JFK Assassination – Read The Alternative Links At The End

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by gunfire as he traveled in a motorcade in an open-top limousine in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, November 22, 1963 (12:30 pm, CST); Texas Governor John Connally was wounded during the shooting, but survived. Within two hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and arraigned that evening.

Shortly after 1:30 am, Saturday, Oswald was arraigned for murdering President Kennedy as well. On Sunday, November 24, at 11:21 am, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail.

Immediately after the shooting, many people suspected that the assassination was part of a larger plot. Ruby’s shooting of Oswald compounded initial suspicions. Among conspiracy theorists, Mark Lane has been described as writing “the first literary shot” with his article, “Defense Brief for Oswald,” in the December 19, 1963, edition of the National Guardian. Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy?, published in May 1964, has been credited as the first book alleging a conspiracy.

In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and that no credible evidence supported the contention that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president.

The Commission also indicated that Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State; Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense; C. Douglas Dillon, the Secretary of the Treasury; Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General; J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI; John A. McCone, the Director of the CIA; and James J. Rowley, the Chief of the Secret Service, each independently reached the same conclusion on the basis of information available to them.

JIM GARRISON – ZAPRUDER FILM

However, during the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison challenged the single bullet theory with evidence from the Zapruder film which he claimed indicated that a fourth shot from the grassy knoll was responsible for Kennedy’s fatal head wound.

In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but concluded that the Commission’s report and the original FBI investigation were seriously flawed.

The HSCA concluded that at least four shots were fired with a “high probability” that two gunmen fired at the President, and that a conspiracy was probable. The HSCA stated that “the Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.”

According to author John McAdams: “The greatest and grandest of all conspiracy theories is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.” Others have frequently referred to it as “the mother of all conspiracies”.

The number of books written about the assassination of Kennedy has been estimated to be in the range of 1,000 to 2,000. According to Vincent Bugliosi, 95% of those books are “pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission”.

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PUBLIC OPINION

Public opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. However, on the question of a government cover-up, different polls show both a minority and majority of Americans who believe the government engaged in one.

These same polls also show that there is no agreement on who else may have been involved. A 2003 Gallup poll reported that 75% of Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

That same year an ABC News poll found that 70% of respondents suspected that the assassination involved more than one person. A 2004 Fox News poll found that 66% of Americans thought there had been a conspiracy while 74% thought there had been a cover-up.

As recently as 2009, some 76% of people polled for CBS News said they believed the President had been killed as the result of a conspiracy. A Gallup poll released in 2013 found that 61% of Americans, the lowest figure in nearly 50 years, believed others beside Oswald were involved.

These include problems with bullet trajectories, the murder weapon, the ammunition used, inconsistencies between the Warren Commission’s account and the autopsy findings, inconsistencies between the autopsy findings and what was reported by witnesses at the scene of the murder, eyewitness accounts that conflict with x-rays taken of the President’s body, indications that the diagrams and photos of the President’s brain in the National Archives are not the President’s.

Also, testimony by those who took and processed the autopsy photos that the photos were altered, created, or destroyed, indications that the Zapruder film had been tampered with, allegations that the Warren Commission’s version of events conflicts with news reports from the scene of the murder, an alleged change to the motorcade route which facilitated the assassination,

WITNESS DEATHS

Allegations of mysterious or suspicious deaths of witnesses connected with the Kennedy assassination originated with Penn Jones, Jr., and were brought to national attention by the 1973 film Executive Action. Jim Marrs later presented a list of 103 people he believed died “convenient deaths” under suspicious circumstances.

He noted that the deaths were grouped around investigations conducted by the Warren Commission, New Orleans D.A. Vincent Bugliosi described the death of journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who said she was granted a private interview with Jack Ruby, as “perhaps the most prominent mysterious death” cited by assassination researchers.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated another alleged “mysterious death”, that of Rose Cheramie. The Committee reported that Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Francis Fruge traveled to Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963—two days before the assassination, to pick up Cheramie, who had sustained minor injuries when she was hit by a car.

Some assassination researchers assert that witness statements indicating a conspiracy were ignored by the Warren Commission. In 1967, Josiah Thompson stated that the Commission ignored the testimony of seven witnesses who saw gunsmoke in the area of the stockade fence on the grassy knoll, as well as an eighth witness who smelled gunpowder at the time of the assassination.

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SUPPRESION OF EVIDENCE

Other researchers reported that witnesses who captured the assassination in photographs or on film had their cameras and/or film confiscated by police or other authorities. Author Jim Marrs and documentary producer Nigel Turner presented the account of Gordon Arnold who said that his film of the motorcade was taken by two policemen shortly after the assassination.

Richard Buyer and others have complained that many documents pertaining to the assassination have been withheld over the years, including documents from the Warren Commission investigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation, and the Church Committee investigation. These documents at one time included the President’s autopsy records.

The existence of large numbers of secret documents related to the assassination, and the long period of secrecy, suggests to some the possibility of a cover-up. One historian noted, “There exists widespread suspicion about the government’s disposition of the Kennedy assassination records stemming from the beliefs that Federal officials (1) have not made available all Government assassination records (even to the Warren Commission, Church Committee, House Assassination Committee) and (2) have heavily redacted the records released under FOIA in order to cover up sinister conspiracies.”

TAMPERING OF EVIDENCE

According to the Assassination Records Review Board, “All Warren Commission records, except those records that contain tax return information, are (now) available to the public with only minor redactions.”

Some researchers have alleged that various items of physical evidence have been tampered with, including: the “single bullet”, also known as the “magic bullet” by critics of the official explanations; various bullet cartridges and fragments; the limousine’s windshield; the paper bag in which the Warren Commission said Oswald hid the rifle; the so-called “backyard”

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CARCANO RIFLE

Among the evidence against Oswald are the photographs of Oswald posing in his backyard with a Carcano rifle, the weapon identified by the Warren Commission as the assassination weapon. Some researchers, including Robert Groden, assert that these photos are fake.

However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the photographs of Oswald are genuine and Oswald’s wife, Marina, says that she took them.

In 1979 after the HSCA had disbanded, Groden said that four autopsy photographs showing the back of Kennedy’s head were forged in order to hide a wound created by the bullet of a second gunman.

According to Groden, a photograph of a cadaver’s head was inserted over another depicting a large exit wound in the back of Kennedy’s head.G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, replied to the allegations stating the “suggestion that the committee would participate in a coverup is absurd”.

ZAPRUDER FILM

The House Select Committee on Assassinations described the Zapruder film as “the best available photographic evidence of the number and timing of the shots that struck the occupants of the presidential limousine.” The Assassination Records Review Board said it “is perhaps the single most important assassination record.”

According to Vincent Bugliosi, the film was “originally touted by the vast majority of conspiracy theorists as incontrovertible proof of [a] conspiracy” but is now believed by many assassination researchers to be a

The Warren Commission determined that three bullets were fired at Kennedy. One of the three bullets missed the vehicle entirely; another bullet hit Kennedy, passed through his body and then struck Governor John Connally; and the third bullet was the fatal head shot to the President.

Some claim that the bullet that passed through President Kennedy’s body before striking Governor Connally—dubbed by critics of the Commission as the “magic bullet”—was missing too little mass to account for the total weight of bullet fragments later found by