The JFK files and the conspiracy theories
No, I haven’t read the newly-released files. That would be quite a task. But as I already indicated, I am nearly certain that they will reveal little of note, and yet that people wedded to the various and sundry conspiracy theories of the JFK assassination will find all sorts of ways to turn them into something that lends credence to the idea that the killing was the result of a vast conspiracy.
So I find this from the Babylon Bee humorous (hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”):
According to sources, the final unredacted release of the CIA’s JFK Files contains no incriminating information, definitively proving that the CIA destroyed all their incriminating JFK Files.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” JFK assassination research enthusiast Edward Dunbar posted on X. “We finally get the files after all these years and there’s nothing in them. That can only mean they destroyed that one file that said ‘We did it’ years ago!”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way – and there has always been a will to make JFK’s assassin into something much bigger than the unimpressive lone Communist gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
One thing about Oswald that made a deep impression on me is that, when the assassination occurred and I first saw a photo of him, I thought he was at least 35 or so. I was young and he didn’t look like a 24-year-old to me, but that’s indeed what he was. And you know what? He still looks to me like a man in his mid-thirties. This is basically meaningless, but it strikes me when I see photos of him.
Another thing that’s clear is that he was trouble – and troubled – for nearly his entire short life:
[Oswald’s father] 5][6] Robert died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. …
As a child, Oswald was described as withdrawn and temperamental by several people who knew him. When Oswald was 12 in August 1952, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald’s half-brother, John. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened John’s wife with a pocket knife.
Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York, but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations”. Hartogs concluded:
“Lee has to be diagnosed as “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies”. Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.”
… Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth Hou”>heese, while describing “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him”, found that he had detached himself from the world around him because “no one in it ever met any of his needs for love”. Hartogs and Siegel indicated that Marguerite gave him very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee “just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate.” … Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee’s withdrawal was a form of “violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life”.
A great deal is known about Oswald; you can find a ton of it in the book I keep recommending for anyone who wishes to learn an enormous amount about both Oswald, the assassination as a whole, and every single conspiracy theory about it and why they don’t hold water: that book is Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, which can be found online here.
I also recommend this previous post of mine, as well as the comments there. I’ve written quite a few other posts on the assassination, but if you read just one I’d suggest it be that one.
It was Case Closed, by Gerald Posner that convinced me that Oswald did the deed, and he worked alone.
We will never know for sure.
There are some similarities to gavrilo princip as with many subsequent events intelligence services seem to catch glimpses of someone like him mcveigh atta but they seem to always miss
My new favorite blog is Coffee and Covid, by the amazing attorney Jeff Childers. He publishes six days a week and always has insightful intelligent things to say about the events of the day.
His big take on the JFK files is that they are an unexpected deep reveal of the horrors our CIA was (is?) committing in crashing about the world, casually risking nuclear Armageddon and torture and deliberate famine and use of bio weapons.
Apparently JFK caught on to them and vowed to break up their power.
And Jeff wonders if this is Trump’s underlying purpose in releasing so much unredacted material; to expose these clandestine entities and drag them into the sunlight to perish.
Apparently the New York Times had an article exploring the same thing yesterday.
Mike Benz argues that USAID was created to enable the CIA, and others in our government, to continue all the nasty foreign wet work that Childers shows the recently dropped JFK files make public. Funding NGOs to do the work the US Congress stopped the CIA from doing directly.
I think there is more a keystone cops to some of these programs there were some strange detours like mk ultra admittedly
Except aid arose in 1961 one might look at in the context of the doolittle report and political action broadly speaking the more likely path was an extension of what the dodd committee found re philanthropic efforts which were not on balance beneficial take the Ford foundation please for instance
It does seem like what has happened
https://x.com/rachelbovard/status/1903119072914440503
From the comments at Althouse:
”A conspiracy theorist dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. God tells him that the first perk in heaven is the answer to the one question he never found the answer to while on Earth.
Without missing a beat the conspiracy theorist asks ‘who killed JFK?’
God answers ‘a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald from a window atop a book depository in Dallas Texas.’
The conspiracy theorist looks down and says ‘Wow! The conspiracy goes way deeper than I ever thought.’”
Well, Oswald was a bit of a known wolf. He killed a cop too, and had nearly murdered General Walker that year. What he did was simple enough for anyone to do, if they weren’t concerned about getting away with it. If you have a good arm you can hit Kennedy with a baseball from that window. The conspiracy theories are awfully convenient for those who wish to distract us from those simple truths.
He should have set off flags from atsugi to minsk to dallas to mexico city but some how he didnt
It’s fun to make fun of conspiracy buffs and some of it is warranted. But I don’t see that the people who took the Warren Report at face value when it came out were much better.
The Single Bullet Theory as proposed in the Warren Report was quite improbable. Later investigations had to extend the window of time in which Oswald had to shoot for it to work.
Computer simulations were necessary to explain the counter-intuitive path of the Single Bullet. The Jet Effect in which Kennedy’s head exploded backwards towards the Book Depository likewise required better explanation.
Then there was the freakishness of Jack Ruby, a mobbed-up nightclub owner, who walked down into the basement of a police station and assassinated Oswald in full view of a dozen or so policemen and national television news cameras.
