Now, it is not a routine thing for a head of state to get assassinated, more so when it comes to the US of A. So you would think that this event would have created frenzy in the whole country. But surprisingly it was not true. The storm had calmed down even before it had begun. Call it the efficiency or inefficiency shown by Dallas Police Department (DPD) and the Federal agents who were able to nail down the assassin not through any kind of significant trail or leads, but only on suspicion, an hour after the assassination. The same department also managed to lose the sole thread of the whole case when an apparently infuriated JFK fan called Jack Ruby shot L. H. Oswald point blank inside the DPD headquarters, two days after the assassination, while he was being taken to a preliminary hearing at the Dallas Court. The case had ended even before it had begun. How convenient…how bloody convenient!!!And this was the official version of the story. Now let’s have a look at it from other angle, an angle proposed by Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney (DA) as a result of his investigation that he started in 1966. This investigation resulted into the filing of the only case on JFK assassination in a federal court. The subsequent rise to a conspiracy theory is the theme of the movie JFK by director and screen writer Oliver Stone, who is famous for his critically acclaimed and politically sensational trilogy on Vietnam War, the second among it being the Oscar winner Platoon.
So here are some of the minute details that were missed out in the Warren Commission, the official investigation carried out by White House, which stated that L.H.Oswald was the sole assassin in the case:
1. Lee was supposed to have used Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle, which was ordered by post. Now orders by post can be easily traced to the address of order and hence the owner of the rifle. But in 1961 any person could go to a gun shop and buy a rifle by producing a fake identity. So L.H.Oswald ordering the gun by post just does not sound smart enough.
2. This rifle was considered by many experts as a bad shoulder weapon to have. Now it is a presumed fact that three shots were fired from the weapon. Number One completely missed the President, the third was the fatal one which hit him in the head. The second bullet now widely known as the Magical Bullet hit him in the neck and then proceeded to create a total of seven wounds in JFK and in the Texas Governor John Connally who was sitting right next to him. In doing so this magic bullet traverses a zig-zag path at varied angles that defies the laws of physics.
3. One more interesting thing was that the time interval between the first and the third shot was 5.6 seconds. But when this rifle was tested by the best of the best snipers in the Bureau, it took them a full 7 seconds to fire three shots including the time to reload. Also the time interval between the second and third shot reports was very less in case of the shootout than what would have occurred for a normal reload time.
4. Any excellent sniper will accept the fact that the probability to get hit the target is highest for the first shot. But in this case, the third shot proved fatal. Considering this Lee had to be one master marksman, since he had to reload the gun twice and at the same time aim in just 5.6 seconds.
5. Check out the accompanying figures. It is very clear that if Oswald was sitting in the book depository to make the kill, it would have been easier for him to shoot JFK when he took the 90 degree turn toward the Dealey Plaza. But he did not do so. He waited for JFK's car to make the turn and head towards triple underpass, away from him. This is very absurd.
6. There were orders from high above from Pentagon to the Naval Office of Dallas for the security troops of the state to stand down on the day of assassination. The Naval Office assumed that the security task had been assigned to some other group, which clearly was not the case. This meant that the security in Dealey Plaza was at the minimal. Also the path chosen for the motorcade was a bizarre decision. At the end of the plaza, the car had to make a 120 degree turn, which made it go at a speed of around 10 miles per hour only making it very easy for the sniper to take a shot. JFK was a sitting duck.
7. There were no Nitrite traces found on Lee’s hands, meaning he did not even fire a single shot.
8. If it is to be assumed that Lee shot JFK, then the fatal shot came from behind JFK. If it is so, his head should have gone forward when the bullet hit him. But that day amongst the viewers at the road side there was an amateur video shooter called Zapruder who had shot the entire event in his video camera. The film captured by him shows that JFK’s head went back and towards left when the third bullet hit him, meaning this fatal bullet came from the front, most probably from grassy knoll in the secured parking lot. The Zapruder film shows some smoke coming from the grassy knoll area after the shooting.
9. The conspiracy theory states that there was a triangulated cross firing (Blue arrows in first figure, red arrows in second figure) by three teams of snipers and their co-ordinators in Dal-Tex building, Book depository and the parking lot.
10. Now Oswald was supposed to have defected to USSR and given vital information about US navy to KGB. But he came back after 4 years to US, and he wasn’t asked even a single question. Apparently he was a double agent for US. He was a trained agent of the Office of naval Intelleigence and remained so till the day he died.
11. The autopsy of JFK’s body was not done properly and the official medical reports were incomplete.
12. Many eye witnesses agreed to hear more than 4 shots and from different directions, but they were told to not tell this to anyone by the federal agents who took them into custody few minutes after the shooting. Surprisingly this was even before the assassin was apprehended.
13. Jack Ruby who shot Oswald was supposedly seen with Oswald on a number of occasions before the assassination.
14. The key witnesses died of sudden unexplained heart attacks or accidents.
15. And the best of all - The official investigator for Warren Commission was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director who had been fired from his post by JFK.
I don’t know when the US federal courts started accepting circumstantial evidence as a proof, but if anything is to go by in this case, L.H. Oswald did not even fire a single bullet and was a scapegoat of a wide spread conspiracy by the US Government and Security Services at the highest level. The other people who were involved were just involved because they did not know what they were doing under the pretext of “Orders”. And this is just the tip of the ice berg. If you want to know about this in detail, read the book “On the Trail of Assassins” by Jim Garrison or watch the movie JFK. It is simply mind numbing.
The persons who were supposed to have protected their president had conspired against him. One of the widely accepted reasons for this assassination was that JFK had gone soft on war issues. He wanted to end the cold war, the result of which was the withdrawal of support to anti-Castro groups and refusal to invade Cuba. He strongly believed that Vietnam and its problems should be left alone and he was a strong supporter of the civil rights to Afro-American community. He gave a sound backing to Martin Luther King’s movements, who by the way was also assassinated some time after JFK’s assassination. JFK’s brother Robert, whose career was also following the same political curve as that of JFK, was also assassinated during California elections. These were all the casualties of what we now call as the Military Industrial Complex. It states that the organizing principle of any society is to go for war. No war, no money. Due to this, there are large military establishments who are exercising strong unwarranted influence over the economics and politics of a democracy. So it was not a big surprise when all the changes proposed by JFK were rolled back along with the signing of the official document for the “Go Ahead” with Vietnam War, within four days of JFK’s assassination, by the new President Lyndon Johnson.
JFK did all that he could do for his country, for his people. He diverted the money spent on wars towards social and economic development. He wanted to bring in peace and end the moon race in favour of co-operation with USSR and in doing so he remained true to his words. He never asked anything in return from his country. But I am sure he never asked what he got on that fateful November ‘63 morning either. He was a true patriot, a martyr.
