Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (7 page)

And yet, like the mythological Hydra, the “innocent explanations” you get just lead to even more
Alfalfa
queries:

• You mean, in the murder of the century, we do not have an original photographic record of the crime scene!!??
  
• You say this innocent explanation is true, but how are we to know that?
  
• Why did the Dallas Police Department feel it was necessary to photograph the boxes in different positions after they had been dusted and moved around?
  
• How does this comport with crime scene protocol at the time?
  
• Why wasn't the photograph taken
  before
  the fingerprinting was done?
  
• Is there another, more sinister explanation that the innocent explanation hides?
  

And if you happen to get more innocent explanations in reply, if you're lucky enough to get a reply, you are just going to have to go back to the well again to dredge up more questions. Instantly you can see that this is no ordinary case!

But this is only the beginning, trust me. There will be seemingly no end to the eye-popping question-inspiring multiple descriptions of reality in the historical record we will have to choose from, as we will continually be confronted with gaps between the representations of reality and the reality represented (that’s a fancy way of saying
we are being lied to
).

But
who
is doing the lying? It’s that old
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
conundrum: is your best friend a
person
or a
pod
? There’s no choice in the matter, we have to decide.

Consider these competing versions of the so-called single-bullet path (the image on the left is from Jim Marrs’
Crossfire
. The image on the right is from page 189 of the second volume of the House Select Committee On Assassinations
Appendix
, which will be cited as 2 HSCA 189, JFK Exhibit F-145):

Zig-zag vs. straight-line. Both of these views can’t be correct, of course.

Now, your first inclination, when you see these two drawings, is to attempt to determine their respective legitimacy by asking yourself which of the two (purporting to describe reality) conforms to your prior knowledge. Of course, we all are familiar with the laws of physics, at least intuitively. We know that bullets that travel in a straight line on a downward path don’t immediately shoot upward, and then, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second later, immediately reverse course. From the laws of physics perspective, you can completely rule out the drawing on the left, which illustrates not the
laws
, but the
loss
of physics. That leaves you with the drawing on the right, which, of these two, is the
only
possible one which could be true.

But the question now is,
which of these drawings best describes the state of the evidence gathered by the Warren Commission?
If the answer is the drawing on the left, then you can instantly see that the
evidence
the Warren Commission claims to be legitimate cannot possibly be true, or the
conclusion
derived from that evidence cannot possibly be true — or both.

As it turns out (and as you will find out), the evidence gathered supports
neither
of these images, which leads us right back to square one: if we were going to draw a picture of the reality (if indeed it was reality) of the single-bullet path based on the best evidence, what would it look like?

This question has very deep ramifications, and leads to other questions: What is the data we need to draw this picture? Do we need
more
data? Or should we simply analyze the data we have and draw the conclusions which most naturally flow? And if we should just analyze the data we have, whose
version
of the data is dispositive?

As you might expect, there are multiple versions of what “the data” is. According to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (writing in the book
Reclaiming History
)
,
the data partially consists of five reasons that one should have more faith in the image on the right we previously saw (and that therefore one should ignore the obvious evidence in the Zapruder film which on its face indicates that that image is flawed in what may be more ways than one). Bugliosi’s dataset is as follows (
Reclaiming History
pp. 458-64 [hereinafter to be cited as RH 458-64]):

• The alignment of Kennedy and Connally’s bodies to each other at the time the shot was fired is consistent with the single-bullet theory.
  
• No physical evidence supports a second gunman.
  
• The entrance wound in Governor Connally’s back was not circular, but oval.
  
• The bullet alleged to have traversed the bodies of both Kennedy and Connally, Warren Commission Exhibit 399, was fired from Oswald’s rifle.
  
• No separate bullet was available to hit Connally.
  

The validity of the foregoing statements, obviously, will be discussed extensively later on in this book. However, one might argue provisionally that this is molehill data on which to base such a mountainous conclusion, particularly since the conclusions inherent in the statements are not necessarily consistent with the evidence. Yet note the Mount Everest conclusion Bugliosi tells us emerges from this molehill data (RH 464-65; emphasis supplied):

Each of the above five reasons, alone and by themselves, proves the single-bullet theory independent of the Zapruder film. (I would defy any conspiracy theorist to
come up with even one — much less five — logical arguments that are independent of the Zapruder film and support the proposition that Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets.
) All five of these reasons, when taken together, prove the proposition that Connally was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy not just beyond all reasonable doubt, but
beyond all possible doubt
. Therefore, the film itself cannot, by definition, show something else. As I said earlier, any interpretation of the film that contravenes the single-bullet theory either must be a misinterpretation by the person analyzing the film, or
is explainable in some other way
.

