JFK Assassination: Do you believe ABC (coincidence) or TIA (conspiracy)?

[TruthIsAll]

Poll question: JFK Assassination: Do you believe ABC (coincidence) or TIA (conspiracy)?

After 40 years the coverup continues. In 1977, the House Select Committee on Assassinations came to the conclusion that BOTH the JFK and MLK murders were conspiracies. But the corrupt media won't accept it. For shame, ABC!

This analysis has been previously posted. But for those who have not seen it, here goes....

Take the tinfoil hats off, put your thinking caps on..

This is an analysis to compute the probability of at least 15 witnesses dying UNNATURAL deaths within one year of the JFK assassination. The deaths were a combination of homicides, suicides, accidents and undetermined origin.

Assuming there were 1000 witnesses, the probability that at least 15 would die UNNATURAL deaths in the year following the assassination is: 1 out of 21,230,606,601,227,800.
(or 1 out of 21,230 trillion, 606 billion, 601 million, 227 thousand, 800)

This result is the same order of magnitude of a famous prior, though slightly different, study: An actuary engaged by the London Times in 1963 computed the probability that 18 material witnesses would die (of any cause) within 3 years of the assassination as: 1 out of one hundred thousand trillion.

For the mystery deaths, I used this table, which is no longer active:
http://www.noage.com/jfknetwork/death.htm

Here is another link:
http://www.jfk-assassination.de/deaths.html

For the odds of death in each category, I used this table of 1999 mortality data:
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

From the 1999 data:
........................1 year...Lifetime
Probability of:
suicide.................0.000107 0.008197
homicide................0.000062 0.004739
accidental death........0.000359 0.027778
undetermined death......0.000014 0.001101

Therefore, the probability of an unnatural death is the sum of the probabilties of the four categories:
........................0.000542 0.041815

The Poisson Distribution
Although the Normal (Gaussian) probability distribution is by far the most important, there is another which has proven to be particularly useful - the Poisson Distribution, which is derived from, and is a special case of the Normal Distribution.

The Poisson Distribution applies when the probability "P" for success in any one trial is very small, but the number of trials N is so large that the expected number of successes, pN, is a moderate sized quantity. The formula is: P(m) =a**m*exp(-a)/m!

In words, the Probability of EXACTLY m successes = a to the m'th power times the exponential function of (-a), all divided by m factorial.

If m= 15, m factorial = m! = 15*14*13*12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1

Now lets use Poisson to determine the probability of a given number of witnesses meeting unnatural deaths within a year of the JFK assassination.
The only assumption we are making here is the number of witnesses.
Assume N= total witnesses = 1000

Let p= Probability of any individual dying from UNNATURAL causes within a given year = 0.000542
Let a= Expected Number of deaths = pN= 0.542
Let m= Actual Number of UNNATURAL deaths = 15

The probability of exactly m=15 UNNATURAL deaths within a given year out of a predefined group of N = 1000 witnesses is:

P(m) =a**m*exp(-a)/m! or p(15)= 0.542**15*exp(-.542)/15!

Here are the probabilities for m=1 through m=15 deaths.
Note:
Prob(X=m) = probability of EXACTLY m DEATHS
Prob(X>=m) = probability of at AT LEAST m DEATHS (the one we want)

m.......Prob(X=m)........Prob(X>=m)
1 3.15E-01 4.18E-01
Thus, for 1 or more deaths, Prob (X>=1)= 0.418

2 8.54E-02 1.03E-01
3 1.54E-02 1.78E-02
4 2.09E-03 2.34E-03
5 2.27E-04 2.49E-04
6 2.05E-05 2.22E-05
7 1.59E-06 1.70E-06
8 1.07E-07 1.14E-07
9 6.47E-09 6.84E-09
10 3.51E-10 3.69E-10
11 1.73E-11 1.81E-11
12 7.80E-13 8.14E-13
13 3.25E-14 3.38E-14
14 1.26E-15 1.31E-15
15 4.55E-17 4.71E-17

For 15 or more deaths,
Prob (X>=15) = 0.000000000000000047101810079330
or 1 out of 21,230,606,601,227,800

Not too likely that these deaths were mere coincidences.


What if there were more than 1000 witnesses? That's a fair question. Well, of course the probabilities will be lower (more likely to occur).

