<p>This strikes me as evidence against Oswald being part of a conspiracy. </p>
<p>The putative motive behind Ruby shooting Oswald is that the Conspiracy wanted Oswald silenced. And apparently were desperate enough that they sent some one on a long shot mission to try to kill him in a police station. Not exactly the greatest chance of success. </p>
<p>If that is the motive then why didnt the Conspiracy take the slightest effort to prevent Oswald from getting captured in the first place? LHO’s ‘escape plan’ was to take the city bus??? And once he got home he was back walking on foot to escape. Clearly if there was a Conspiracy they could have done a much better job of providing some actual logistics for escape and getting him out town. </p>
<p>If the Conspiracy is concern about Oswald talking, why leave him in police custody for two days? They could easily have gotten him out of town on day one and either put him on a boat or killed him at their leisure. The Conspiracy ends up with the problem of Ruby talking.</p>
<p>According to Bill O’Reilly who just wrote a book on this subject, there was no conspiracy. He said the detectives he interviewed said they WANTED to find a conspiracy for various reasons but could not.</p>
<p>Oswald was not a particularly competent guy.</p>
<p>If there had been a conspiracy involving the CIA, the Mafia, or some other group of relatively important people, I think they could have found a more trustworthy shooter than Oswald.</p>
<p>This is not a new idea. The guy who wrote this new book also suggested this motive in a biography of Connally that he wrote more than 20 years ago. But still, it’s interesting. To me anyway.</p>
<p>People who think JFK’s head should have moved forward have never seen a bullet explode through a person. The bullet enters at high velocity making a relatively small hole if the bullet is intact. It then hits all sorts of tissue and bone which also breaks apart as the shock wave created by the bullet distorts everything inside. That force explodes out as and slightly after the bullet exits, making a large exit wound. That is what happened to JFK’s head. </p>
<p>There is no rational basis to believe another gun was fired. Period.</p>
<p>As to conspiracy, hard to say. Oswald was a weird loner who had a romantic attachment to the USSR. The information out about his life there shows he was looking for some sort of romance. And he seems to have asked a girl to marry him. She turned him down and in her words couldn’t imagine how he thought there was a romantic relationship between them. </p>
<p>To me, Oswald sounds like the kind of guy who might have been recruited - by Castro in particular - but I’ve never seen any actual evidence so I doubt it happened. </p>
<p>Assassins often work alone. Seems to be the usual case. Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy, though the guy who killed him was the ringleader not a follower. The attempt on Truman was by Puero Rican separatists. Other than that, they all seem to be loners and lunatics: Garfield’s and McKinley’s killers, the attempt on FDR and then all the modern attempts against Reagan and Ford were solo and usually nut cases.</p>
<p>As for Jack Ruby, I take his own words as the truth, that he was acting out of instinct in the moment. He had a reason to be in the area - problems with his strip club - and was known well enough to get close to an event so important it was being shown on every TV station - meaning everyone was curious about it - and at some point in that process he got the idea to shoot Oswald if he could. And he did.</p>
<p>There is also the psychological motivation that a ‘great’ tragedy cant have a simple small cause. </p>
<p>How does 9/11 have meaning if its just the work of screw ups who succeeded 50% of the time. How can the great Princess Dianna be killed by a drunk speeding chauffeur?