Later we discovered that the CIA was plotting to assassinate Castro, at times with the Mafia, and that the CIA was running the MK ULTRA program to create programmed assassins. There was no question of the hostility between JFK and the CIA after the failure of the Bay of Pigs.
Anyone who wasn’t questioning the JFK assassination in those days is as guilty IMO of motivated reasoning as the conspiracy buffs.
RigelDog,
I heartily join you in recommending Coffee & Covid.
I start my day with Jeff Childers and end it with Neo.
Great analysis of the day’s news. Plus Childers is hilarious!
But Neo’s commenters are the best.
Everyone has a personal probability theory.
When a particular Big Deal couldn’t happen without an unlikely coinciding of unlikelihoods, eventually the random chance begins to seem…unlikely.
For example, the ship which hit the bridge in Baltimore lost, it is said, its steering during the two (?) minutes it was aimed at the bridge pier. Not earlier and not later. But…just right.
According to various reports, the course down bay includes a curve, part of which is aimed at the bridge pier and then curves further onto a course safely between the piers. All ships follow this course and,,,it was during the really bad period that the steering went out.
Thus the story in various locations. So the question arises, what are the chances? Could have been any other time. But…this time.
So with JFK. Various items seem unlikely–maybe or maybe not–and coincide to allow Oswald to do his thing. Without which, the theorist theorizes, it couldn’t have happened. Without which coinciding, that is, which is the issue raising eyebrows.
Oswald needed a job and, due to his personality and history, it wasn’t going to be a white collar job in the suburbs, nor heavy construction. Of the umpteen tens of thousands available he got one overlooking a likely parade route. What are the chances? Did some nefarious operator put him there in case some notable would be in a parade in the next couple of years? What are the chances the random applicant for the job is the kind of guy who’d shoot a notable from the window?
As one goes on, how many of the likely candidates for the job owned rifles (this is TEXAS)?
And he managed not to get fired until JFK showed up.
Suppose we posit four required items to be in place to allow this to happen. Each is a fifty percent chance, one in two, pretty close to random. And they have to coincide.
So that’s 1/2×1/2×1/2/1/2, or 1/16 chances it happened by random. Or fifteen chances out of sixteen it was purposeful.
To the extent the theorist comes up with a large, or larger denominator, proving a negative becomes more difficult. Generally, we try to show one or another factor was not relevant. But….
Point is, there was so much going on in the background that the theorist has a selection of issues to consider relevant–they’re not? prove it–that getting a pretty big denominator is easy.
How many people here are satisfied that we know all we need to know about Thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump’s attempted assassin?
Just a lone nut? Are you sure?
There’s a bad smell to the Crooks story, as there was to Oswald’s.
@ Miguel cervantes “intelligence services seem to catch glimpses of someone like him mcveigh atta but they seem to always miss”
@ Miguel cervantes > “He should have set off flags from atsugi to minsk to dallas to mexico city but some how he didnt
@ huxley > “There’s a bad smell to the Crooks story, as there was to Oswald’s.”
It’s not too big a stretch to wonder if some of those “misses” and “what red flags?” were deliberate.
Oswald is a stand-in for all the other assassins and would-be assassins. He’s also a deflector. With all the focus on JFK and LHO we don’t ask the questions we ought to be asking about the RFK and MLK assassinations and the two attempts on Trump’s life — and heck, the Epstein suicide and the Las Vegas mass shooting that we never got an explanation for.
Abraxas. With regard to the Las Vegas shooting; Paddock was logistically capable of doing that by himself. Had money. Knew his way around Vegas. So forth. It was also, as far as anybody knows, pointless. You can’t have a conspiracy theory unless the Big Thing looks as if it has a point.
Maybe he just wanted to do that, and was getting high on his slow, careful prepping.
Then, a week and a half later, his home was burgled. While being watched by Reno cops. Watched by Reno cops seems to mean when a neighbor calls about something suspicious, they rush right over. Found nothing amiss, and no idea about ingress.
Could be veeerrry suspicious, but it was in a Del Webb community whose residents are wealthy enough to travel and have the time. Which is to say there may be a number of high-value targets going empty for a couple of months. My sister rented one for three months while cleaning up from Harvey. So, maybe it’s a burglar’s paradise. OTOH, if it were, there’d be extra precautions….
So, suspicious burglary or not….?
the data sets re the document dumps are a little unwieldy, like the crates in the New Mexico desert, where they hid the Ark
the fact the bureau didn’t deign to give a motive for Paddock, which was the highest death toll after Pulse Night Club,
Miguel @ 6:02 pm.
Yep, that was Obama’s hugest AND most successful joke EVUH.
(And that’s sayin’ a lot…)
miguel
Not up to the Bureau do order up a point for Paddock. If there is one, even the vaguest hint, it would be covered by all kinds of theorists. Might be dissed by a lot but it wouldn’t be unknown.
The only reason a point might be hidden is….what? Randomly shooting up a country music concert would get a particular individual killed? The ATF knows how to do that with a lot less fuss and bother. In fact, so does the Secret Service, almost.
Doesn’t seem to have added much to the overloaded gun control freaks’ arguments, government or citizens.
If it’s to cover something nefarious, then something nefarious shouldn’t have been scheduled for a hotel in Vegas. Doesn’t take long to get to the far ‘burbs outside the city.