For example, if we assume 5000 witnesses, the probability of 15 deaths is 0.000000190, or 1 out of 5,239,859

column 1 refers to n, the number of deaths,
column 2 is the probability of at least n deaths,
columm 3 is the mathematical odds

Note: the years in which investigations occurred, 1964 and 1977, had the most deaths, 14 and 15. A coincidence?

1000 witnesses
n.......prob.................1 out of
1 0.418 2.39
2 0.103 9.69
3 0.0177 56.26 (1971)
4 0.0023 427 (1968,1975)
5 0.0002 484,018 (1970,74,76)
6 0.000022 45,091 (1967,1969)
7 0.00000169 588,306
8 0.000000114 8,752,118
9 0.00000000683 146,245,847 (1965)
10 0.000000000368 2,712,122,977
11 0.0000000000180 55,278,020,364
12 0.000000000000814 1,228,276,488,499 (1966)
13 0.0000000000000338 29,551,271,527,958
14 0.00000000000000130 765,351,111,903,523 (1967)

15 0.00000000000000004710 21,230,606,601,227,800 (1964)


2000 witnesses
n.......prob...........1 out of

1 .661 1.51
2 0.295 3.39
3 0.096 10.38
4 0.024 41
5 0.005 195
6 0.00089 1,113
7 0.000136 7,343
8 0.0000181 55,093
9 0.00000215 463,452
10 0.000000231 4,321,227
11 0.0000000226 44,239,588
12 0.00000000202 493,399,077
13 0.000000000167 5,954,899,756
14 0.0000000000129 77,331,852,139

15 00000000000093 1,075,228,365,705


5000 witnesses
n........prob............1 out of
1 0.933
2 .753 1.33
3 .508 1.97
4 0.288 3.47
5 0.138 7
6 .057 17
7 0.020 47
8 .00670 148
9 .00196 510
10 .00051 1,939
11 0.00012 8,070
12 0.000027 36,485
13 0.0000056 178,135
14 0.0000010 934,300

15 0.000000190 5,239,859




The House Select Committee on Assassinations could not let the actuary's results stand; it was circumstantial proof of a conspiracy.

In response to a letter from the Committee, "London Sunday Times" Legal Manager Anthony Whitaker stated:

"Our piece about the odds against the deaths of the Kennedy witnesses was, I regret to say, based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published. This was realized by The Sunday Times editorial staff after the first edition - the one which goes to the United States...- had gone out, and later editions were amended. There was no question of our actuary having got his answer wrong: it was simply that we asked him the wrong question. He was asked what were the odds against 15 named people out of the population of the United States dying within a short period of time, to which he replied -correctly - that they were very high. However, if one asks what are the odds against 15 of those included in the Warren Commission Index dying within a given period, the answer is, of course, that they are much lower. Our mistake was to treat the reply to the former question as if it dealt with the latter - hence the fundamental error in our first edition report, for which we apologize".

Here is the fallacy of this obfuscation:
My calculations agree with the original study; and the probabilities are virtually the same (in the trillions). It is a fairly simple calculation - using the Poisson formula. I do not know what formula the actuary used, but it may well have been the Poisson or the Cumulative Normal Distribution.

In any case, the actuary did exactly what he was asked to do. The Times is using Orwellian-speak to give the impression that there was a mistake in the question to be solved. This is total obfuscation. There was NO miscommunication, here's why:

The probability that at least 15 people in the United States (pop. 280 million) would meet violent deaths in any given year is 100%. It is a certainty. On the other hand the probability that 15 out of a population of say, 1000, would do so is infinitesmal, as both my analysis and the actuarial study both prove.

This settled the matter for the House Committee, which apparently made little or no attempt to seriously study the number of mysterious witness deaths which followed the JFK assassination.

[wtmusic]

1. What are the odds that

no one would come forward in 40 years or on their deathbed would reveal the truth about a conspiracy of such profound significance?

1 : ∞

Mark Twain sez: Oswald did it

:tinfoilhat:

[TruthIsAll]

2. You are either very young, very ignorant, very naive or very delusional..

Or maybe a combination...

Nixon said the Warren Report was a fraud.

Lyndon Johnson, shortly before he died, said that he never believed it, either.

[wtmusic]

4. Because I don't accept a very complicated formula

founded on bad logic?

