Jfk Assassination

JFK Assassination

On Friday, November 22, 1963, while enroute to the Dallas airport, President John Fitzgearald Kennedy was fatally shot. ABC's newsanchor Walter Cronkite said that it would be "a day that will live in infamy." The reason that that fateful Friday is still talked about is the controversy surrounding the assassination. The official investigators determined that the president was killed by a lone gunman, but every single piece of evidence - from eye witnesses to forensic evidence - points to at 2 or more gunmen, and a conspiracy, possibly involving government officials. According to the Warren Commission Report : Report of President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, published in 1964, President Kennedy was shot by lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The report states that Oswald fired three shots from an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, while standing at a half-open window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, located at Dealy Plaza, 411 Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, where Oswald was employed. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally both were hit by bullets. The report states that of the three bullets that were fired, one hit Kennedy from behind, entering his shoulder, the second fired hit Connally in the hip, and the third was the fatal blow, which entered Kennedy's head from the back. Everything that the Warren Commission reported was simply unsupported lies and discrepancies. Regardless of different "conspiracy theorists" conclusions, they all agree that the Warren Commission's report was greatly flawed.

The first big problem with the investigation occurred the day after Kennedy's death, on November 23, 1963. The suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in the basement of the Dallas police station, by a local bar owner, Jack Ruby. Even though previously an attempt had been made to kill Oswald, no further security precautions had been taken to prevent this from happening again. The fact that reporters were allowed to be around Oswald as he was escorted out of court was plain irresponsibility on the part of the Dallas police. Public access to Oswald should not have been permitted under any circumstance. Oswald was murdered in front of cameras and video footage of the incident shows that the police didn't make Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby.

hardly any attempts to prevent the murder, but literally just stood there. Many people have found this to be extremely suspicious. Some believe that Jack Ruby killed Oswald to silence him and the police were ordered to let it happen. If this is true, who were they taking orders from?

Despite discrepancies such as these, for many years the American public had to be content with the Warren Commission's verdict that "Lee Harvey Oswald had been the sole assassin in the murder of John Kennedy who died as result of three shots being fired from the Texas school depository building." However since the report was published on September 24, 1964, fresh evidence keeps surfacing, as does inconsistencies on the Warren Commissions part.

There is a general feeling among "conspiracy theorists" is that the Warren Commission disregarded evidence if it contradicted their conclusion. They had been under immense pressure from the public to come to a verdict. At the time Oswald had seemed like the perfect person to blame - a motiveless man with a grudge. They had no doubt been influenced by public opinion and their conclusion had been a hasty one. In fact, three days after the assassination, (newly) President Johnson received a memo saying; "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates."

By the 1970's, Americans were actually alarmed that the Warren Commission had been so single minded and did not make any attempt to investigate other possible theories and that they hadn't followed a number of promising leads. It later also came to light that none of the commission members had any investigative experiences and completely relied on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. However, probably their biggest mistake was disregarding key eyewitnesses whom they considered to be "incompatible, inconsistent and contrary" to their lone gunman theory. Nobody of the commission heard one of the witnesses who appeared before the counsel. Among them were crucial witnesses such as Abraham Zapruder (who recorded the entire assassination with a 8mm home video camera, which proved to be key evidence later on), J C Price, a bystander at the motorcade, who claimed to have seen a man with a rifle running behind the fence on the grassy knoll. Similarly, Gordon Arnold and James Simons stated that the shots came from the grassy knoll. Jean Hill, a teacher who was standing near the Presidents car, said:

"I heard four to six shots and I'm pretty used to guns. They weren't echoes. They were different guns that were being fired."

Credible testimonies from literally dozens of witnesses such as these was ignored purely because it contradicted the Warren Commissions conclusion of a lone assassin firing three shots from the depository building. This plainly shows that their report was based on an appallingly selective reading of evidence.

All these eyewitness testimonies remained inconclusive to the Warren Commission at the time, as they just didn't make sense. Similarly Kennedy's autopsy reports also contained many discrepancies. Two autopsies were carried out on Kennedy. It was hoped at the time that they would reveal the angles at which the bullets had entered Kennedy's body, hopefully pointing to where the gunman or gunmen were situated. The autopsies actually created even more confusion, as they were completely contradictory. The first autopsy was conducted in Parkland Hospital, Dallas although the official one was conducted in Bethesda Naval Hospital, just around the corner in Bethesda, MD. When the two examinations were compared, alarming differences showed up. The main difference was that the exit and entry wounds were different. In Dallas, doctors claimed that the bullet entered Kennedy's body at the front of the neck, about bow-tie height. When Kennedy was brought into Parkland Hospital, Dr Malcolm

Perry said that when he was about to perform the tracheotomy, he noticed a hole of about 5mm just below Kennedy's adams apple, presumably where the bullet had entered. Contrary to this, in Washington the autopsy reports show that the bullet exited from the neck.

Their report confirmed the 'single bullet theory' addressed by the Warren Commission whose conclusion was highly dependent on