Was Oswald The Lone Assassin?
I’ve been hanging out at Youtube a lot lately and while enjoying subjects as diverse as silent movies (Georges Melies a favorite), animated DC and Marvel, and other stuff, I got sucked into JFK assassination videos after starting out with such innocence as JFK swimming at Santa Monica Beach in 1962 or other fun stuff like his press conferences. Man, some of the researchers are definite tin foil hatters, but there’s a lot of solid stuff out there. Some of it I’ve known for years and some was new to me.
Tomorrow is the 52nd anniversary of the JFK assassination, so I thought I'd share some thoughts over the next few days.
Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Maybe those of us who can’t buy that a loser loner (the official version of LHO) could pull off the crime of the century with a crappy Italian-made rifle that even the Italians considered inferior are looking for some meaning where there is none. But those who deride conspiracy theorists forget that often in murders, there is more than one suspect, and often those suspects have different motives but want the same results: the death of the victim. So I can concede that there are plenty of people out there who wanted JFK dead (more on that later).
The reasons I can’t buy into the official Warren Commission version that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin are listed below. He might have been part of a team. He might have been just the patsy he proclaimed to be. We may never know, but the Government shifted the ground under Americans’ feet in 1963 and their handling of the case caused the people’s skepticism and began and accelerated Americans’ distrust of their own Government.
Lee Harvey Oswald served in the Marines and worked in an area which was concerned with American U-2 flights over Russia. He took the Russian examination (which privates did not do) and defected to the U.S.S.R. after he was honorably discharged (which was promptly changed to a dishonorable discharge). When he grew disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, he returned from the Soviet Union with a Russian wife (niece of a KGB colonel) without any fuss at all in 1962, at the height of the Cold War.
The FBI assigned a handler to him, James Hosty. It was later revealed that LHO was paid $200 a month to be an informant for the FBI. If he wasn’t an informant, why wasn’t the Secret Service notified that a former defector to the Soviet Union worked in the Texas School Book Depository, which was right on the route of the motorcade in Dallas?
Oswald had many CIA acquaintances and friends. For example, Ruth and Michael Paine, both CIA (though of course undercover at the time), took in Lee’s wife Marina and his kids. Ruth claimed they would give her a home while Lee worked in Dallas during the week in exchange for Marina giving her Russian language lessons, but she was already proficient in the language.
The Secret Service criminally bungled their job or were part of the conspiracy. A video on Youtube shows an agent being waved off the presidential limousine by his supervisor as it leaves Love Field on November 22nd. His body language indicates WTF? It has been claimed that he was being told his assignment was at the airport, but if so, why wasn’t he replaced? And if the President did tell the agents he didn’t want them blocking the people’s view of him, they often overrode him for security reasons, yet no agent stood on the back (special modifications to the bumper allowed it with hand rails) or jogged beside the limousine as per Secret Service protocol. Of course, most had broken protocol the night before by carousing all night in Forth Worth and were hung over the next day. No agents were in the crowds. No agents disallowed open windows on the motorcade route, and support by the local Army base was not available (they were told to ‘stand down’). Almost every protocol in the book was broken that day. The presidential limousine was the lead car. Breach of protocol. The press bus was stuck way in the back instead of close to the presidential limo so that reporters and photographers could do their jobs. Only amateur photographers were in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting. Wouldn’t Secret Service protection be extra tight when going into a known hostile environment such as right-wing Dallas, whose leading newspaper published a full-page ad entitled Wanted: For Treason the morning of his arrival and showing JFK as if he was being booked like a common criminal with front and profile pictures?
On November 22, 1963, after the shots were fired, a Dallas policeman ran into the building immediately. He and the supervisor, Roy Truly, were headed up to the roof (a flock of birds had been disturbed and the officer thought a sniper might be up there). They saw a man in the second-floor lunchroom drinking a Coke. The officer, Marion Baker, stated that the man was calm and cool, not disheveled or otherwise indicating he had just run down from the sixth floor in haste. Truly said he was all right, the man worked there, and his name was Lee Oswald. That was approximately 90 seconds after the shots. Pretty cool customer, that Oswald, drinking a Coke after shooting the President of the United States after stashing his rifle and running down four flights of steps, eh? No elevators were working.
