JFK shot himself in order to prevent a time paradox.
Everybody knows that by now.
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Recently in another thread @dfaris recommended Kurt Anderson’s book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. Thanks to his recommendation I’m largely through the book; it is a cracking read. Among the many things Anderson discusses is the evolution of America’s obsession with conspiracies. He argues that while these sort of conspiracy theories are relatively recent, they are connected to other fake reality tendencies that have been part of the fabric of our society since the early settlers.
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or did he do it to piss off Joey…
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Surely most assassinations are indeed conspiracies?
There is a tendency to dismiss almost anything as a “conspiracy theory”. Well, the fact is, conspiracies happen all the time. Any crime that involves more than one person and any planning is a conspiracy. Most business meetings? Conspiracies. Seriously.
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Gotta push back on this, because with the RFK assasination you either believe the evidence of point-blank powder burns reported by then-LA Country Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi (who has publicly expressed skepticism over Sirhan’s guilt all of his life but was never asked about this evidence at the trial) or you believe a weird fantasy that for one shining moment in 1968 the LAPD was not lazy and racist, but in fact totally and fairly prosecuted a case against a brown Palestinian man.
I am really sick of this lazy arm-chair psychoanalysis about conspiracy theorists craving an ordered world. You could easily make the case that amateur skeptics need to believe the system works, because to believe the level of establishment corruption that conspiracy theories typically imply would require that these people actually become politically active in their precious spare time.
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Yeah, at the very least the skeptics ought to admit that Sirhan’s trial was a botch.
Putting all three cases together, JFK, MLK and RFK, I’d say the evidence is only about 40% convincing in each. But that means that I’m nearly 80% convinced of a conspiracy, on the whole (i.e., 1 - (1 - .40)^3 = .784).
On the psychological point, I’d also argue that a conspiracy of this nature was possible to pull off in 1968, but would not be today. I feel that having this in mind helps me keep a check on potential bias, and the sort of creeping conspiratorial thinking that is admittedly common.
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It is possible for the LAPD to be lazy and racist while still identifying the correct perpetrator. For example, I believe O.J. Simpson was guilty even if racist clowns in the LAPD botched the investigation.
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Osama Bin Laden.
This is kinda how I feel about the Adnan Syed case. I tend to lean towards his innocence, but there’s absolutely room for him to be guilty and as well as be the victim of prosecutorial misconduct.
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Yes, conspiracies exist; especially in a legal/technical sense.
But another truth is that even momentous events (and their causes) are more often than not very, very banal.
Anyway, here is my favourite conspiracy, The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy:
I just don’t accept that dichotomy. The LAPD (or any other law enforcement agency) need not be competent or fair to believe that Sirhan killed RFK. Just like one need not be a fan of the Dallas or Memphis police department or the CIA or the FBI to recognize that it’s overwhelmingly likely that Oswald killed JFK alone, and that James Earl Ray killed MLK.
And to be clear, my doubt of many conspiracy theories is not based in a belief that “the system works.” Quite the opposite, actually, which is what I was getting at that the chaos of the real world is often far more frightening than the notion that things are controlled, indeed controllable.
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You can quibble with that rhetorical flourish (it was racially charged and meant as a provocation), but you honestly just don’t know enough about any of these three assassination cases to be worth debating.
How did James Earl Ray manage to pose as a Union Carbide executive warehouse operator with a Top Secret security clearance, while already a fugitive from July 1967 up to the MLK murder on April 4, 1968? How did a petty criminal get fake IDs for a man, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who looked remarkably like him and was part of the national security sector? [Here’s a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation piece on the Galt ID issue.]
Last summer the CIA finally revealed that the mayor of Dallas Earle Cabell was a paid CIA asset at the time of the JFK assassination. He had a 201 file and a secrecy agreement and everything. It’s the kind of thing that even conspiracy theorists would have laughed at a few years ago, but now it’s part of the historical record. [Here’s a McClatchy news item mentioning these declassified papers.]
I’m tapping out of this conversation, because it’s not worth it to me, and I regret engaging, but I do want to address the psychological issue one last time: getting to believe the “darker” hypothesis that it’s all unmanageable chaos is as much an appeal to (what I am arguing is) the fundamental lazy apathy of self-described skeptics as believing “the system works.” You may not give enough of a shit to have done the reading on these assassinations, but the people who do are not all kooks out there desperately craving the succor of easy answers. Enjoy the rest of your day.
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Hey, don’t do that. It’s possible for us to disagree without doing that.
I think that the conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK fall apart under their own weight and contradictions. Le’t take this fact that Earle Cabell was a “CIA asset.” That’s exactly the kind of comforting, top-down control that I think is less scary than the fact that a kook with a rifle could change the course of history.
