Oh, have they changed history where the magic bullet is concerned? Have the facts been successfully rearranged to fit the foredrawn conclusion?
No, that's what the conspiracy theorists do when they try to claim that the bullet found on the stretcher was "pristine", when it very certainly was *not*.
There was no "pristine" bullet. There was, however a significantly deformed bullet, consistent with passage through JFK's neck and Connally's chest/wrist.
Bullet on left is the so-called "pristine" bullet, bullet on right is an unfired round.
Note the crease on the nose, and the warping of the side (the lower portion as oriented in the picture) and the flattened surface directly facing the camera.
Here's a close-up of the tail end of the bullet:
Note how much the lead is deformed and cracked by the bullet's deformation.
Of course, I'm being facetious. But it's better to be facetious than misinformed.
So you won't misinform anyone by calling the bullet "pristine", I hope.
Don't blame Oliver Stone for this story. He was merely depicting history.
*snort*. Shall I list all the ways he distorted the known facts about the wounds, the positions of the people in the car, and the condition of the bullet?
The 'magic bullet' WAS (conveniently) found on a gurney at Parkland (at just the moment the conspirators needed it to be found because they could not otherwise account for all those extra gunshot wounds).
LOL! My favorite thing about conspiracy theorists is how they postulate all sorts of absurd things that seem "obvious" to them but make no sense otherwise.
Perhaps you could explain for us exactly how a bullet on a stretcher would suddenly "account" for the alleged "extra gunshot wounds"?
The really funny thing about this suggestion is that simultaeously you're suggesting a) more bullets were fired at the scene than currently believed, and b) *ADDING* another bullet to the evidence (on top of the bullets and fragments already on the scene due to the shooting(s) themselves) was somehow going to cause investigators to *reduce* their estimate of how many bullets were involved.
Go ahead, pull the other leg now.
Another problem with most of the JFK conspiracy tales is the exact same problem with the OJ Simpson conspiracy tales: It suggests that a large team of "evidence planters" was running all over the various crime scenes planting evidence BEFORE THEY HAD ANY WAY OF KNOWING what physical evidence or possible witnesses were going to turn up when the investigators did their jobs. In the OJ case, the allegations that officers were frantically planting OJ's blood evidence at the murder scene in the first hour or so to frame him are ludicrous given that as far as they knew, subsequent analysis of the "real" evidence might well turn up clear evidence of the real killer(s) -- in which case the evidence-forging officers would have one hell of a hard time explaining how OJ's blood got there, wouldn't they?
Likewise for the various JFK "evidence planting" screwball theories -- for example, for all they knew the bullet that struck Connally might have been in his body (he was still in surgery at the time the not-so-pristine bullet was discovered). How stupid would the conspirators have to be to plant an *extra* bullet in order to "sidetrack" the investigation when the *actual* bullet might turn up at any moment (and if it did, the "planted" bullet would *prove* conspiracy, not turn people away from that theory). For that matter, where *did* the "real" bullet go if the bullet at the hospital was "planeted"? Conspiracy theorists never seem to want to answer that one.
And more outrageous than (but just as true as) that, that miraculous bullet was not discovered at Parkland until AFTER Kennedy's body was already in Washington.
Is it too much to ask that conspiracy theorists get even their basic facts straight? Yes, I suppose it is.
1. JFK was shot at 12:30.
2. The not-so-pristine bullet was found within 90 minutes of the assassination itself (i.e., at or before 2:00 pm.
3. Jacqueiline Kennedy, four Secret Service agents, and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh left the hospital in an ambulance with JFK's body, heading for the airport at 2:04.
4. JFK's body was loaded onto the plane at 2:18.
5. The plane lifted off at 2:47.
6. The plane carrying JFK's body touched down at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington at 5:58pm Eastern time (4:48 pm Dallas time).
I guess I don't have the sort of piercing intelligence it takes to be a conspiracy theorist, because I don't see how "on or before 2pm" is somehow "AFTER" 4:48pm.