[elperromagico]

27. The purpose of the Warren Commission

was to silence the skeptics. It is always preferable to believe that a traumatic event was caused by a lone malcontent and not by a wide-ranging conspiracy. Of course, the Warren Commission report turned out to have the opposite effect, because it was such a piece of hack work.

I don't know what to believe, though I lean towards conspiracy. I've read Case Closed by Posner. Utter horseshit. I've read On The Trail Of The Assassins by Garrison. Utter horseshit. I've read plenty of books on the Kennedy assassination, none of which answered any questions.

I doubt we'll ever know for sure what happened.

[JackRiddler]

42. Want people who spoke out? Please look up...

Fletcher Prouty (Pentagon liaison to CIA, briefed JFK daily, author of The Secret Team)

Hale Boggs (Member Warren Commission, doubted its results, presumed dead after plane disappeared)

Al Haig (still alive, subtly pushing the Castro thesis)

Frank Sturgis (confessed to crime on deathbed)

House assassinations committee (found two gunmen had acted)

Haldeman (said in his autobiography all of Nixon's references to "The Bay of Pigs Thing" meant the JFK assassination)

This is scratching the surface. Many have spoken out, but go forgotten. Conformity among reporters at work.

Jack Ruby was a big one, I'd think... interesting that a mobster with a good business going feels compelled to throw himself at the lone gunman live on national TV as the only way to kill him, isn't it?

(& I'll take Woody Harrelson's father as less than definitively convincing.)

If you care about it at all, do some research. Just because YOU haven't heard it yet, doesn't mean people didn't speak out.

[0rganism]

3. What are the odds that anyone would believe such a deathbed confession?

1 : \��

What are the odds that the backroom dealers would have the actual gunmen murdered within a year of the assasination?

\�� : 1

Fuck it. We'll never know who called the shots or why.

[dflprincess]

5. We don't know that someone hasn't tried

but did the story get printed?

[sendero]

6. what is the chance...

... that if they did, you would ever hear about it?

[papau]

20. To me a Gov-CIA & political -oil types conspiracy likely- but the actuary

stuff is misinterpreted.

The actuary was asked what was the probablity - before any material witness has died, of 18 named individuals who happen to be material witnesses dying in the next 3 years - and he gave the correct result.

The Times interpreted this as the odds of 18 material witnesses out of a universe of unkown number of material witnesses dying in 3 years - and with a large enough universe of material witnesses that easily is better than 50/50.

[janekat]

29. I actually think a few did

I'm no expert on it though...

[nostamj]

7. god bless you, but I don't need all that math...

the "magic bullet" is bullshit. period.

[diamondsoul]

9. ROTFL AMEN!

Been saying that for years!

The JFK assassination bothered me so much I watched the HBO "trial" of Lee Harvey Oswald. The "magic bullet" read as so much fantasy anyway, but to actually watch someone show you what the thing was supposed ot have done....well let's just say I was reduced to tears that anyone could ever have believed such lunacy.

[Birthmark]

8. Nice try.

"Undetermined" just gets chucked into the conspiracy numbers, eh? I think I can guess why some might have committed suicide. The stress alone that these people endured (WITHOUT conspiracies)was probably quite high. So, if we subtract out the "undetermined" and the "suicides" I suspect that we are left with some pretty palatable numbers. I'll just throw in that I don't even believe that the number 15 is correct.

[TruthIsAll]

11. Educate yourself. Read Bill Marr's "Crossfire"....

Unfortunately, the first link to the circumstances of the actual witness deaths no longer works.

Read the book. In fact, read more than one.

[Braden]

17. Mark Lane's plausible Denial

is excellent

High Treason I&II by Harrison Edward Livingstone are good.

Mark Lane's book has a passage in it where an alleged Dealey Plaza shooter's name is spoken in open court by a woman who claims to have driven to Dallas in November 1963 with a group of armed men.

The Book is the story of how Howard Hunt sued Liberty Lobby for printing what he said were lies. And in court he admits to having been in Dallas, November 22, 1963. Something he had never copped to before. It also does a wonderful job of detailing how badly CIA have compromised the News Services.

[Birthmark]

34. Why should I believe that book?

I mean, this has become an industry, one in which truth is subservient to selling books. And the only way to sell books is to tell the conspiracy nuts what they want to hear.

