Posted on 11/30/2003 10:28:12 PM PST by whammerjammer
Running down a footnote to assassination
By Colleen Cason November 23, 2003
In the one day and four decades since President Kennedy died in Dallas, we Americans have been served a cafeteria of conspiracy theories.
Almost nothing is too tough for some to swallow. They take heaping helpings of the Mafia and CIA, garnish with an evil cabal of Texas businessmen and sprinkle on LBJ and Castro.
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A recent ABC News poll indicates 70 percent of Americans believe JKF's assassination was a plot.
Only 22 percent accept the official finding that Lee Oswald acted alone.
Most Americans favor conspiracy scenarios even without knowledge of the oracle of Oxnard -- the mysterious whispering woman who predicted Kennedy's death 20 minutes before shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.
This tantalizing tidbit ran in the former Star-Free Press the day after the assassination. The Los Angeles Times and Associated Press carried similar accounts.
According to the unbylined story in The Star, a call came into the old General Telephone office on C Street in Oxnard at 10:05 a.m. Pacific Standard Time Nov. 22.
Two supervisors manning the switchboard overheard a woman whisper: "The president will be killed at 10:10."
Moments later the woman reportedly revised her statement, saying softly "It won't be 10 after 10; it will be 10:30."
The operators dismissed it as a prank -- until news reached them that the president indeed had been shot around 10:30 California time
(Excerpt) Read more at venturacountystar.com ...
Only if they contain an antidote to the damned tryptophan. If not, there's no positive side to it; one miserable cookie will result in a weight gain of ten pounds. Damn that "Magic Cookie Theory"! < grin >
Almost thirty years later, a sometime Texas gun dealer fearing a frameup by the BATF collected as much information on the activities of those agents that day, including their names and present status, particularly BATF Agent Frank Ellsworth, who claimed to have *helped find" the Carcano rifle in the schoolbook building, though not where the official rep. His name was David Koresh.
Former AFT agent Frank Ellsworth, who participated in a second search of the book depository conducted after 1:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, according to a Secret Service document, confirms that the Mannlicher-Carcano was found by a DPD detective on the fourth or fifth floor of the building, "not on the same floor as the cartridges." He adds: "I remember we talked about it, and figured that he must have run out from the stairwell and dropped it as he was running downstairs."
You should have been where I was, where the local Cubans, most of whom had mourned brothers, uncles, fathers or sons in Castro's prisons or killed at the Bay of Pigs, celebrated the payment in blood they felt due from the bastardo who had betrayed their own as they were dying on the beach. Most of the Americans in that refinery town, where many of the workers from the CalTex/Texaco Santa Clara facility had been employed before Castro's takeover, found it hard to understand and accept the reaction of the Cubans, then experiencing the *shock and woe* you describe. But those of us who had been in Cuba understood.
-archy-/-
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, and disappointed to hear that you think I'd put such a substance into your cookies. Or that I'd use anything for which there was an antidote if I was so inclined.
And I'll have you know that the tetraethyl lead, [Pb(CH2CH3)4] was in the cookies strictly as flavour enhancer and preservative....
-archy-/-
What are the odds someone would have looked at the exact spot of someone firing from behind a fence a couple of hundred feet away with lots of leaves from the trees obscuring the view at the exact moment of the shots and not looking at the motorcade just as the President was passing by?
What's your source for that? How many were standing in front of the knoll?
You're not getting the full face, the right side is partially blocked by grain on the window. But the eyes of the face are clear, and Oswald's left eye (right as we're looking at it) sloped downward in all the pictures I've seen of him, exactly as it does in this one. The mouth features look the same as well.
It's him, at least it strongly appears to be him, and few have disputed, even those who dismiss Oswald as a shooter there is a face in the window.
Here's a bigger blowup of it, I changed the dimensions on the previous one to make it smaller.
Seriously (more or less), ever seen the following picture?
The arrow indicates the "dent" in the limousine's windshield top chrome molding. The angle of the photograph makes it tough to tell for sure, but it looks like a missed shot from the front penetrated there, bending the metal out and to the rear. That's the maddening thing about this topic; the actual evidence is either missing, destroyed, sealed away or obfuscated. The questions are never answered, and likely never will be.
Wherever you got your information from it's erroneous. From the House Assassination committee report:
The statements of 178 persons who were in Dealey Plaza, all of whom were available to the Warren Commission, were analyzed: 49 (27.5 percent) believed the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository; 21 (11.8 percent) believed the shots had come from the grassy knoll; 30 (16.9 percent.) believed the shots had originated elsewhere; and 78 (43.8 percent) were unable to tell which direction the shots were fired from. Only four individuals believed shots had originated from more than one location. Some comment on these statistics is called for. The committee noted that a significant number of witnesses reported that shots originated from the grassy knoll. The small number of those who thought shots originated from both the book depository and grassy knoll might be explained by the fact that the third and fourth shots were only seventenths of a second apart. Such a brief interval might have made it difficult for witnesses to differentiate between the two shots, or to distinguish their direction. While recognizing the substantial number of people who reported shots originating from the knoll, the committee also believed the process of collecting witness testimony was such that it would be unwise to place substantial reliance upon it. The witnesses were interviewed over a substantial period of time, some of them several days, even weeks, after the assassination. By that time, numerous accounts of the number and direction of the shots had been published. The committee believed that the witnesses' memories and testimony on the number, direction, and timing of the shots may have been substantially influenced by the intervening publicity concerning the events of November 22, 1963.
An analysis by the committee of the statements of witnesses in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, moreover, showed that about 44 percent were not able to form an opinion about-the origin of the shots, attesting to the ambiguity showed in the August 1978 experiment. Seventy percent of the witnesses in 1963 who had an opinion as to origin said it was either the book depository or the grassy knoll. Those witnesses who thought the shots originated from the grassy knoll represented 30 percent of those who chose between the knoll and the book depository and 21 percent of those who made a decision as to origin. Since most of the shots fired on November 22, 1963 (three out of four, the committee determined) came from the book depository, the fact that so many witnesses thought they heard shots from the knoll lent additional weight to a conclusion that a shot came from there.
The interviews of witnesses to the assassination may have reflected a tendency to make a "forced choice" between the two locations caused by the actions of police and other spectators in Dealey Plaza indicating the knoll and the depository were the two shooter locations, an attitude that was substantiated by press reports of shooter locations that, in some instances, preceded interviews with witnesses.
The committee, therefore, concluded that the testimony of witnesses in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 supported the finding of the acoustical analysis that there was a high probability that a shot was fired at the President from the grassy knoll. There were also witness reports of suspicious activity in the vicinity of the knoll.
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