When Oswald was in the movie theater, he sat down next to the few people scattered around the theater, which was speculated that meant he was trying to reach a CIA (?) contact. Otherwise why does a man who just shot the President go into a movie theater and sit down next to a patron, wait for the man to say something, get up and repeat the same actions?
A witness from the store next door could not see much out front of the theater while the police were there and went back into the store and out into the back alley. He saw police hustling a slender white man out of the theater and into a squad car. For years he thought he’d witnessed the arrest of Oswald. It wasn’t until a journalist contacted him years later and showed him a picture of LHO being brought out the front that he exclaimed, “Then who was it that I saw being taken out the back?” There are other examples of a possible double before the assassination.
Numerous witnesses claimed to hear shots from behind the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission said it was an echo effect, but dozens of people ran up the knoll, including trained policemen, and there have been reports of men claiming to be Secret Service showing credentials up there before the motorcade arrived. Several witnesses also saw a puff of smoke from the knoll. JFK’s own aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, both World War II veterans, also claimed they heard shots from the knoll from their positions in the motorcade.
The Zapruder film and many other films that were confiscated by the FBI showed damage when returned, and there are missing frames in some. Hollywood experts have acknowledged there has been tampering of the fatal head shot in the Zapruder film, for instance, blacking out the back of the head to disguise the full extent of the exit wound. Interesting, because the official autopsy photos clearly show the back of JFK’s head intact. Huh? Numerous witnesses, including the doctors and nurses in Parkland Hospital’s ER, stated that the right back of the President’s head was gone, so why wasn’t that evident in the photographs? Researchers have speculated that it was to cover evidence of shots from the front, since the Warren Commission emphatically stated there were only three shots, and all from the back.
The doctors performing the autopsy at Bethesda had never done an autopsy before. The lead doctor, Humes, destroyed his notes. DESTROYED HIS NOTES!!! The autopsy of the century and the doctor DESTROYED HIS NOTES!!!
The funeral attendant in Dallas said the body was wrapped in a white sheet and placed in an expensive bronze casket before being taken away by the Secret Service. The autopsy techs in Bethesda said the body was in a black body bag and taken from a cheap metal coffin.
The ‘magic bullet’.
The limousine was washed while at Parkland, obliterating forensic evidence and flown to Detroit under LBJ’s orders where it was rebuilt before any forensic scientist could take pictures or examine the limo. Witnesses claiming there was a bullet hole in the windshield (indicating a shot from the front) were out of luck, as the windshield was removed and destroyed before any pictures were taken. The murder scene, the presidential limousine, had all evidence methodically destroyed before any official examination.
During Oswald’s custody by the Dallas Police Department, no official notes were taken, no handwritten notes, no audio recordings, no stenographer’s notes.
The rifle found in the TSBD was first reported to be a German Mauser. It was changed to an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, a bolt-action rifle that the Italians called ‘the humanitarian rifle’, as it rarely killed anyone, it was so poorly made. No one in the Dallas Police Department knew the difference between these two rifles? Or were there two rifles found? The witnesses who named it a Mauser said ‘Mauser’ was clearly stamped on the rifle. What happened to this rifle?
Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, was heavily connected to the Mafia. Was it chance that he arrived at the police garage to kill Oswald on November 24, 1963? Lone nutters (anti-conspiracy advocates) say that the transfer was delayed, that Ruby stopped off at Western Union and sent money to a former stripper, left his dog in the car, etc. Years later an officer on duty revealed that he received a phone call the night before the transfer and the caller said that the transfer would be delayed. It is speculated that the transfer was deliberately delayed and Ruby went through the motions of mundane activities to cover a deliberate mission. He was the perfect assassin as many Dallas cops knew him (he encouraged them to come to his strip clubs and comped them) and he was able to stroll right into that police garage without being challenged at all during a high-security prisoner transfer and easily kill Oswald.
