Jefferson Morley and Alan Dale continue their discussion about the challenge of acquiring reliable methods by which reason and objectivity may prevail over alleged facts and confirmation bias.
- Making sense of the JFK assassination 53 years later
- Thomas Jefferson’s secret and almost 200 years of faulty expertise
- Applying Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” to our understanding and methods
- Dr. Gary Aguilar on Junk Science and “Confirmation bias”
- The most popular post on JFK Facts
- Perspectives on Jack Ruby’s connection to JFK
- The CIA and Watergate
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Got a JFK question or a comment? Contact us at editor@jfkfacts.org and we’ll talk about it on the show.
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My new ebook, CIA and JFK: The Secret Assassination Files, available on Amazon, provides the fullest account yet of the JFK records that the CIA is still concealing.
I am still thinking about Thomas Kuhn but I have always supported Occam’s razor, i.e. go for the simplest explanation consistent with the known facts.
For example, in the case of the CIA’s covering up, I would say that what they are covering has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with the fact that they could have prevented the assassination by ordinary competent work.
The public revelation of their incompetence would have been more than they could bear, and I suspect that it still is.
Of course this leaves open the question of whether there was another shooter in Dealey Plaza. Looking at the balance of testimony from Dealey Plaza witnesses, doctors and nurses in the Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the rather far fetched single bullet theory, I think there probably was another shooter who got away. Yet there is room for doubt. We should all be more candid about our doubts.
Good point about acknowledging doubts in this case. That’s the only way forward to the truth.
Regarding your point about hiding incompetence, I could believe that if the hierarchy – the CIA’s veteran spymasters – weren’t so closely associated with Oswald in the weeks leading to the assassination.
An example is Helms hand-picking Joannides in December – soon after the missile crisis – to get the DRE “under control.” Helm also made himself Joannides’ direct report. Nine months later, DRE is interfacing with Oswald in NO. Seems to me both Helms and Joannides had to know this prior to the assassination if the DRE was that important to them and how rarely if ever FPCC members were crucified in person on mass media. The fact neither was forthcoming regarding the DRE in ANY govt investigation smells like more than incompetence to me.
Then you have Angleton’s SIG group lying to the MC station about Oswald’s recent activities in NO.
The CIA has taken more reputation damage being suspected of killing JFK than they would’ve if they just explained a colossal eff up at the start, IMHO, and fired all the relevant parties at the time.
So maybe they are covering up something more than a failure to help protect the President. Like maybe Angleton, Helms and Joannides were in fact not only aware of Oswald but directing his actions?
Somewhere recently (3-4 mo. ?) on this website info was presented that is convincing that the CIA created the DRE to consolidate other anti Castro organizations, monitor and control it’s members, and use them to their own ends.
“Like maybe Angleton, Helms and Joannides were in fact not only aware of Oswald but directing his actions?”
To me, Ronnie, that’s the only logical explanation.
“. . . I have always supported Occam’s razor, i.e. go for the simplest explanation consistent with the known facts.”
Apply that to the Dreyfus Affair. Which explanation is simpler:
1- The French General Staff manufactured (i.e., forged) secret “evidence” not made available to the defense, and when the truth started seeping out entered into a conspiracy to keep an innocent man imprisoned for years in unbelievably hellish conditions while protecting the man who almost certainly was the real traitor, OR
2- Dreyfus was guilty, the evidence against him was genuine, and the men in charge of the French army were virtuous patriots.
Or apply it to Watergate. I don’t think I have to explain that one.
Occam’s Razor is a rationalization for lazy thinking.
I feel strongly that Lee Harvey Oswald actually believed that he was on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963 to help protect Kennedy from an assassination attempt as the result of a ‘deal’ he had made with the U.S. government that would allow him to come back into U.S. society and live a normal life again with his wife and their two young daughters. I feel that way because of a clear revelation that I had in Moscow, Russia in early 1993: He and I both spent three years in the Soviet Union, we both were engaged to Russian women (He married his fiancee, I did not.), we both had/have political views that are not accepted in the U.S. and we were both considered a ‘lost person’ by the U.S.. Being considered a lost person in the USSR meant that your government has given up on you, since you had decided to go your own way. In other words, Oswald was a prime target to be set up.
If Oswald actually fired a shot or shots from the sixth floor, I feel that they were most likely directed at the actual assassins – and not at Kennedy – since he was there to protect Kennedy. I have my own doubts, however, that Oswald ever even fired a shot.
Actually I thought that the most popular thread on here was the Prayer Man thread not Gail Raven’s cleavage. Doesn’t that thread have over 500 comments?
This podcast never works for me all the through on any device but my laptop. And then I can pause, rewind or forward.
Can’t you just upload to iTunes? You might also get a wider audience.
It never works 4 me either, I’ve discovered it best to download the podcast then open it in itunes.
You have to download the podcast
Nice discussion of the Single Bullet Theory: Here’s what can be, here’s what is, make sense of it Arlen.
That is the SBT that occurred outdoors in Dealey Plaza. There is second such theory that occurred indoors inside the Texas School Book Depository. It’s called the Second Floor Lunch Room Encounter Theory. It occurred for the same reason that the Single Bullet Theory occurred, to make impossible sense out of some very stubborn facts.
What was the ironic bridge between the two? Shots that made pigeons fly caused a cop to run into a vestibule and start a stopwatch. Arlen are you listening?
Jake, do you know that Arlen Specter is dead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlen_Specter
Yes John, I did know. While I’m not a particularly religious person, my call to the former Senator was to his place in heaven and as such, a lyrical flight of fancy. As he was the author of the SBT, I feel that a ‘flight of fancy’ is something that he would truly appreciate.
Regarding Jack Ruby. I will simply say that YOUR expectations obscured your vision.
Instead of going to Jack Ruby’s own words to us, you went to a hearsay account from a strip tease dancer who worked for him. Since you did not feel it necessary to address the things that Jack Ruby himself said I will again post the video of his news conference, in which, he told us, there was a conspiracy , and HE WAS ACTING on behalf of those conspirators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dLupbqmtUU&feature=youtu.be
“Our expectations obscure our vision”.
That is precisely why I posted the Mary Moorman and Lee Bowers interviews in the thread that contained Part 1 of these podcasts.
If you recall, in that post I stated that we have to get the facts correct. And I gave as an example the following…
Mary Moorman and Lee Bowers have told us for 50 years they heard 3 shots. But the three shots they heard were not the 3 shots that the WC and many others have told us. Moorman and Bowers heard 3 shots that occurred in about 1 second duration. The first shot in this 3 shot volley was the shot we know as the shot that struck the President at Zapruder frame 313. The acoustic evidence also tells us that there were three shots in about 1 second.
Because of our expectations, we have all mis-interpreted Mary Moorman and Lee Bowers. We ASSUMED that the three shots they described were the 3 shots that the WCR told us about. BUT THEY ARE NOT.
Moorman’s and Bower’s testimony as well as the acoustic evidence tells us that there were 3 shots in less than one second when the Presidents limo came abreast of pedestal upon which Zapruder and Sitzman.
Here again are links to the Moorman and Bowers interviews. I think they are important enough to post again.
Scroll to 22 minutes in the following video. This is where Moorman describes the shots she heard.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/24228714
Here is the video of Lee Bowers interview where he describes the shots he heard.
Lee Bowers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcU0mhstQds#t=1m0s
I watched this interview with Ms. Moorman a while back and I think you are misrepresenting what she actually stated.
She did say she heard the first sound (shot) at the moment she snapped her Polaroid but she did not say two more shots followed in less than 1 second. She stated she heard a POW…followed by a pause and then a POW POW as two more shots were fired.
If three shots were fired in less than one second, do you think she would be able to distinguish one shot from another?
No, I am not mis-represnting what she actually stated.
Scroll to 22 minutes in the video and listen to what she actually stated. She said she heard 3 shots, with the first shot being the shot at frame 313. She said she heard two more shots immediately after. The acoustic evidence actually corroborates this statement.
Similarly, Lee Bowers described the same 3 shot sequence. Three shots, almost on top of each other.
And yes, I think they would be able to distinguish the three shots, (because they did) but what they would not be able to distinguish is where the shots came from, particularly if the three shots came from different locations, which I believe they did.
Here is the time interval measured from the video between Mary’s pow..pow pow. It comes out to about 1.3 seconds.
https://goo.gl/photos/EYz7mpjiu5ge8P3V6
Simiarly, here is the time interval between Lee Bowers taps on the desk. It comes out to .9 seconds.
https://goo.gl/photos/Tqca8a5p47r6ZTx4A