Quite a compelling proclamation, even from a prosecutor who gives numerous indications in this paragraph that he never met a hyperbole he didn’t like. Unfortunately for Bugliosi’s overly-optimistic summary, there actually is another way to describe the single-bullet theory which on its face trumps Bugliosi’s five reasons, a description which encompasses far more of the physical evidence unearthed (as will be seen, Bugliosi’s summary suffers from an invisible
factectomy
). George Evica takes on Bugliosi’s challenge to come up with more than one logical argument to support the proposition that Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets, in his brilliant
reductio ad absurdum
of the Single-Bullet Theory (
And We Are All Mortal
, p. ix):

Though such a theory was not necessary to the Commission’s case (except that in its absence conspiracy was certain), the
Report
argued it
could
have happened. A single-bullet could have caused Kennedy’s back of the neck wound (somehow moved up six inches from its observed location), continued through his neck (at a rather acute angle to the horizontal plane of the limousine despite the fact the round was allegedly fired from a sixth-floor window at an original angle of about 45 degrees) and, striking no bones, exited from the front of the neck through what
had
been an entry wound, turned down, leaving particles of lead throughout Kennedy’s neck, but keeping its copper alloy jacket intact, and, losing no weight, either paused for 1.3 seconds before striking Connally or so lightly and swiftly struck him that he did not respond for 1.3 seconds, then plunged through the thorax of the Governor, shattering a rib, yet losing no weight and, with its copper alloy jacket still intact, its diabolical velocity still undiminished and possessing an uncanny direction-changing ability, exited through a gaping wound in the Governor’s chest, turned right, smashing through the Governor’s right wrist and breaking one of the hardest bones in the human body, leaving lead particles behind, yet losing no weight, its copper alloy jacket still intact, exited the wrist, turned down and left, and imbedded itself in the femur bone of the Governor’s left thigh, where, exhausted, it would drop
up
and out, its copper alloy jacket still intact
and
without weight loss, leaving lead fragments in the Governor’s thigh, but with
one last great effort
, tucking itself under the mattress of a stretcher used in the emergency
red blanket
treatment of a small black boy at Parkland Memorial Hospital, from which, helpfully, it would heave itself out when it was needed as evidence.

Uh . . . . what? Something is very wrong here . . . Vincent Bugliosi is a well-respected prosecutor. How can his conclusion that the single-bullet theory has been proven “beyond all possible doubt” (based on his five reasons)
possibly
be reconciled with the previous paragraph?!

At this point, as the Immortal Bard could have told us, you may be sensing something rotten in the state of the Union. Psychiatrist Dr. Martin Schotz, in a speech entitled “The Waters of Knowledge versus The Waters of Uncertainty,” delivered on November 20, 1998 to the
National Conference of the Coalition on Political Assassinations
(COPA), smelled a rat, and began to follow the thread:

Over and over again we hear people asking for more and more information from the government. I suggest to you that the problem is not that we have insufficient data. The problem is that we dare not analyze the data we have had all along. In fact we need very little data. Honestly, as far as I’m concerned you can throw almost the whole 26 volumes of the Warren Commission in the trash can. All you need to do is look at this . . .

And then Schotz contrasted two images related to the aforementioned single-bullet theory, the first an illustration produced under the supervision of autopsy doctors for the Warren Commission, and the second a photograph of President Kennedy’s jacket produced by the FBI, both said to show the entry point of a bullet shot from the
rear
of the President:

Note that the
illustration
on the left shows the bullet entry wound at or
above
the collar; the
photograph
on the right reveals that the bullet entry wound actually entered over 5 inches
below
the collar, and that the neck “exit wound” in the left illustration therefore had to have been not only a
separate
wound, but
also
a wound of
entry
, indicating a separate shot from the
front
. . . where Oswald was
not
. So much for the single-bullet theory, and so much for the idea of Oswald as the “lone assassin,” two hypotheses elegantly destroyed with a mere two images.

But there is more to the tale than that. Schotz tells us where the thread is heading:
4

On the left is the Warren Commission drawing of the path of the “magic” bullet. To the right is a photograph of the hole in the President’s jacket. Now what does this tell us? It tells us without a shadow of a doubt that the President’s throat wound was an entry wound, and that there was a conspiracy without any question. But it tells us much more. It tells us that the Warren Commission knew that the conspiracy was obvious and that the Commission was engaged in a criminal conspiracy after the fact to obstruct justice. The Chief Justice of the United States was a criminal accessory to the murder of the President. Senator Arlen Specter is a criminal accessory to murder.
The Warren Report was not a mistake; it was and is an obvious act of criminal fraud.

Think of this for a moment. The Warren Report is an obvious criminal act of fraud and no history department in any college or university is willing to say so. What does such silence mean?