Conspiracies

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

One can feel dissatisfied with an explanation without that being evidence for anything else.

A sense of dissatisfaction with "the official explanation" can certainly motivate investigation of other possibilities-- that's reasonable, but that's all. Then you have to go and find evidence for some alternate theory.

You either do or don't have evidence for a conspiracy. If you don't, you don't.

LHO certainly is a guy with an odd story, as is Jack Ruby. But folks have been over both of their strange stories in very great detail, and you just can't come up with evidence for anything much.

The whole JFK story is both sad and frustrating for the chaotic and disorderly way the investigation was conducted. I certainly do not have any concrete evidence of anything and I also feel that you could feed the five thousand on the red herrings in the story. How to know which (if any) of the clues takes you anywhere? We have a murderer who was himself murdered before he could say anything worthwhile. We have an autopsy conducted by people who knew nothing about forensic science and could only manage to hopelessly contaminate the evidence. Why was General Curtis Le May present BTW? We have endless tosh about the magic bullet and the grassy knoll, all promoting the unsubstatiated theory of the second gunman. It is all white noise and confusion.

There's no realistic possibility that the story will ever be explained unequivocally now.

[CARLTON BROWN]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

"Don't look entirely kosher" doesn't succeed as evidence of a conspiracy.

Many things are hard to understand. Talk to a group of airplane passengers and ask them "how many of you understand how an airplane stays in the air"

Argument from personal incredulity is a logical fallacy: "I don't see how an airplane crashing into a building could make it fail" and "something sure seems weird about Rudolph Hess and Lee Harvey Oswald" do not stand as evidence for any kind of conspiracy.

You cannot go from "x doesn't seem right to me" to "this is evidence that there was a [logically highly improbable] conspiracy".

Only evidence for a conspiracy is evidence for a conspiracy. Retrospectively odd seeming coincidences are not evidence of a conspiracy. Evidence of a conspiracy is, for example, a group of French Army leaders who undertook to overthrow General de Gaulle in 1961, the "Algiers Putsch".

We have precisely zero evidence for a government conspiracy with respect to the Kennedy Assasination, Pearl Harbor, Rudolph Hess or 9/11. With respect to these events, we _do_ have abundant evidence of a conspiracy by, respectively, LHO, the Japanese military, Hess, and al Qaeda.

Yes, Joe Public might be seen as only having a limited knowledge of many things. Most people haven't the faintest idea how something like a TV or radio works. Nevertheless that doesn't mean there aren't experts who do and smart people who see obvious flaws in official explanations for strange events.

Do we need solid evidence to simply be suspicious? The police in the UK won't hesitate to arrest someone simply on suspicion of committing a crime. In all the historical events I've mentioned, there are big, or should I say huge credibility gaps in parts of the stories.

And there are apparently many documents relating to the JFK assassination that remain classified, which are not measured by numbers of pages, but by tons in weight.

Deceit is part of the way governments run things. They need to maintain the status quo and the only rule is not to get caught out.

[DTravel]

Originally Posted by seany65

I generally disagree with that, as I think a 'conspiracy' by any US agancy (or an agency from any country) could just be a few people

That is the first fantasy of almost any conspiracy theory involving a government agency. There is NEVER "just a few people". The "few people" who might be in a position to attempt this are dependent on entire chains of command under them to give them the information they would need to make any decision. And that's before you get into the private contractors!

The closest we've ever come to "just a few people" in the real world that I can think of is Watergate. And even THEN someone talked and there were copious records!

[DTravel]

Re: JFK assassination

Originally Posted by scoundrel

We have endless tosh about the magic bullet and the grassy knoll, all promoting the unsubstatiated theory of the second gunman. It is all white noise and confusion.

The "magic bullet" has been explained and the shot duplicated. The only way it could have been a "magic bullet" is if the President and the Governor had been sitting 1) directly in line; 2) at the same height; and 3) both were facing forward. None of those three are true, the Governor's seat was lower and to one side of the President's and the Governor's torso was twisted to the side as he was looking at the crowd he was waving at. Take those facts into account and you find that all the entry and exit wounds line up perfectly and the resulting trajectory points straight back at the Book Depository window Oswald was shooting from.

[windymiller]

Originally Posted by DTravel

Re: JFK assassination



The "magic bullet" has been explained and the shot duplicated. The only way it could have been a "magic bullet" is if the President and the Governor had been sitting 1) directly in line; 2) at the same height; and 3) both were facing forward. None of those three are true, the Governor's seat was lower and to one side of the President's and the Governor's torso was twisted to the side as he was looking at the crowd he was waving at. Take those facts into account and you find that all the entry and exit wounds line up perfectly and the resulting trajectory points straight back at the Book Depository window Oswald was shooting from.

This is absolutely correct. Oswald, and only Oswald shot JFK. Someone may have well put him up to it, we may never know who, if anyone. Why did Ruby shoot him? I'd imagine there must have been thousands of Americans who would have shot the man who killed their President if they'd had the opportunity.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

There's no realistic possibility that the story will ever be explained unequivocally now.

The story seems fully explained. LHO shot the President. Despite all the claims of the difficulty of the shot, its been replicated.

LHO has a strange story. Let's start with the obvious: during a time of profound hostility between the US and the Soviet Union, he essentially defects to Russia. You certainly could start with the suspicion "LHO was a Russian agent, sent to kill the President".

That's a plausible theory. Now: is there any evidence for it? Turns out not. Everything we know from Soviet files and the KGB people who handled LHO is that they thought he was a nut, and useless.

