Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (4 page)

Now let’s go to the second reason this book is different.

What This Book Seeks to Achieve

It is amazing how many excellent books have been written about this topic. And yet, even though the authors of those books presented to me compelling evidence that there was no Case Against Oswald, we are still, to this day, debating the topic. It is almost as if people thought that whether or not the Holocaust existed was a legitimate topic for debate. That would be crazy, right? Well, that’s the way it is with the Kennedy assassination.

If everyone read those books, there would be no need for this book. But everyone has not read those books, and many of them are now out of print. So it looks like we are going to need at least one more book.

Yes, brilliant as these books were and are, due to a variety of circumstances including the out-of-print status of some of these books as well as the relatively high cost of some of the others, the books as a group only been able to get the ball to the one-yard line (through no fault of their own), with some very determined, very well-financed people trying to move that ball back to the five, ten, or even twenty yard line.

Because the ball has never crossed the goal, there is always this back-and-forth motion, and there always will be, until someone proves the point
definitively
, that there is no case at all.

But how do you write a book that conclusively proves that there is no case against Oswald? How could such a thing be done?

Well, in thinking about this, I decided to structure the book logically, categorizing all the evidence by topic, the topics related to key facts in the assassination which had to be true if Oswald was indeed the culprit. With the evidence categorized by factual topic, people could then make up their mind as to whether or not the evidence supported that particular fact.

So, with this method, it would be very easy for people to determine the strength or weakness of the case.

If this book is successful, it is going to break a decades-old logjam, and allow the intellectual efforts of people to be focused in what I view as the right direction, creating a short-list of suspects in the murders, and then deciding what would be the appropriate action to take.

Now the question is, how
do
I prove it? That takes us to the third reason this book is different, how it achieves what it seeks to achieve, and to that point, there are two methods:

1. The Amazon Virtual Jury
   
2. The JFK Challenge
   

Let me discuss them.

The
Amazon Virtual Jury

So, let us say that I am able to write a book which proves on paper that no jury would have returned a “guilty” verdict against Oswald. Oswald never had a trial, and no court is going to be trying him ever again, so how do I ultimately prove this when we don’t have a jury?

The answer I came up with was to create a
virtual jury
, a jury comprised of people who have read the books, and can then cast their votes online based on the evidence that they have seen.

But here there is a problem as well. How do you create a system of online voting that people can trust? For example, if you created an online survey using websites like
Zoomerang
, could that result really be trusted? People could vote, but you don’t know if they have actually seen the evidence. In addition, and even worse, multiple people could vote over and over, which would skew the results. How could you ensure integrity?

Creating a system with robust authentication would be extremely difficult to do, but luckily, there is no need to do it, because there is already a system out there which can guarantee authentication, and in this case, guarantee that at the very least people possess the book they say they have read.

The system is maintained by
Amazon
. It is actually a system designed to ensure the integrity of book reviews.

For book reviews,
Amazon
has a feature they call the
Amazon
verified purchase. This means that if someone reviews a book, and the “Amazon Verified Purchase” logo appears, you know that individual purchased the book:

In addition,
Amazon
authenticates each review by account. One account, one vote. People don’t get to review a book multiple times, they can only review it once.

Even better, there is something called the “Real Name” feature:

If someone posts a review, and the “Real Name” logo appears underneath the name, you know that individual is who they say they are. That prevents people from hiding under aliases to evade the responsibility of posting false reviews.

And, of course, there is the star rating system, which has a 1-5 scale that allows readers to rate the books, but in this case,

can also allow people to evaluate the strength of the case
I am making
against The Case Against Oswald.

This was quite an “aha!” moment for me when I realized that the Amazon reviewing system could be used as a mechanism for people to vote in a Virtual Jury, a jury whose results would be visible to people worldwide.

So, here is how the
Amazon Virtual Jury
system will work. Every purchaser of Volumes 2 and 3 has a right to vote based on what they read in those volumes. The “reviews” of those books are actually only sideways reviews. They are really reviews of how well I make the case against The Case Against Oswald, which I guess you could argue is a type of book review.

