA would like that or not. -Colt

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Speaking as someone who lives right down the street from the Kennedy Assasination Conference that finished up today, have you guys actually read word for word what the single bullet theory is? It doesn't make much sense...
And to quote Cyril Wecht during a lecture I heard him give, "If your parents are one of the fifteen percent of Americans who believes the official story about who shot JFK, go home and ask them if they were aware that the people who conducted the autopsy had never dealt with a gunshot case before. It's like getting appendicitis and having someone operate on you and you die anyway because the doctor was an epidermologist."

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I already pointed out that the investigation was poorly done. It has been pointed out by a number of legal scholars that they would never have been able to convict Oswald. There were jurisdictional issues, chain of custody issues, and several other problems that would have made a lot of evidnece inadmissable, or at least questionable.

This is classic fuel for the conspiricy theorists. The less evidence there is, the more it proves their point.

The fact that the examiner had not experience with gunshot wounds does not prove anything. A rifle shot at that range with FMJ ammunition would produce a through and through wound at any range in question. All they would have to determine is which was the entry wound.

The investigation of the Kennedy assasination was the Grenada of police work. It should have gone to the local police, but naturally all of the feds wanted control of the investigation, with the result that no one was in charge.

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A wound from a gun shows not only the entry wound and exit wound. It also shows how far away the shooter was, what kind of weapon the shooter was using, and the direction the bullet came from. A lot of forensic stuff is very subtle and you can't notice it until you know what to look for from prior experience.
Another interesting case in point: you know how Kennedy had a bullet wound to his throat? The people who did the autopsy assumed it was not a bullet wound at all and it was just a trechtioctamy (however you spell it) the surgeons did in Dallas. In actuality the Dallas surgeons expanded the bullet wound while trying to save him, but the people doing the autopsy did not know this because they didn't know the difference and never checked with the Dallas surgeons (which you never EVER do!). By the time word got out their official report was filed.
I of course am by no means an expert on this but my facts are from an internationaly known forensic scientist who was involved with the assasination. I kinda assume he knows what he's talking about in these matters! At least I hope so...

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On a through wound you would not be able to tell what kind of firearm was used. A FMJ bullet does not expand, and tends to make pretty clean wounds. Still, in the case of a head shot the exit wound is going to be explosive. The Zapruder film clearly shows the exit wound in the forehead.

Remember, this was 1963. Forensics was not as developed as it is today. The point I am making here is that even though there was lots of incompetence going around, that does not mean there was a conspiricy.

I remember in the movie JFK the question was raised "Why did they not put Robert Kennedy in charge of the investigation?" The reason is simple, you never put someone with personal ties to an investigation in charge of the investigation.

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I'm doing my homework, two assignments, when I decide to pop in to the BABB for maybe a bit of inspiration. Imagine my surprise when I saw a thread about the subject of my two assignments!
The first asks me to point out any bias present in the Warren Commission and the conspiracy-beleiving movie JFK. The second asks me to draw my own conclusions.

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How cool!

I will admit that the Warren Commision only fueled doubt by screwing up parts of the investigation and missing certain facts, but as has been said that doesn't prove any conspiracy. The main thing is that here we are 40 years later and there isn't a single theory that can beat out Oswald acting alone. Not that anything can be concluded from that, but it does put a damper on some of the conspiracy theories in a way. And until something is legitimately proven that there was a conspiracy, the verdict stands.

Remember, it is not up to those who believe Oswald acted alone to substantiate the claim, it is up to the conspiracy theorists to prove their claim. it is analogous to the moon hoax; those who believe it was faked must prove it, not the other way around. Pointing out gaps or flaws in the Warren Commission in no way proves a conspiracy.

The problem with conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination in general now is that most if not all of the evidence is now gone. One can speculate all they want but nothing will ever be proven. If there was any evidence of a conspiracy then surely by now it has been destroyed.

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Andromeda, I assume that you missed the ABC special referred to in the OP. The doubts you express about the single-bullet theory were completely put to rest. It's not a theory now -- it's a fact.

Here's what they did, and why it was so convincing. They used the Zapruder film, and other movies shot that day, and did a complete 3-D animation of Dealy Plaza, the buildings and terrain surrounding it, the Presidential limo, and two of its occupants (Kennedy and Connelly). They overlaid the 3-D model directly on top of the frames of the Zapruder film to produce an absolutely exact recreation of the events. Once the animation was done, of course, they could vary the point of view freely. They showed several different views during the TV show, including an Oswald's-eye view.