The FBI sent a report to LBJ soon after the assassination and verified that there were no prints on the Mannlicher-Carcano (documentation published in books and on-line). This report was signed by J. Edgar Hoover. The Dallas funeral home preparing Oswald for burial was visited by FBI agents and the mortician was asked for a private viewing of LHO’s body. After they left he had to remove black ink off the body’s palm for viewing/burial. Eureka! The Dallas P.D. declared that they had found a palm print of Oswald’s on the Mannlicher-Carcano.
Why were records pertaining to the assassination sealed for 75 years? They won’t be released until 2039, after everyone who was alive in 1963 are very old or dead. If it was to keep autopsy photos from getting to the public, that ship has sailed, as you can see them on-line.
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, Sr., were the only two people over the age of five who could not recall where they were on November 22, 1963. Nixon finally admitted that he was in Dallas as lawyer for the Pepsi Company (he was out of politics in 1963) and flew out of Love Field the morning of November 22nd, and Bush claimed to be giving a speech that afternoon in Tyler, Texas, even after the news of the shooting was common knowledge. He took twenty years to come up with that one.
Bush lied to Congress in 1976 when he said he had not worked for the CIA during his hearings for his appointment as CIA Director. He ran the Zapata Oil Company in the Caribbean, a station for CIA agents to pick up guns, money, and other necessities for operations in the area. He named two of the supply boats in the Bay of Pigs operation Zapata and Barbara (he had a habit of naming things after his wife, like his two planes in World War II). He was involved in putting that operation together (American-supported invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by anti-Castro troops). He had likely been recruited through Yale’s Skull & Bones Society, where the top one percent hangs out and winds up in Government jobs, including the CIA.
Too much unexplained stuff for my taste. Oswald was either the luckiest guy in history to use a crappy rifle to shoot the President of the United States dead or the unluckiest, as he ended up dead two days later himself.
Next:
Who Wanted JFK Dead, Who Had Opportunity, And Who Had The Means To Cover It Up?
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Tomorrow is the 52nd anniversary of the JFK assassination, so I thought I'd share some thoughts over the next few days.
Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Maybe those of us who can’t buy that a loser loner (the official version of LHO) could pull off the crime of the century with a crappy Italian-made rifle that even the Italians considered inferior are looking for some meaning where there is none. But those who deride conspiracy theorists forget that often in murders, there is more than one suspect, and often those suspects have different motives but want the same results: the death of the victim. So I can concede that there are plenty of people out there who wanted JFK dead (more on that later).
The reasons I can’t buy into the official Warren Commission version that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin are listed below. He might have been part of a team. He might have been just the patsy he proclaimed to be. We may never know, but the Government shifted the ground under Americans’ feet in 1963 and their handling of the case caused the people’s skepticism and began and accelerated Americans’ distrust of their own Government.
Lee Harvey Oswald served in the Marines and worked in an area which was concerned with American U-2 flights over Russia. He took the Russian examination (which privates did not do) and defected to the U.S.S.R. after he was honorably discharged (which was promptly changed to a dishonorable discharge). When he grew disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, he returned from the Soviet Union with a Russian wife (niece of a KGB colonel) without any fuss at all in 1962, at the height of the Cold War.
The FBI assigned a handler to him, James Hosty. It was later revealed that LHO was paid $200 a month to be an informant for the FBI. If he wasn’t an informant, why wasn’t the Secret Service notified that a former defector to the Soviet Union worked in the Texas School Book Depository, which was right on the route of the motorcade in Dallas?
Oswald had many CIA acquaintances and friends. For example, Ruth and Michael Paine, both CIA (though of course undercover at the time), took in Lee’s wife Marina and his kids. Ruth claimed they would give her a home while Lee worked in Dallas during the week in exchange for Marina giving her Russian language lessons, but she was already proficient in the language.