Jackie Kennedy wanted more meaning: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights . . . it had to be some silly little communist.”</p>
<p>Even today Brittnay Murphy’s father thinks she was killed by government spies. </p>
<p>People just dont want to accept simple causes for great events.</p>
<p>Lizard–there have been lots of plots to kill Castro that no one has carried out successfully. Many of those plots were cooked up by our CIA. A Senate Committee 4-5 years ago headed up by Senator Church unearthed some very crazy schemes.</p>
<p>I recently read Stephen Hunter’s latest novel The Third Bullet, that addresses the issue rom a gun/ballistics POV. He suggests how it could have been done and explains various aspects of LHO’s behavior. I think it is very convincing. (Not the novelistic aspects, as is the specific who, but the how.)</p>
<p>I saw an interview some time back with Oswald’s brother, which I thought was illuminating regarding the type nutcase agitator jackass that he was. </p>
<p>I have no trouble believing he acted alone. If there were credible evidence to the contrary, I’d believe that, but I don’t see any.</p>
<p>My point was that if there was more than one person involved, then it is by definition a conspiracy. Since there are plenty of murders with more than one person, you can’t dismiss conspiracy theories out-of-hand.</p>
<p>But even with the traditional definition of conspiracy of having one or more organizations/nations behind it, there is precedence. In your own example, you derisively cite the 9/11 conspiracy theories as being bunk. Well, technically, even having Al Qaeda be behind 9/11 is a conspiracy, just as much as having Cuba or the mafia be behind the Kennedy assassination. Are you saying you don’t believe Al Qaeda was behind 9/11? </p>
<p>I think the problem is that the word “conspiracy” is a dirty word. The reality is that sometimes groups are behind political assassinations or murders. </p>
<p>I think the Warren commission created their own problems with all the secrecy and by not connecting the dots to prove what was clearly their predetermined conclusion. For instance, lergnom raised a good point about the “magic” bullet not needing to zig zag because the seats were not aligned due to Connolly’s seat being a “jump seat”. I read that as well, but I’m fairly sure the first guy to make that argument did so in the 80’s or 90’s. Shouldn’t the Warren Commission figured that out? How else does one make the argument that the same bullet went through Kennedy and hit Connolly without knowing about the jump seats, except if they were being intellectually dishonest? There is plenty of other stuff like this that was never resolved. People who are knee-jerk against conspiracies assume that there must be an innocuous explanation and we should take it all on faith; on the other hand, people who enjoy conspiracy theorists automatically assume any testimony or anomaly proves a conspiracy. I think the correct approach is to be open to the possibility that an argument, fact, or testimony may lead somewhere other than Oswald being the lone shooter. Regardless, I made this thread because I guessed that people might want to discuss it. There’s no reason to call either side (if there has to be a side) “stupid.”</p>
<p>I never thought it wwa a conspiracy; none of the theories and “proofs” seemed convincing to me. What did surprise me was when I heard some tapes of Oswald speaking. He was quite an articulate man with a good vocabulary. For some reason, I did not think that was the case.</p>
This actually isn’t true/doesn’t follow. Most murders with multiple people involved are gang-type stuff - drive-bys, bar fights, invasion-style robberies and things like that. Not really what a person would call a “conspiracy” since there’s no “secret” element to it and the perpetrators are typically directly involved in the action. Instances where two or more people get together to plot to kill someone and conceal their actions are actually extremely rare, for the same reason that there are fewer conspiracies in real life than in fiction: people talk. The likelihood of someone blabbing about the conspiracy increases exponentially with the number of people who know about it. (Literally. The fact that several people know that there are other people who know the “secret” makes it more likely that any of them will talk than any of them would be to talk if they alone knew the secret.)</p>
<p>I’ve always assumed that the conspiracy theories were ridiculous. After listening to Philip Shenon being interviewed on WNYC today, I now understand why so many have sprung up. FBI destroying evidence… Earl Warren interviewing people by himself and then providing his version to the committee. I was just shaking my head by the end of it.</p>
<p>^Fair enough. Although, it seems there were plenty of people talking–who knows whether they were telling the truth, though.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’d like to have an explanation of why one of the bullets exploded on impact while the others did not. From what I’ve heard, bullets are designed to either explode or pass through the body. Can two different types of bullets be loaded in the same rifle? I’m not familiar with guns at all, but I’ve heard experts claim that the fact that one bullet exploded and the others didn’t meant that there must have been two different guns.</p>
<p>I didn’t say a deranged individual couldn’t act on his own–my opinion is that it seems more likely that organized forces were behind the assassination. It’s just a gut feeling.</p>