Or even 2:04pm -- not only was the bullet not found "AFTER Kennedy's body was already in Washington", it was found while JFK's body was still in the freaking Dallas hospital.
But while you're giving your explanations for your amazing claims, perhaps you can also explain how it makes any bloody difference, conspiracy-wise, whether the bullet was found before or after JFK's body was in any particular place.
Read up on the circumstances that FOLLOWED the assassination and you will see why so many of us continue to scream conspiracy.
Um, because you make things up as you go along, or rely on the writings of people who do?
If you investigate the subject a little deeper, and if you care about the truth, I think you might come to the same conclusion.
Been there, done that, have very much *NOT* come to have any greater faith in the theories, reliability, or mental faculties of the conspiracy theorists. Quite the contrary, in fact.
After years of following this stuff and researching it, I have in fact come to the conclusion that if a conspiracy theorist says that grass is green, it's quite likely that it was instead blue. They can't even get the easy stuff right (e.g. is 2pm before or after 4:48p?), much less the more complicated aspects of the issue.
You might start with "Best Evidence" by James Lifton. That is, if you are really interested in what really happened.
ROFL! Ooookay....
This is, of course, the same book in which Mr. Lifton puts forth his theory that "the President's body was inside the Dallas casket when it was put aboard Air Force One at 2:18, but it was no longer inside the casket at 2:47, as the plane rolled down the runway."
Yes, that's right, Lifton postulates an elaborate shell game involving rapid exchanges of coffins, a decoy ambulance, and a switched body shroud. He contends that once the body was stolen from under the noses of Jackie Kennedy and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh (who, as official escort of the dead President, never left the coffin unless Jackie was with it), a covert team of surgeons surgically altered the corpse to "fake" evidence of rearward bullet entry, then managed to swap it back (um, *when*?) for the decoy casket before the autopsy a few hours later at Bethesda, which took place immediately upon arrival. This despite the fact that the casket was never left unattended at any point.
In other words, Lifton is insane.
He doesn't want to face the actual medical evidence, so he comes up with a paranoid and ridiculous massive conspiracy which shows how the medical evidence was "faked". Uh huh...
He bases this ludicrous nutball fantasy on minor nitpicks like statements from bit players at Bethesda (orderlies, etc.) which can be read to indicate that JFK's body arrived in a body bag instead of wrapped in sheets (actually, the coffin was plastic-lined) and in a different coffin (yes, that's right, the conspirators managed to swap/steal the original coffin for an identical decoy in an operation beyond the abilites of the Impossible Mission team, yet they somehow were stupid enough to accidentally put the altered body back into the *wrong* coffin before they swapped it back without any of the hundreds of people at Bethesda noticing...)
At the same time, he ignores clear and compelling evidence that JFK's coffin was attended and watched over every moment during its travels, establishing a clear "chain of evidence" for the body, as well as various statements and evidence clearly invalidating his scenario.
In short, it's par for the course for the conspiracy whackos -- build mountains from molehills, then pretend the actual mountain of contrary evidence doesn't even exist. (Or invent elaborate conspiracies to explain how the real evidence is actually only "faked" evidence.)
"Lifton gets away with crap, and no one challenges him. I could assemble a whole team of the best surgeons in the country and still not be able to accomplish in a day what Lifton says was done in a few hours."
-- Forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, one of the most vocal medical critics of the Warren Commission"In 1967, Lifton had a theory of fake trees, that a construction company put in fake scenery and so forth in Dealey Plaza, and then after the shooting, it was removed. He thought it helped the assassins get close for the shooting and also confused the people... Lifton is a beast... [does] gross plundering. It's almost as though he is a religious convert, and he is proselytizing for a false religion"
-- Historian and assassination researcher Professor David Wrone"Lifton is just bizarre... On a scale of one to ten, his theory is a zero."
-- Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the House Select Committee
"[We] rejected it as illogical, even absurd. [...] preposterous notion [...] at best, the book is a monument to one man's ingenuity. At worst, it is an appalling hoax."
-- Richard Billings, editorial director of the House Select Committee