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I’m gonna see if I can make this case clearly and politely relatively fast, so hopefully you’ll better appreciate where I am coming from.
I’m at the level of interest in this that approaching the subject from both the wider historical circumstances (like Mayor Earle Cabell’s personal connections or counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s KGB molehunt at the CIA) and the smaller, more granular details of the assassination itself all matter. I think we can both agree that historical circumstances matter and we can consign the question of “What’s ‘more scary’?” to the realm of pure opinion, where reasonable people can differ.
So let’s focus for now on the evidentiary case against the kook with a rifle:
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The neutron activation analysis on the Mannlicher Carcano bullet lead has been disproven in a peer-reviewed journal. You can read a Washington Post article about that research, which first appeared in the Annals of Applied Statistics in 2007. The paper’s authors were former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James. Today, comparative bullet lead analysis has been consigned to the dustbin of junk science and rarely ever sees the light of day in a courtroom. It’s one of the many areas in dire need of reform in criminal forensics (more on that from the Washington Post in 2017). This is one of the only things tying the rifle to the murder.
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Law enforcement reported finding Oswald’s wallet with the “Alek Hidell” alias in two separate, mutually contradictory locations. FBI agent Bob Barrett reported that he saw Oswald’s wallet in the hands of Dallas Police Department Captain Michael Westbrook at the scene of the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963. But the DPD’s arresting officer, Paul Bentley, reported that he found Oswald’s wallet while frisking Oswald in the police car after leaving the Texas Theatre where Oswald was apprehended later that day. Both Barrett and Bentley say that the wallet contained identification cards for both “Lee Harvey Oswald” and “Alek Hidell.” You can’t prove Oswald mail ordered the rifle without this ID, and the chain of custody for this piece of evidence is hopelessly, suspiciously fucked. The guy who figured this out, an SF-area civil rights attorney named Bill Simpich, is incredibly generous with his time and you can read what he’s written or email him yourself to your heart’s content.
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Sebastian F. Latona, the supervisor of the Latent Fingerprint Section of the FBI’s Identification Division, told the Warren Commission that the palm print and other evidence found on the rifle “were insufficient for purposes of either effecting identification or a determination that the print was not identical with the prints of people.” Latona told the commission that, in his opinion, “the latent prints which were there were of no value.” To believe the palm print evidence, you have to trust the DPD who have already botched the chain of custody with Oswald’s wallet (and although this is another rabbit hole, the “stretcher bullet” at Parkland Hospital).
What I am getting at is that the case would have fallen apart in any reasonable court trial. You have to bone up on a lot of parallel history like Bill Harvey’s career at CIA and the ZRRIFLE wet work program to actually have a sense of whether or not the conspiracy theories “fall apart under their own weight and contradictions.” I’m not getting the sense that you have really. This thread closes in less than 4 days, and your stance has mostly been arguing via Socratic dialogue rather than actually engaging with the material circumstances of these assassinations.
It’s funny to me that we so quickly pivoted to Dallas 1963 from Los Angeles 1968, but if you really want to keep pursuing any of these three historical episodes, I am easy to find on Twitter @CBMDP and you can slide into my DMs or whatever. (I can’t promise that I will be super prompt though! Life happens.)
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I think the three examples you point to are representative of what I’ve seen of the vast majority of conspiracy theories re: JFK, RFK, and MLK. Problems with chains of evidence, analytical processes, they all have holes in them because human beings are fallible as hell and literally everything we do will have gaps and holes and contradictions.
There are any number of coincidences and contradictions and questionable scientific processes in literally every aspect of our society. The moon landing, JFK, whatever large historical event you want to look at will have holes in the story that are caused by human error of one kind or another. People’s memories are terrible, sometimes they lie for one reason or another, all manner of things fog the record. It only seems nefarious if you look at things like these assassinations in a vacuum and pretend that things like this don’t happen in every other aspect of our world.
Out of curiosity, who do _you_think killed JFK, RFK, and MLK? It seems pretty clear that you don’t believe Oswald, Sirhan, or Ray did, so who do you believe actually did it?
I’ve often said the idea of a secret hand controlling everything is less scary than the random happenstance the world seems to work with…
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You’re really blowing my mind here, doctor. Human beings are fallible?
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That wasn’t a rhetorical question, by the way. I really do wonder who you think DID kill these people.
I (like) went so far as to pull books off the shelf for this, but am realizing I don’t have time in the next 24 hours. Short answers will sound too kooky, so we’ll just have to deal with this elsewhere, later. Also, it is very not hard to find out what I think about this stuff online somewhere probably. This sounds like a cop-out, I know, but I just got to live with that. TTYS, or TTYL, hopefully. (I am being sincere.)