Could people buy the book multiple times and cast multiple votes? In the first place, I doubt anyone would do that, and in the second place, the answer for the
Kindle
is “no”: Amazon will not let you buy a
Kindle
book twice; if you try to do that, it will tell you that you already purchased the book.

Now, I suppose that people could set up multiple accounts with multiple credit cards, but who is really going to be doing that? I feel pretty safe in saying that we don’t have to worry about that one.

Details on how the
Amazon Virtual Jury
voting will proceed will appear in the “About This Book” section at the beginning of volumes 2 and 3.

Well, good idea though this may be, it does have at least one flaw, a significant one which I have to address to ensure the integrity of the results. Here is what some people are going to say if the results of the Virtual Jury turn out like I expect:

“Oh, sure, look at all the people who say that they would be voting ‘not guilty’ if they were on the jury. So what? It doesn’t mean anything! It just proves that you have written a distorted, biased book, including only the evidence which supports your view and leaving out all the evidence which is against your view. Big deal, anyone can do that, so all you have proven is that you have written a distorted, biased book that has misled the American people, who are so gullible that they will fall for anything!”

Ouch! That is some charge, and I know it is coming. And, in fact, there is a certain amount of truth to what they’re saying. Anyone who writes a book on any topic, which of course would include the Kennedy assassination, is going to be leaving out information. That is inevitable. Do you know how many pages of official evidence there are in this case? Hundreds of thousands!! So, it is going to be extremely easy for them to demonstrate that I have left out evidence, since they have hundreds of thousands of examples to choose from.

However, what I would argue in return is just what I have argued, that it is impossible to include all the evidence, and so in fact I
have
to leave out evidence, if for no other reason than I know that no one is going to be reading a book that is hundreds of thousands of pages long! And, I can easily reply that every other book on this topic, every single one of them, no matter which side, is leaving out evidence as well. So, while this might appear to be at first glance a significant criticism, it is in fact
no criticism at all
.

The real criticism would be this:

“Yes, you left out evidence, but not just the evidence that everyone else leaves out, but real, material evidence that would actually change the way people voted.”

Because I knew this charge was coming, I knew I had to find a way to respond to it, otherwise the JFK merry-go-round would be circling for eternity. And the way I found is a second means of ensuring integrity called
The JFK Challenge
.

The
JFK Challenge

As good as the
Amazon Virtual Jury
idea is, it does have the Achilles’ heel I just mentioned. Consequently, I have to back up the Virtual Jury concept with a much stronger concept,
The JFK Challenge
.

Here is how the challenge works: I make certain claims in the book. As a result of these claims, people will conclude that there is no case against Oswald. Others will challenge me, saying that I have either distorted or omitted information. To those people I say, “Fine. If you have purchased my book, you have the right to take me before an arbitrator and demonstrate before him or her the strength of what you’re saying. Prepare a rebuttal to my book, and I will prepare a counter-rebuttal, and we each have a second right of reply, and we will take all this material before an arbitrator. We will let them decide which one of us has distorted or omitted information.”

This is a much stronger concept! Suppose 100 people in the Virtual Jury vote “not guilty.” Then, one person claims that I have distorted or omitted information. Yet, curiously enough,
that person refuses to take me before an arbitrator to prove his or her case
. What does that tell you? I know what it tells me. It tells me they can talk the talk, but they can’t walk the walk. It tells me who is real, and who was just posing.
The JFK Challenge
allows me to smoke out the phonies.

By the way, you should know that at the very beginning of this book, even before this book was written, I knew I was going to have a
JFK Challenge
. The amount I used in my mind was $5000 at risk. At each stage in the writing of the book, when I put a fact down, I asked myself “is there any evidence out there that
should be
included that someone is going to claim should be included for this point?” I did this over and over and over, multiple times a day.

That is why, when you read this book, you’re going to find every fact footnoted, and all the evidence in the case before your eyes in the form of screen captures. You will be able to check everything that I’ve said against the public record. This is how you are going to know that I did not distort information. Someone defending Oswald must have absolute integrity, and this is the check I placed against myself to ensure the integrity of the information I presented.

So, if you wanted to know why this book is different, you just read three very good reasons.

Other Ways This Book Is Different

Apart from these three points, there are other reasons this book is different: