Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (9 page)

. . . doesn’t mean that what they have to say is
legitimate
.

Remember the Asch effect! We learned a powerful lesson from that experiment: make your decision exclusively by looking at the
facts
, and
ignore what the crowd says
. This can take some guts, and can on occasion be hazardous to your health:

So, inspired by the latter of the photographs above, we decide to take a chance and look at the facts related to The Case Against Oswald. Unfortunately, we have a problem there too, and at first glance, it is a big one.

When we examine the data on a cursory basis, it appears that this time the mass media may have got one right; the evidence against Oswald does
indeed
initially appear overwhelming. There is not just one piece of evidence which goes against him, not even two, nor three, or four, but
dozens upon dozens
of isolated facts which, when added up together, apparently point out — seemingly irrefutably — to his guilt.

Let’s start from where the shots were fired. According to the Warren Commission and the
House Select Committee On Assassinations
(HSCA), all the shots that were fired in Dealey Plaza on November 22 originated from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was employed. Whose gun was found on the sixth floor? Oswald’s! A bullet was said to have been found on John Connally’s stretcher, and from whose gun was it fired? Oswald’s! Three shells that were ejected from Oswald’s rifle were claimed to have been found on the sixth floor, and since the majority of witnesses reported that only three shots were fired (according to the Warren Commission), the most likely perpetrator had to be — of course — Oswald.

And further . . . Oswald’s palm print was found on the rifle; his fingerprints were found on some of the boxes; Oswald was observed to be in the building at the time of the assassination; a bag was found on the sixth floor, and Oswald had told a co-worker the extremely suspicious story that the contents of a paper bag he was going to carry into the building contained curtain rods; however, this bag could have also held a disassembled rifle, and considering what happened, a far more likely alternative.

And if you needed any more evidence than the hard data items listed above, just consider the fact that Oswald was a “loner,” a Marxist, a person who defected from the United States, a person accused of earlier firing a shot at another public figure, General Edwin Walker (the natural inference: if true, his alleged attack on the President would not have been an isolated incident), and to top it all off, a person suspected of killing a police officer in an “escape from the scene of the crime.”

Let’s see . . . killed a cop? Check! Fled from the scene? Check! Caught red-handed in a photograph holding a rifle and two militant newspapers? Triple-check!

“It’s not Oswald”???? . . . who else
could
it be?

Do you really need any more facts? Let’s face it, just based on the above, you have to conclude that this guy was a sure candidate for the electric chair. Jack Ruby did us all a favor, and saved us the cost of what could have been an extremely expensive trial. And did the Warren Commission really have to write over 24,000 pages of documentation proving Oswald’s guilt, supplemented by several thousand more by the HSCA? Why did Vincent Bugliosi have to write
Reclaiming History
? His 2800+ page extensive analysis
proves
, in Bugliosi’s schema, that Oswald was guilty far beyond a reasonable doubt.

Forget Stephen King and
The Kennedys
. That’s just fiction anyway. If you want the facts, Bugliosi is your man. The eminent district attorney and author told us just how difficult defending Oswald is, and how naïve Warren Commission critics and “conspiracy theorists” are, and given the evidence, who could blame him? (RH 952)

[T]here is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world — you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera — you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you. That’s just not what happens in life.

Bugliosi then went on to quote his opening argument to the jury in the 1986 mock trial of Oswald broadcast on
Showtime
, with Bugliosi successfully squaring off against famed defense attorney Gerry Spence (RH 952; emphasis supplied):

I articulated this fact in my opening argument to the jury in London: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when a man is innocent of a crime, chances are there isn’t going to be anything at all pointing towards his guilt. Nothing at all pointing towards his guilt. But now and then, because of the very nature of life, and the unaccountability of certain things, there may be one thing that points towards his guilt, even though he is innocent. In an unusual situation, maybe even two things point to his guilt, even though he is innocent. And in a very rare and strange situation, maybe even three things point to his guilt, even though he is completely innocent. But
with Lee Harvey Oswald, everything, everything points towards his guilt. In fact, the evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80 percent of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.
”

And then, in case his level of doubt was in doubt, Bugliosi removed all doubt (RH 952; footnote omitted, emphasis supplied):

Indeed,
the evidence against Oswald proves his guilt not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt
, or, as they say in the movies, beyond a shadow of a doubt. In other words, not just one or two or three pieces of evidence point toward Oswald’s guilt, but more than fifty pieces point irresistibly to his guilt. And not only does all of the physical, scientific evidence point solely and exclusively to Oswald’s guilt, but virtually everything he said and did points unerringly to his guilt. Under these circumstances,
it is not humanly possible for him to be innocent, at least, as I said, not in the real world in which we live. Only in a fantasy world could Oswald be innocent and still have all this evidence against him. I think we can put it this way:
If Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, then Kennedy wasn’t killed on November 22, 1963
.