[DUreader]

43. Forget the book, look up the Court records Hunt vs. Libby Lobby

I think it is Libby Lobby, although it may be Liberty Lobby

Google will help you figure out which one

[Braden]

46. Howard Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby

Howard Hunt admits in court or that he and Frank Sturgis were in Dallas November 22, 1963 and the significance of that admission under oath is really startling. Check it out non-believers.

[Braden]

45. you may believe whatever you want to believe

I would read the book if I were you and then question the motives of the author.

Why should anyone believe the Warren Report?

[Guaranteed]

10. Well, the odds aren't very good,

but, nevertheless, it happened. I'm not sure what you're proving. You don't think it really happened?

[Must_B_Free]

13. I'll post the photo evidence later

which proves Oswald didn't shoot - it's at home and I can't get to it until then

Oswald was downstairs in the doorway to the building watching his president drive by, like everyone else.

[TruthIsAll]

14. You are kidding, right?

What I have calculated, friend, are the astronomical odds that these 15 deaths occurring within a year of the assassination, were NOT a coincidence.

I realize the math is challenging. But trust me, it is correct.

[robcon]

15. The math is calulated correctly, but the theory is bogus.

TruthisAll wrote: "I realize the math is challenging. But trust me, it is correct."

What sophist thinking! Your calulations are absurd, and have no relevence to real statistical analysis.

Maybe your 'calculations' impress the naive, but they are nonsesnse to anyone who knows statistics. Even an apprentice actuary could blow your numbers out of the water.

[papau]

22. Now be gentle - the fellow is expressing a common - albeit false - thought

Do you really want to get into the difference in the stat for 18 selected independent deaths, and the stat for a group of 18 deaths that have actually occured out of all the deaths that will occur during during the 3 years in question?.

I am too old for a 2 page post - but if you are up for it - have at it!

:-)

[TruthIsAll]

25. Papau, old friend, please explain your meaning...

The problem is simple: What are the odds of 15 out of 1000 or 2000 or 5000 witnesses meeting strange deaths within a single year.

If we know the probability of such a death for one person, we can calculate the odds that AT LEAST 15 persons from any random group would be murdered, committ suicide or die from an accident, etc. during a given one year period.

These are NOT natural deaths. These ARE all witnesses. They ALL died within ONE year.

The circumstances of their deaths, the timing and their relationship to the JFK murder are more than just suspicious.

They are circumstantial evidence of a massive conspiracy.

[wtmusic]

26. The odds that 92 people

would die an unnatural death within a single second, within 100 yards of each other:

1: 3,456,234,654,000,212,345,312

(American Airlines Flight 11)

9/11 never happened.

QED.

[TruthIsAll]

30. Such utter nonsense! Is that the best you can do?

You have failed the challenge.

As is typical with those of your ilk, you ignore the question with a spurious strawman.

Now, I will give you one last chance. Refute MY calculations. No strawman allowed here.

How does it feel to be exposed in front of 30,000 DUers?

[TomNickell]

32. It's all you deserve....

It is NOT nonsense.

This has been explained to you before. It's all basic text book stuff.

You are wrong. X No credit. 10 points off.

D-

[Name removed]

36. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

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[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

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[dweller]

28. let's get started

:kick:

dp

[dweller]

33. back to the top page

:kick:
:kick:

dp

[Name removed]

37. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Guaranteed]

54. It doesn't matter anyway.

All he did was (try to) figure that the facts couldn't happen together. Statistical analysis can't prove conspiracies.

[Guaranteed]

55. My above post

is extreme sarcasm masked by deliberate ignorance. I didn't even bother looking at your math.
Look: you can't prove things are connected to each other by conspiracy by proving that the odds of them all actually happening are small. Your whole premise is bogus. The odds of 16 lunch-ladies winning the lottery in Minnesota and me getting a toothache on the very same day are very, very small. But, it happened. AND- there was no conspiracy involved. There's no connection.

On edit: All you did was prove that it couldn't happen. But, it did. That's statistics for ya.

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

12. great minds think alike..........

We must have been composing our own similar polls
during the same time.

[librechik]

16. Farewell, America

The French Intelligence Services did their own independent investigation of the JFK assassination. James Hepburn's book written about the investigation has been banned in the US until recently. Here is a link to an online version of the work.(written in 1969)


http://www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html
doesn't name the assassins, but puts it all in perspective

[Eloriel]

21. I recommend the book highly.

It fits completely with what I've learned about our American life quite aside from any thought of JFK.

After I read it, I made pains to rent Oliver Stone's movie and thought it was quite good too. So good I bought the DVD and I don't even have a DVD (well, not one that's hooked up).

Eloriel

[RainDog]

24. and a voice from history

The soft, the complacent
the self-satisfied societies
will be swept away
with the debris of history

JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY

I say that all who accept the illegal presidency of George Bush are complacent.

I say that all who accept the obviously bogus and many-times publically disproven Warren Commissionn are self-satisfied.

I say that if America does not wake up to what is happening to her, she will be swept away with the debris of history and will wonder how it all happened, when the reasons have been undermining democracy for at least fifty years.

The last fifty years, sixty, really, are a history of lies and deceit and an undermining of democracy by those forces which gained power in this country in opposition to communism. They became that thing (totalitarianism) that they claimed to abhor.

"In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that the vast army of intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disasterous consequences to them and us."

Malcolm Muggeridge, May 1966

The assassination of Mossedegah, democratically elected leader of Iran (the Shah, the Ayatollah as blowback)

backing the Ba'ath party against the nationalists in Iraq, including that upstart Saddam Hussein.

our Cuban obsession...thankfully aborted Operation Northwoods (could this, too, have prompted Kennedy's assassination?

Vietnam

Watergate

The overthrow of a democratically elected leader, Allende, and the support of a dictator, Pinochet.

Arming both Iran and Iraq in their protracted war in which children were used to find landmines.

Iran-Contra (Reagan, Casey, North, Poindexter, George Bush)

The genocide this caused in Central America.

Iraqgate (George Bush Sr. funding Saddam and supplying him with weapons)

Arming and funding the mujuahadeen (Osama bin Laden, the Taliban) against the Russians in Afghanistan)

April Gillespie lying to Saddam, our invasion of Iraq, the placemet of troops in Saudi Arabia.

9-11

Coup attempts against a democractically elected president, Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela.

the invasion of Iraq based upon lies and deceptionn and propaganda, and the violations of the Geneva Conventions, the nuremberg principles in Guantanemo Bay and Iraq.

our overturning of the ABM treaty.

when will it stop? is this the governance you want? is this the country you want?

there is a better way.

[Darranar]

18. I think Oswald did it, but he was part of a conspiracy.

[RainDog]

19. House Select Committee

I don't know everything to know about this, but I've been reading up and trying to learn. anyone who claims, at this late date, that Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald via the "magic bullet" theory of the Warren Commission is plainly uninformed in the most basic way, since, as the original post noted, the house investigative committee in the 70s was FORCED to admit evidence which strongly supported otherwise.

quotes-

"Scientific accoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy; other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the president."

the committee also stated, concerning the impulse patterns to determine the number of bullets fired:

"All six impulse patterns passed the preliminary screening tests."

(there were two additional impulses which did not pass the rigorous accoustic test, though they, too, may have been gunshots.)

In H.R. Haldeman's book, The Ends of Power, he states that when Nixon talks about "the whole Bay of Pigs thing" and the problems that would cause for the CIA and for the nation, that was Nixon's shorthand for the Kennedy Assassination.

Watergate, which was a proven conspiracy, also appears to be related to, and involved figures prominent in the Kennedy Assassination, including E. Howard Hunt, for instance.

The Tonkin Bay incident was a conspiracy to lie to the American people and draw us into a protracted war in Vietnam.

The sinking of the Liberty was an attempt by Israel, as historians now report, to provoke the U.S. into war.

If you deny there have been any conspiracies in this government by right wing extremists, you are ignorant. plain and simple as that.

And Lucretia Borgia was just a housewife...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

31. Two years after the assassination

my family took a trip to Canada, and being a bookworm even at that age, I bought a bunch of Canadian magazines. One of them was Maclean's, a news magazine with the same format as Time or Newsweek.

It contained an article by a reporter who had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination. He claims that he looked in the direction of one of the shots and saw *two* people standing in the window of the Texas School Book Depository. He quickly snapped a picture. Later, he notified the FBI, and they confiscated his camera with the film in it. He never heard back from them.

Is his story true? Who knows.

To me, the most implausible part of the Warren Commission report is the unlikely trajectory of the "magic bullet."

Jack Ruby's role is fishy, as well. A mob-connected nightclub owner was so grief-stricken at the assassination that he just had to rush over to the police station two days later and shoot the suspect on live television while the suspect was surrounded by a dozen or more police officers?

On edit: I don't remember the chronology, but Jack Ruby died of cancer within a year after killing Oswald, didn't he? Was he willing to do the killing because he knew that he didn't have long to live anyway?

Sure, yeah, whatever you say. Just a coincidence.

[FDRrocks]

35. JKF MLK RFK MX ....

Christ, the liberals were killed. And now where are the powerful liberals? People give the right too much credit... they are absolutely fucking murderous.

[sujan]

38. I simply dont care

[Lexingtonian]

40. What a load

The Neocreationists abuse statistics in a similar manner to argue that the existence of life on the planet is so unlikely that it can't be explained by anything other than a conspiracy aka supernatural agent. This is a straight ripoff of the "method". The assumptions that are wrong are always simplifications and assumptions of randomness and directedness that never hold up to light.

As an alternative to it being simply bogus probablities, I propose this hypothesis: all these people got killed by a group of people who wanted it all to appear to be a conspiracy, when it wasn't. (Ha hah! Argue your way out of that one!)

But, seriously, my basic problem with all the conspiracy True Believers and their theories is always the dogmatic belief that the assassination was somehow politically efficacious. History says that's only the case when monarchs or dictators are assassinated. The historical record in the U.S. involving assassinations is that only the mentally ill and politically deeply naive extremists resort to them.

The '60s were a time of great lunacy in the public arena due to the strains of the Cold War and Civil Rights, which were unresolvable problems in the national psyche, and that assassination was just one of the many pointless, violently psychotic, things that were done that expressed peoples' inability to come to terms with all the things that were becoming too strange and unstable for them to comprehend.

[TruthIsAll]

41. Lexingtonian, get your head out of the sand...you are so naive..

"The historical record in the U.S. involving assassinations is that only the mentally ill and politically deeply naive extremists resort to them".

Right. To you, every other country in the world suffers political assassinations, except the U.S. Sure.

Good night.

[JackRiddler]

44. Dear TIA

you know I agree with you here as far the JFK killing is concerned but every time you go off on one of your "statistical proofs" of the likelihood of an event you take entirely the wrong approach.

Use politics, logic, forensics and actual testimony, it gets you much further and actually convinces people!

Of course it stinks when a bunch of material witnesses suffer convenient deaths but then you need to go into who-what-when-where and leave aside this dry statistical approach that proves nothing because you can never delineate satisfactorily the larger set of people from out of which the 18 die.

It's a mug's game and I like your posts very much otherwise and I don't know why you are seduced into it every time, I presume you have a professional background involving heavy statistical analysis. Give it up, your essays are much more to the point.

[Padraig18]

47. I don't know.

I've read extensively on the subject, and probably own one of the larger collections of books on the subject, as well as the original Warren Commission report AND the appendices.

The two most disturbing pieces of objective, phsyical evidence are the 'magic bullet' and the Zapruder film: quite simply, the 'magic bullet' defies the laws of physics, and the Zapruder film strongly indicates at least one shot from the front, and possibly two.

Nonetheless, there is no absolutely compelling evidence of a 'conspiracy' in terms of 'who did it?', i.e., Cubans/CIA, The Mob, Big oil, etc. .

I'm not sure we will ever know, since the *best evidence* lies buried at Arlington, and no one has the balls to exhume it and have qualified forensic pathologists and criminalists examine it using modern methods.

How many of you favor digging up JFK? Raise your hands, now, so I can count...

[wtmusic]

48. I've never been convinced by 'shots from the front' scenarios

Physics get very convoluted when one is examining fuzzy film, bullets traveling at 3K fps, a moving car, and unknowable muscle tensions, reactions, and body masses.

Very easy to draw conclusions where none are warranted. Very difficult (psychologically) to accept that a lone gunman could bring down one of the most popular presidents in American history, and that we will never know for sure.

[Padraig18]

50. Yeah

That's why I deliberately used the word 'disturbing'.