The Secret Service criminally bungled their job or were part of the conspiracy. A video on Youtube shows an agent being waved off the presidential limousine by his supervisor as it leaves Love Field on November 22nd. His body language indicates WTF? It has been claimed that he was being told his assignment was at the airport, but if so, why wasn’t he replaced? And if the President did tell the agents he didn’t want them blocking the people’s view of him, they often overrode him for security reasons, yet no agent stood on the back (special modifications to the bumper allowed it with hand rails) or jogged beside the limousine as per Secret Service protocol. Of course, most had broken protocol the night before by carousing all night in Forth Worth and were hung over the next day. No agents were in the crowds. No agents disallowed open windows on the motorcade route, and support by the local Army base was not available (they were told to ‘stand down’). Almost every protocol in the book was broken that day. The presidential limousine was the lead car. Breach of protocol. The press bus was stuck way in the back instead of close to the presidential limo so that reporters and photographers could do their jobs. Only amateur photographers were in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting. Wouldn’t Secret Service protection be extra tight when going into a known hostile environment such as right-wing Dallas, whose leading newspaper published a full-page ad entitled Wanted: For Treason the morning of his arrival and showing JFK as if he was being booked like a common criminal with front and profile pictures?
On November 22, 1963, after the shots were fired, a Dallas policeman ran into the building immediately. He and the supervisor, Roy Truly, were headed up to the roof (a flock of birds had been disturbed and the officer thought a sniper might be up there). They saw a man in the second-floor lunchroom drinking a Coke. The officer, Marion Baker, stated that the man was calm and cool, not disheveled or otherwise indicating he had just run down from the sixth floor in haste. Truly said he was all right, the man worked there, and his name was Lee Oswald. That was approximately 90 seconds after the shots. Pretty cool customer, that Oswald, drinking a Coke after shooting the President of the United States after stashing his rifle and running down four flights of steps, eh? No elevators were working.
When Oswald was in the movie theater, he sat down next to the few people scattered around the theater, which was speculated that meant he was trying to reach a CIA (?) contact. Otherwise why does a man who just shot the President go into a movie theater and sit down next to a patron, wait for the man to say something, get up and repeat the same actions?
A witness from the store next door could not see much out front of the theater while the police were there and went back into the store and out into the back alley. He saw police hustling a slender white man out of the theater and into a squad car. For years he thought he’d witnessed the arrest of Oswald. It wasn’t until a journalist contacted him years later and showed him a picture of LHO being brought out the front that he exclaimed, “Then who was it that I saw being taken out the back?” There are other examples of a possible double before the assassination.
Numerous witnesses claimed to hear shots from behind the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission said it was an echo effect, but dozens of people ran up the knoll, including trained policemen, and there have been reports of men claiming to be Secret Service showing credentials up there before the motorcade arrived. Several witnesses also saw a puff of smoke from the knoll. JFK’s own aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, both World War II veterans, also claimed they heard shots from the knoll from their positions in the motorcade.
The Zapruder film and many other films that were confiscated by the FBI showed damage when returned, and there are missing frames in some. Hollywood experts have acknowledged there has been tampering of the fatal head shot in the Zapruder film, for instance, blacking out the back of the head to disguise the full extent of the exit wound. Interesting, because the official autopsy photos clearly show the back of JFK’s head intact. Huh? Numerous witnesses, including the doctors and nurses in Parkland Hospital’s ER, stated that the right back of the President’s head was gone, so why wasn’t that evident in the photographs? Researchers have speculated that it was to cover evidence of shots from the front, since the Warren Commission emphatically stated there were only three shots, and all from the back.
The doctors performing the autopsy at Bethesda had never done an autopsy before. The lead doctor, Humes, destroyed his notes. DESTROYED HIS NOTES!!! The autopsy of the century and the doctor DESTROYED HIS NOTES!!!
