FOR those still content to believe the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this very day, perhaps you'd like to consider this list of people:
Jack Zangretti, Eddy Benavides, Mary Meyer, Hank Killam, Bill Hunter, Gary Underhill, Jim Koethe, Teresa Norton, Karen Carlin, Marilyn Walle, William Pitzer, David Ferrie, Eladio Del Valle, E. R. Walthers, Rev. Clyde Johnson, William Pawley, George DeMohrenschildt, Carlos Prio Soccaras, Lou Staples, Joseph C. Ayres.
All of the individuals identified above had connections to the vast story of President Kennedy's murder, some with bigger roles than others.
Of those 20 people named, all met their deaths violently: Seventeen of them received fatal gunshot injuries, two died from blows to the neck while one had his throat cut.
This list, incidentally, doesn't include people such as Lee Bowers Jr, William Whaley, Rose Cheramie, James Worrell or Mona B. Saenz, all of whom died in unusual road accidents.
And not forgetting famed American journalist and TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen who was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby - the man who shot Oswald - when he was in his jail cell in the spring of 1964 and began her own meticulous research into the President's death. Kilgallen, a regular panellist on the celebrated CBS TV game show What's My Line? for 15 years from 1950, was found dead in her New York apartment in November, 1965, not long after she had told friends: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to break this case. This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them." Kilgallen's death was said to have been caused by a cocktail of pills and alcohol although the exact circumstances were "undetermined".
But hey-ho, never mind. It was Oswald alone, don't forget, and there is nothing else sinister linked with this case whatsoever. Nothing. That's what we've all been told to believe, haven't we?
Friday 22 November 2013
Tuesday 19 November 2013
The Real Nightmare On Elm Street
I THINK I must have been in my very early teens or perhaps in my last year in junior school when I happened one day to be thumbing through an encyclopedia detailing famous historical events.
My eyes were drawn to a monochrome photograph, slightly blurred, of a car with a number of people around it. The caption underneath the picture explained what was going on - American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Little did I realise that more than three decades after I first saw this image I would count researching the conspiracy behind the brutal public execution of America's 35th Commander-in-Chief as among my greatest and most important passions.
Let me be frank from the outset. For those of you willing to go along with the official account of what happened that dreadful autumn afternoon, you need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Maybe it's for the easy life; maybe it's because you don't like difficult questions; or maybe it's because where the truth goes on this one it's to a far darker place than you could ever imagine - or really want to go to.
But for those still happy to go along with the official story that a lone, disillusioned man with Marxist sympathies fired three shots from a $13 bolt-action rifle with a defective telescopic sight from a sixth floor window at a moving target from 88 yards through thick foliage causing fatal injuries to one occupant of the limousine and serious wounds to another (with the same almost pristine bullet) while somehow reversing the law of physics by getting the mortally-wounded man to move backwards following a projectile that hit him from behind travelling thousands of feet per second, I've some bad news I want to relate to you - Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist. But if you buy into the findings of the 1964 Warren Commission, you may as well believe in Father Christmas and the elfish flying creature who leaves a shiny coin under your pillow whenever you lose one of your gnashers.
It was the writer William Manchester who really kick-started my intense interest in the assassination of President John Kennedy. The year was 1988 and I can still remember getting his famous book out of the library at St Katherine's College in Liverpool where I was in the second of my three years reading History and American Studies for a BA Honours Degree.
Manchester's 1967 tome, The Death Of A President, opened my eyes to an incredibly-hypnotic story, and from that moment on - at that point exactly 25 years since Kennedy's murder - my interest was sparked to find out through as much research as I could just what really happened in those fateful few seconds one November lunchtime on an ordinary downtown street in the third-biggest city in the second-largest State in the Union.
I am not what some might call an 'Assassination Buff' - the sort of person who has devoted more hours of their lives than they care to mention on the subject. Far from it. But I do have more than a passing interest and have read many articles and books and witnessed a good number of programmes, films and documentaries - and, as any good journalist should do, I have listened to both sides of the case.