Similarly: the Mob. One theory goes "the mob was furious about Bobby Kennedy's organized crime prosecutions" -- and so they killed the President? Evidence? None

And so on with the Cubans, the CIA and so on. You can come up with all kinds of angles "someone who might have wanted to kill the President" -- but you can't find any evidence at all that any of them did.

There are lots of loose threads, but they don't add up to anything coherent.

Assassinations and attempted assassinations are, unfortunately, not at all rare in American political life. With the exception of John Wilkes Booth, all of them have been the work of mentally addled loners, usually under some sense that they have a mission.

LHO is basically John Hinckeley/Squeaky Fromme/Charles Guiteau/Jared Loughner, a character we see over and over again, tragically.

[CARLTON BROWN]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

The story seems fully explained. LHO shot the President. Despite all the claims of the difficulty of the shot, its been replicated.

LHO has a strange story. Let's start with the obvious: during a time of profound hostility between the US and the Soviet Union, he essentially defects to Russia. You certainly could start with the suspicion "LHO was a Russian agent, sent to kill the President".

That's a plausible theory. Now: is there any evidence for it? Turns out not. Everything we know from Soviet files and the KGB people who handled LHO is that they thought he was a nut, and useless.

Similarly: the Mob. One theory goes "the mob was furious about Bobby Kennedy's organized crime prosecutions" -- and so they killed the President? Evidence? None

And so on with the Cubans, the CIA and so on. You can come up with all kinds of angles "someone who might have wanted to kill the President" -- but you can't find any evidence at all that any of them did.

There are lots of loose threads, but they don't add up to anything coherent.

Assassinations and attempted assassinations are, unfortunately, not at all rare in American political life. With the exception of John Wilkes Booth, all of them have been the work of mentally addled loners, usually under some sense that they have a mission.

LHO is basically John Hinckeley/Squeaky Fromme/Charles Guiteau/Jared Loughner, a character we see over and over again, tragically.

Rather like Jack the Ripper and Roswell, there are new claims every other month to explain this complex assassination and debunk the conspiracy theories. New ideas, often supported by computer graphics make good TV shows when presented as the final proof of what really happened and those who are opposed to any deep form of conspiracy immediately jump on them as final solid proof of the truth.

Actually, the latest idea for the magic bullet theory is that one of the diplomatic protection team carrying a newly issued M16 accidentally discharged the weapon when the shooting started, killing JFK and that's what was really covered up. It certainly looks feasible, but of course, like all these supposed expert claims, it is just another theory. Personally, I have many doubts about what happened in Dallas, who Oswald really was, why the real KGB files on his stay in Russia mysteriously vanished, his arrest, the connection to Jack Ruby, etc, etc. People claiming any of this has been fully explained, just want to see things wrapped up in a tidy manner. They have often done little or no research, but want blame removed from the possible orchestrators like Hoover, who was a seriously strange man with some weird ideas about life, an absolute hatred of the Kennedys and the ability to make things happen.

The chances are we will never know what really happened. Yes, it might be Oswald, but on the other hand, he may well have been set up as a patsy.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by CARLTON BROWN

Rather like Jack the Ripper and Roswell, there are new claims every other month to explain this complex assassination and debunk the conspiracy theories.

Here you apply a skepticism to the debunking of conspiracy theories that you don't apply to the conspiracy theories themselves.

[seany65]

Originally Posted by DTravel

That is the first fantasy of almost any conspiracy theory involving a government agency. There is NEVER "just a few people". The "few people" who might be in a position to attempt this are dependent on entire chains of command under them to give them the information they would need to make any decision. And that's before you get into the private contractors!

The closest we've ever come to "just a few people" in the real world that I can think of is Watergate. And even THEN someone talked and there were copious records!

Have you never thought how easy it would be for those who get the info (the field agents etc.) to honestly pass it on to those higher up, and be told "Leave it with us and we'll sort it out", and for those who are meant to pass it on either don't or they change it in some way?

Yes you are correct in saying that those at the top rely on those lower for giving them the correct info. But isn't it possible for them to be given the correct info, in good faith by those lower, and yet those higher could decide to not act, or to deliberately decide to do the wrong thing, or actually do the right thing but delay doing it long enough for the damage warned about to be done?

It really would not take thousands of americans in a huge conspiracy, to attack the WTC. It could just take the top brass to decide to not act, (or to act too slowly), on info they were given about an attack that was planned by al qaeda.

Incidentally, I don't remember seeing any evidence that al qaeda actually did it. I remember on this forum (this thread?) being told Bin laden admitted the attack, but is that the overwhelming proof that I seem to remember being promised to the world by the POTUS?

[CARLTON BROWN]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Here you apply a skepticism to the debunking of conspiracy theories that you don't apply to the conspiracy theories themselves.

I'm probably a good deal more neutral than you think. I've read endless nonsense about all manner of things from alien abductions to secret plots to overthrow the US Government.

Many of the supposed major conspiracies from the Maine being blown up in 1898 to the death of Diana may or may not have been engineered and may have just had the details altered for political reasons. Stuff goes on all the time, from Operation Northwoods to the more recent attempts to destabilising parts of the Middle East. Most of the time, we never hear anything about some of the near misses that take place.

In a world filled with corruption, stupidity and individuals who have their own take on honour or loyalty, bad things can and will happen.

My only interest is simply the truth and when you start accepting everything you're told by the powers that be without question, democracy is soon on very wobbly ground.