There were several facts that are often ignored or glossed over by conspiracy theorists. First, Kennedy was not directly behind Connelly in the car; he was six inches to the right (that is, out toward the side of the car) and three inches higher (Connelly was in a jump seat). Second, Connelly was not facing forward at the time of the "single bullet" shot. Oswald missed his first shot; Connelly (and many others) heard it, and he turned sharply to his right, trying to see what had caused the sound. That's the reason the bullet didn't have to change direction in midflight.

In the reconstruction, the animation was frozen at the time the second bullet hit. You could see that its path was absolutely straight, from the 6th-floor window of the book depository, through Kennedy, and then through Connelly. Everything fits, just as it was recorded in the Zapruder film. There's no doubt at all: Kennedy's neck wound and all of Connelly's injuries were produced by one shot, Oswald's second. The first shot missed everything; the third ended Kennedy's life.

As Gerald Posner put it... case closed.

One of the other interesting things that came up in KFK was the fact that on one hand they were saying that Oswald was an idiot, and on the other saying that he should have known to take the shot when Kennedy was coming straight on. The also had the scene where the guy was trying to show that there was no way Oswald could ahve gotten the shots aff as fast as he did. In the scene he was being intentionally slow. Anyone could have worked the bolt twice as fast as the guy giving the demonstration. Then they make a big deal about how far the shot was. It was only 88 yards. I could do that with a pistol. At that range there is not need to lead the target or compensate for the downward angle.

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Gerald Poser is as intellectually dishonest as the Moon Hoaxers and anyone who parrots his fraudent ideas is hardly committed to the truth.

Here is resource concerning Posner. I suggest ya'll interface and learn about the methods of this sensational psuedo-investigative journalist.

I hate to burst your bubble, but even if Posner is dishonest and a bad historian (which I don't think he is anyway) he is not the only proponent of Oswald's guilt. There are quite a few resources on the subject, specifically non-internet ones that are somewhat more valid.

PS - I said let's keep this topic polite, I suggest you follow the instructions.

Exactly, Normandy6644! It seems that some folks have a hard time realizing this simple truth. I'm also surprised that 7 people voted "for" conspiracy.

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Not necessarily. Even if we accept that there was only one shooter, and that he killed Kennedy from the sixth floor of the book depository, there still remains the possibility that it wasn't Oswald.

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While there may indeed have only been "one shooter," the thing that makes me consider "conspiracy" is the fact that JFK wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but as soon as Johnson took over, more money and troops were allocated to the war. Anyone know the supposed reason for this?

Additionally, several eyewitnesses claim to have seen Oswald and Jack Ruby together in a strip club just weeks before the assasination. If this is factual, what were they doing together?

It has long been known that Ruby knew Oswald. I do not see how this leeds to conspiticy. Most murders in the US are between people who know each other.

In any court case motive can be important to the jury, but it does not prove anything.

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FWIW - Nellie Connally has stated that there were three shots; the first wounded the president (neck wound), the second hit the governor, and the third killed JFK. When questioned, her reply is "were you in the car?".

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There are photos of Kennedy's body on the internet taken after he was dead. If you look, you can clearly see the right side of his forehead is serioulsy damaged. And watching the Zapruder film, you can see a lot of mass explode from his head forward. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

All that mass being blown from the front, right side of his head pushed it back and to the left.

Another thing. The "magic bullet." People who fall for this belief that a bullet was planted on the Governor of Texas' stretcher like to believe some sooper sekrit agent man strolled by the Governor as he lay on a stretcher and casually planted a "pristine" bullet by his leg. What they never bother to explain is how the person who planted this magic bullet went about getting the one that the Governor was shot with out of his body so there wouldn't be two bullets of different ballistics found.

Hmmmmmmm.

I'll give it a shot (so to speak). On a shot with an entry and no exit, all the momentum of the bullet is transfered to the victim (minus whatever is absorbed in its fragmentation). So the victim responds similar to if punched. They don't fly through the air like in the movies though.

In a head shot with an explosive exit wound, the matter exploding away from the bullet may well have more energy than is absorbed by the entrance wound. That is simply a property of collision kinematics. The best analogy I can think of (though not a perfect one) is hitting a golf ball - the ball doesn't travel at the speed of the club-head but at the speed of the club-head plus a percentage of the speed of the club-head as determined by its and the ball's elasticity. So that explosive exit wound is carrying more momentum than you might think - and it is carrying momentum away from the head. So action-reaction: the head moves in the opposite direction.

Typical conspiracy believer behavior. If you can't argue on the facts, use personal attacks and insults. JFK conspiracy believers usually do this after being backed into a corner - something they have in common with the Moon Hoax Believers.

Even if Posner is a completely worthless scumbag, it doesn't affect the mountains of evidence pointing to Oswald being the sole shooter.

There is no "supposed" about it. We know exactly the reason for it. The story goes back to the early 1950s and the start of the Eisenhower era. (This is based on a post in the "nukes in orbit" string and is complementary to that.)