And, really, there are only two arguments: (1) Lee Harvey Oswald did the whole thing alone and it's case closed or (2) Lee Harvey Oswald did not and it's case still open.
Those are your two choices - it really is as simple as that.
There are countless side issues I could write about on this truly incredible story - and I have no doubt I will on a forthcoming blog. But for now, I'll leave you with these two facts to ponder over as the world prepares to mark half a century since President Kennedy's murder:
If Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin as the Warren Commission ruled beyond reasonable doubt - and we should be content in the knowledge that this is indeed true - why on earth in November 2013 - 50 years later - are some 1,171 documents still withheld by the Central Intelligence Agency and marked "national security classified" in relation to the President's death?
And, why is it that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations which met in the late 1970s will not be opened for another 16 years?
Somewhat strange, wouldn't you say, given it's "officially" an open and shut case?
My eyes were drawn to a monochrome photograph, slightly blurred, of a car with a number of people around it. The caption underneath the picture explained what was going on - American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Little did I realise that more than three decades after I first saw this image I would count researching the conspiracy behind the brutal public execution of America's 35th Commander-in-Chief as among my greatest and most important passions.
Let me be frank from the outset. For those of you willing to go along with the official account of what happened that dreadful autumn afternoon, you need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Maybe it's for the easy life; maybe it's because you don't like difficult questions; or maybe it's because where the truth goes on this one it's to a far darker place than you could ever imagine - or really want to go to.
But for those still happy to go along with the official story that a lone, disillusioned man with Marxist sympathies fired three shots from a $13 bolt-action rifle with a defective telescopic sight from a sixth floor window at a moving target from 88 yards through thick foliage causing fatal injuries to one occupant of the limousine and serious wounds to another (with the same almost pristine bullet) while somehow reversing the law of physics by getting the mortally-wounded man to move backwards following a projectile that hit him from behind travelling thousands of feet per second, I've some bad news I want to relate to you - Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist. But if you buy into the findings of the 1964 Warren Commission, you may as well believe in Father Christmas and the elfish flying creature who leaves a shiny coin under your pillow whenever you lose one of your gnashers.
It was the writer William Manchester who really kick-started my intense interest in the assassination of President John Kennedy. The year was 1988 and I can still remember getting his famous book out of the library at St Katherine's College in Liverpool where I was in the second of my three years reading History and American Studies for a BA Honours Degree.
Manchester's 1967 tome, The Death Of A President, opened my eyes to an incredibly-hypnotic story, and from that moment on - at that point exactly 25 years since Kennedy's murder - my interest was sparked to find out through as much research as I could just what really happened in those fateful few seconds one November lunchtime on an ordinary downtown street in the third-biggest city in the second-largest State in the Union.
I am not what some might call an 'Assassination Buff' - the sort of person who has devoted more hours of their lives than they care to mention on the subject. Far from it. But I do have more than a passing interest and have read many articles and books and witnessed a good number of programmes, films and documentaries - and, as any good journalist should do, I have listened to both sides of the case.
And, really, there are only two arguments: (1) Lee Harvey Oswald did the whole thing alone and it's case closed or (2) Lee Harvey Oswald did not and it's case still open.
Those are your two choices - it really is as simple as that.
There are countless side issues I could write about on this truly incredible story - and I have no doubt I will on a forthcoming blog. But for now, I'll leave you with these two facts to ponder over as the world prepares to mark half a century since President Kennedy's murder:
If Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin as the Warren Commission ruled beyond reasonable doubt - and we should be content in the knowledge that this is indeed true - why on earth in November 2013 - 50 years later - are some 1,171 documents still withheld by the Central Intelligence Agency and marked "national security classified" in relation to the President's death?
And, why is it that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations which met in the late 1970s will not be opened for another 16 years?
Somewhat strange, wouldn't you say, given it's "officially" an open and shut case?
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