The funeral attendant in Dallas said the body was wrapped in a white sheet and placed in an expensive bronze casket before being taken away by the Secret Service. The autopsy techs in Bethesda said the body was in a black body bag and taken from a cheap metal coffin.
The ‘magic bullet’.
The limousine was washed while at Parkland, obliterating forensic evidence and flown to Detroit under LBJ’s orders where it was rebuilt before any forensic scientist could take pictures or examine the limo. Witnesses claiming there was a bullet hole in the windshield (indicating a shot from the front) were out of luck, as the windshield was removed and destroyed before any pictures were taken. The murder scene, the presidential limousine, had all evidence methodically destroyed before any official examination.
During Oswald’s custody by the Dallas Police Department, no official notes were taken, no handwritten notes, no audio recordings, no stenographer’s notes.
The rifle found in the TSBD was first reported to be a German Mauser. It was changed to an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, a bolt-action rifle that the Italians called ‘the humanitarian rifle’, as it rarely killed anyone, it was so poorly made. No one in the Dallas Police Department knew the difference between these two rifles? Or were there two rifles found? The witnesses who named it a Mauser said ‘Mauser’ was clearly stamped on the rifle. What happened to this rifle?
Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, was heavily connected to the Mafia. Was it chance that he arrived at the police garage to kill Oswald on November 24, 1963? Lone nutters (anti-conspiracy advocates) say that the transfer was delayed, that Ruby stopped off at Western Union and sent money to a former stripper, left his dog in the car, etc. Years later an officer on duty revealed that he received a phone call the night before the transfer and the caller said that the transfer would be delayed. It is speculated that the transfer was deliberately delayed and Ruby went through the motions of mundane activities to cover a deliberate mission. He was the perfect assassin as many Dallas cops knew him (he encouraged them to come to his strip clubs and comped them) and he was able to stroll right into that police garage without being challenged at all during a high-security prisoner transfer and easily kill Oswald.
The FBI sent a report to LBJ soon after the assassination and verified that there were no prints on the Mannlicher-Carcano (documentation published in books and on-line). This report was signed by J. Edgar Hoover. The Dallas funeral home preparing Oswald for burial was visited by FBI agents and the mortician was asked for a private viewing of LHO’s body. After they left he had to remove black ink off the body’s palm for viewing/burial. Eureka! The Dallas P.D. declared that they had found a palm print of Oswald’s on the Mannlicher-Carcano.
Why were records pertaining to the assassination sealed for 75 years? They won’t be released until 2039, after everyone who was alive in 1963 are very old or dead. If it was to keep autopsy photos from getting to the public, that ship has sailed, as you can see them on-line.
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, Sr., were the only two people over the age of five who could not recall where they were on November 22, 1963. Nixon finally admitted that he was in Dallas as lawyer for the Pepsi Company (he was out of politics in 1963) and flew out of Love Field the morning of November 22nd, and Bush claimed to be giving a speech that afternoon in Tyler, Texas, even after the news of the shooting was common knowledge. He took twenty years to come up with that one.
Bush lied to Congress in 1976 when he said he had not worked for the CIA during his hearings for his appointment as CIA Director. He ran the Zapata Oil Company in the Caribbean, a station for CIA agents to pick up guns, money, and other necessities for operations in the area. He named two of the supply boats in the Bay of Pigs operation Zapata and Barbara (he had a habit of naming things after his wife, like his two planes in World War II). He was involved in putting that operation together (American-supported invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by anti-Castro troops). He had likely been recruited through Yale’s Skull & Bones Society, where the top one percent hangs out and winds up in Government jobs, including the CIA.
Too much unexplained stuff for my taste. Oswald was either the luckiest guy in history to use a crappy rifle to shoot the President of the United States dead or the unluckiest, as he ended up dead two days later himself.
Next:
Who Wanted JFK Dead, Who Had Opportunity, And Who Had The Means To Cover It Up?
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