[SiobhanClancy]

52. I would be...

I know it will never happen,though. I think we deserve to know the truth,and I think President Kennedy deserves for the truth to be known. There are so many questions. For some reason,the rather unscientific sticking point for me is why on earth would a mob guy like Jack Ruby shoot Oswald?

[Padraig18]

57. Good point!

I, too, would favor exhuming the late President's body and performing a competent, forensic necropsy on it; in all of our obsession with 'is it or isn't it a conspiracy', we tend to forget that the mortal man know as John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered, and his murderer may yet be alive and unpunished. Simple human decency demands that our best efforts should be focused on bringing him or her to justice, and one of the key peices of evidence--- his body--- has never received the same sort of competent forensic examination that a skid-row bum in Chicago would have gotten from the Cook County Medical Examiner.

Sad... so sad.

Edited for spelling error.

[TruthIsAll]

53. JackRiddler, here is why I show the math...

Because the coverup takes many forms. We should at least agree that the circumstantial case for conspiracy is overwhelming if one would just analyze the timing and manner of the many strange witness deaths that occurred during the periods of the Warren (1964) and HSCA (1977) inquiries.

What better way to prove it than with mathematical probability analysis? The math is not too difficult for those who have been exposed to the Normal and/or Poisson distributions in Statistics or Probability.

Itis a simple, yet classic problem:
Given a population of N persons (witnesses),
each with probability P of an unnatural death in a given year,
what is the probability X that at least M of these witnesses will die?

The fact that the odds are so vanishingly remote that these deaths were due to mere coincidence, should lead any rational person to agree:THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY.

That's why I did it.

[JackRiddler]

56. The problem's in the operationalization

Given a population of N persons (witnesses),

And here it falls apart already. How do you delineate this? There is no way to do this that will have consensus. Go this way and you are stuck dealing with a tertiary question.

Who is a witness? Who is an IMPORTANT witness?

You want to take this on, you have to go case-by-case.

And in the end it's still a circumstantial case, except one based on questionable assumptions with regard to the population and using a language (stat analysis) most people will not understand.

You want a quick way to convince people there's a circumstantial case to doubt the official story?

Jack Ruby already did that live on TV, two days after the assassination.

After that, you have to delve into the case specifics. Which you have done in other threads. The statistics become irrelevant. It's infinitely more impressive and less abstract (and substantially less circumstantial) when you talk about David Ferrie "overdosing" the day before he was to testify to Garrison; or de Mohrenschildt "killing himself" just before he was to testify to the House committee.

It can be wearying, the detail, but it tends to convince in a way this particular set of numbers never will. You are looking for an abstract, magic shortcut.

Now be honest: are you a statistician? A programmer? A math teacher?

[number six]

49. Come on, all we really know is...

we don't know, but it most likely wasn't Oswald. It's likely it was a conspiracy, a good conspiracy who have muddied the water to the point that it's likely we'll never know.

[jsw_81]

51. We'll never know for sure

...but I'm inclined to believe that Oswald was the lone gunman. Posner's Case Closed rips all of the conspiracy theories to shreds, but unfortunately there are just too many people out there who desperately *want* to believe that there was a huge conspiracy involving CIA/LBJ/KGB/Castro/Mafia/Bush instead of just one lone nut. It has almost become like a religion for these conspiracy believers with the seemingly endless parade of books, theories, and "new" evidence popping up all the time.

As for all the dead witnesses, keep in mind that the right-wingers do the same thing with the "Clinton body count" that lists dozens and dozens of people who have allegedly died after meeting Bill and Hillary Clinton. Does this mean that the Clintons are murderers? Of course not. It just means that some people out there can twist and abuse statistics in order to further their own poitical ideology. It's quite sad, really.

[DrGonzoLives]

58. Gee

Let me guess what the reason for posting this is: you're upset that people refuse to believe your "proof" that Wellstone was killed, so you drag this out, the goal being to show that because there was a possibility that Kennedy was the victim of conspiracy, so was Wellstone.

Exactly what is the connection here? Any, or are you just trolling again?

How about presenting evidence that more than one gunmen shot JFK (of which there is plenty) or that there might have been a conspiracy to assassinate him. Simply throwing around odds does not mean anything - odds can be defied, just ask any lottery winner.

For the record: I do not think Oswald acted alone, and suspect there may have been a conspiracy behind the assassination. But don't let that stop you or others from claiming otherwise.