Eisenhower had a very specific strategy for dealing with the USSR. It was called containment. Essentially, it meant bottling the USSR up then hitting them with challenge after challenge until their economy collapsed and their society imploded (that's more or less what did happen by the way - later). So, the plan was to build a masisve offensive nuclear capability, when the USSR tried to match it, build a massive defense capability that neutralized that offensive capability then hit them somewhere else. The greatest strength the US had was its economy; the Eisenhower plan was to cut US defense expenditure back as far as possible and thus stimulate the greatets possible level of economic growth. For reasons that don't concern us here, armies had got to be very expensive things in the decade between 1945 and 1955. The US could achieve great things by slashing the army back - the beauty was the strategic position of the USSR meant they couldn't do the same.

The US Army was slashed back to being a tripwire. The key to the Army role was a thing called the Pentomic Division, a division structured in such a way that it could only fight using nuclear weapons. That meant if anybody attacked a Pentomic Division, it would mean an immediate nuclear reply - and the devastating American superiority in nuclear firepower made that national suicide. So puttinga cheap, light pentomic Division in the path of an attack stopped that attack dead. Either the attack ended or the war went nuclear.

The Army hated the Pentomic Division. and waged a constant war against it. One of their converts was John F Kennedy. He accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing the army to decay and ridiculed the Pentomic Divisions (in fairness JFK was probably too stupid to understand the rationale behind those divisions). JFK wanted a big army so he could go into third world confrontations with the USSR (something Eisenhower wanted to avoid - that was the job of the Marines and regional allies).

Building a big army requires a cadre of instructors and personnel. And, by the early 1960s, armies required a lot of money. Kennedy looted the only part of the Army that had prospered under Eisenhower, the Army Air Defense Command (ARADCOM) to provide that cadre. ARADCOMs budget (the ABM effort) was gutted to provide the funds for a new US Army. That was the Army that went to Vietnam. Kennedy ALWAYS intended a mass deployment to Vietnam - the NSC papers make that very clear. Johnson simply followed the Kennedy strategy. The reason why there was such a long delay before sending massed forces to Vietnam was that there were initially no massed forces to send. It took time to train the new Army, time to reorganize the Pentomic Divisions as regular line units and time to get everything in place.

If the theory of the "Vietnam" conspiracy is accepted, it has to be believed that "they" killed Kennedy for doing exactly what they wanted him to do..............

Exactly. This is what I was saying earlier. As for the Vietnam thing, I don't think anyone would argue that there could have been a conspiracy - there may have been a plot to kill JFK - but the evidence points to just Oswald. PERHAPS there even were assassins on the grassy knoll waiting for a clear shot, but Oswald did it first. No matter what is said about conspiracies and how likely or unlikely they were, the fact is that the evidence points otherwise.

It has been said that Kennedy's head jerking back was a muscle reflex. If you watch the Zapruder film you will notice a split second delay between the hit and the motion of the head. Again, a 6.5mm FMJ bullet will not impart much momentum to the target.

I have also seen the experiment I mentioned earlier that the expelled mass of the exit wound would have more momentum than the bullet can impart, causing a reaction in the other direction.

Most people, who know most of what they think they know about firearms get their information form movies. I can tell you that if you saw something about firearms in a movie it is 99% likely to be wrong. I saw a guy get hit with a .50BMG round. It did not knock him down, he just dropped in place. Given that, I do not think any conventional firearm would knock someone across the room like they do in the movies. It is simple physics. When you fire a gun you are launching the bullet and the propellant. Lets say a .30-06. That would be a 150 grain bullet and about 60 grains of propellant. Launching all of this out of the barrel at about 2900 fps generates about 4000 ft/lbs of energy, but since some of this is the propellant gasses (which by the way will come out faster than the bullet once it clears the bore, but I ant to keep this simple) the bullet is carying less than 3000 ft/lbs. Depending on range, the bullet will have imparted some of its energy to the air by the time it hits. Now, even a soft point bullet from a .30-06 will not impart all of its energy to a person's body at less than extreme range. The bottom line is that the firer is taking a lot more kinetic energy than the target. The mass of the rifle will absorb some of that, but 10 lbs of mass would not make much difference. The firer could easily have 10 lbs less body mass.

OK I have gone on long enough.

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It seems like most of the discussion is centred on whether Oswald was the sole shooter. But is this the most relevant consideration? The mere facts that Ruby killed Oswald afterwards and that Ruby was a mob figure almost demand the conclusion that the mob was involved. Therefore a conspiracy by definition.

I think, one kook just saw that another kook got his fame by shooting someone and so decided to shoot the other kook to get some fame, too.
When bad things happen, it often inspires other people to do the same.

Harald

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