Powerful words. Persuasive words. Unambiguous words. And Bugliosi was no wet-behind-the-ears kid fresh out of law school. As a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney, he won 105 out of 106 felony cases.
3
Who could possibly want to begin to try to refute the remarks of an extremely competent prosecutor with seemingly every fact of the Kennedy assassination at his fingertips?

Your answer: yours truly!

Incredible though it may seem, I am convinced that Bugliosi is wrong, and for that matter, Stephen King, Tom Hanks, Bill O’Reilly, and anyone else who happens to agree with him, whether CBS, ABC, PBS, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Bill Clinton, the history textbook you read in high school or college, etc. etc. etc.

How sure am I? So sure that I’m willing to put anywhere from $1,000 to $12,000 on the line, and possibly higher, to prove I’m right.

Yes, as Rodgers and Hammerstein once told us in the classic musical
Cinderella
, “impossible things are happening every day,” and to show that’s no fairy-tale, I want to prove the impossible, that
there is
absolutely no case
against Lee Harvey Oswald
!

Nada
. None whatsoever. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

But, if you can prove me wrong to the satisfaction of a unanimous virtual jury of 12 arbitrators, the money is yours . . .

Are you salivating yet? Got that cruise planned already? (I recommend
The Jazz Cruise
, or maybe a poker cruise, where you can parlay those thousands into multiples of thousands).

The rules for this engagement, which I will refer to using the umbrella term
The JFK Challenge
, are contained later in this book (partly) and more specifically and more completely the third volume of this book, as of this writing. Information related to
The JFK Challenge
(whether in fact anyone accepts the challenge or not, the amounts to be awarded, and the results, if any) will be contained at the following link:

http://www.krusch.com/jfk
(then click the “JFK Challenge” link)

Why create
The JFK Challenge
? Because I am convinced of one other thing that you simply won’t believe. Here it is:

Not only do
I
believe there is no Case Against Oswald whatsoever, I don’t believe that there is
even one person
in the United States, and possibly the
world
, that will
accept
the challenge, proving that
no one else
believes it either!

Now, wouldn’t
that
be something? Just think: millions upon millions upon millions of media impressions that “Oswald did it, Oswald did it, Oswald did it”, creating what we can call
The Oswald Wall
, Oswald’s guilt assumed in history courses throughout the land and DVDs formerly littering the shelves of
Blockbuster
(now streaming video from
Netflix
and
Amazon
), and millions of people exposed to these impressions who supposedly buy into this blarney, and yet no one — not
one
— who is confident enough to take on the challenge.

I mean, what would that mean? The thought is staggering. Here’s one implication:

A chief judge of the United States Supreme Court was
wrong
, and a guy meandering in the woods pondering alien agendas was
right
!

(let us all pause to let this sink in . . .)
Of course, whether this turns out to be the case, only time will tell.

While we wait for the results (tick, tick, tick . . .), let’s proceed and take a look at the method by which I seek to prove that The Case Against Oswald is impossible —
actually
impossible, not one of the “impossible” things that can and do happen every day.

I will start here with the low-hanging fruit, and zero out the really bad arguments, like this one:

Communists are bad.

Assassins are bad.

Oswald was a Communist.

Therefore, Oswald killed Kennedy.

Now, I don’t know if anyone actually believes anything like this, but if they did, they really must have some wires crossed in their mind. To have any hope whatsoever of turning this into something logically sound, we would have to articulate the implicit, unstated premises here, which is that “all Communists are assassins” and “all assassins are Communists.” These unarticulated premises can be destroyed simply by observing that if the lone assassin theory was true, and there were 10,000 Communists in the United States in 1963, we would know for a fact that
9999 of them could not have killed Kennedy
. In addition, if there were 1000 assassins in 1963, we would also know that 999 did not kill Kennedy either. Even this wouldn't do it. To save this syllogism, we would have to manufacture yet another (obviously false) premise “All assassins killed Kennedy,” and what would be the point of that? So this logic is clearly incorrect, and anyone who believes it is . . . dare I say it . . .
crazy
.

Just as bad is this one:

People who believe in aliens are crazy.

Jim Marrs believes in aliens, and a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

People who believe in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy are crazy.