|
|
|
|
|
Kennedy Assassination TheoriesA number of theories exist with regard to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Often called conspiracy theories, these are usually scenarios involving powerful individuals and/or groups at the time who theoretically had motive and means to plan and execute the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Some of these theories have overlapping, shared motives within the groups, and some are distinct from each other. All of these theories dispute the plausibility of the official conclusion reached by the Warren Commission, that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone before, during and after the assassination, killed President Kennedy. The popularity of these theories may be a representation of the level of public distrust for official U.S. government key policies and statements of the time, having had some problems with U.S. government credibility. (See Pentagon Papers) Two government investigations and many government committee, board, and panel reports have not settled for most persons the question of who killed John F. Kennedy. Even Richard Nixon was quoted as saying that the Warren Commision was "...the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." Numerable professional polls, from 1963 to the present have consistently shown that 60% to 90% of the people polled do not agree that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a pre-meditated plan formed and implemented by Oswald alone. Looking specifically at the three most recent 2003 polls strongly supports this. An ABC TV News poll reflected that just 32 percent (plus or minus 3 percent) of Americans agree that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, while 68 percent do not agree Oswald acted alone.http://abcnews.go.com/images/pdf/937a1JFKAssassination.pdf A Discovery Channel poll reveals that only 21% agree Oswald acted alone, while 79% do not agree Oswald acted alone. http://poll.discovery.com/servlet/viewsflash?jfk=6&cmd=tally&pollid=jfk&results=data%2Fdsc%2Fpackage%2Fjfk.results.html&submit.x=51&submit.y=6 A History Channel poll details that only 17% of individuals agree that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, while 83 percent do not agree Oswald acted alone. http://www.historychannel.com/jfk/jfk_poll_results.jsp General disputes The security around Kennedy's motorcade had been stripped down from what it was documented to be in previous motorcades, a conclusion that the two official government investigations confirm. The lack of security suggests to some that the CIA, Secret Service and/or some other agent, rogue agent(s), or agencies were actively involved in the assassination, rather than simply negligent. Many people have pointed to the Warren Commission's single bullet theory as unlikely. Some ballistic evidence has suggested that such a bullet trajectory was possible, but this particular point is a source of much contention and disagreement. Other points of contention: - The presidential limo was immediately cleaned and repaired instead of being secured as ballistic evidence.
- Kennedy's body was also immediately taken to Washington, rather than examined by the local coroner as Texas law mandated.
- Governor Connallys hat, which he was holding in his right hand only inches away from his wrist when the wrist was shot completely through with a bullet, has disappeared from the evidence chain after last being seen in the Dallas police department Chiefs office the evening of November 22. According to Connally's wife and the official chain of evidence the Mexican Peso gold cufflink that Connally was wearing on his right shirt sleeve cuff of his hand that was wounded during the attack has disappeared (there was no gold found on the "magic bullet," nor any bullet fragment, nor in the limousine, nor within Dealey plaza)
- The Dallas police did not seal the Texas School Book Depository until 12:39 to 12:40 PM; policeman, detectives, witnesses, and others were busy searching the grassy knoll, parking lot, and railroad yard from 12:30 to 12:39 pm.
- The Dealey Plaza area itself was not sealed-off by the Dallas police, and within only nine minutes of the assassination, photographs show that vehicles were driving down Elm Street, through the crime scene kill zone.
- Oswald's military file was "routinely" destroyed in 1973.
- Several of the Bethesda autopsy photos are now missing.
- The location of President Kennedy's brain is not accounted for.
Whether or not allowed deliberately, these actions suggest, at the very least, poor handling of evidence at hand. Questions about the Bethesda Hospital autopsy performed 11-22-63 by three military personnel abound, including how an easily seen on the x-rays, conveniently sized 6.5 mm and mostly round, bullet fragment located at the rear of the presidents head almost 3 inches (75 mm) above the Warren Commissions bullet entry point (traveling at 1800 to 2000 ft/s (549 to 610 m/s)) but on the outside of President Kennedys skull could have been missed by the 11-22-63 autopsists. This fragment was never reported by the Warren Commission or testified to by the autopsists, and was not officially commented about until the x-rays were limitedly restricted for release to researchers in 1966, and when the x-rays were reviewed by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968. Proving to an absolute certainty any conspiracy theory or combination of theories about the Kennedy assassination, or, conversely, disproving that the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald acted alone, may never occur. There are still thousands of pages of documentation being withheld from the public, and possibly several, as yet, un-publicized pieces of physical evidence such as photographs/films, Governor Connally's "Stetson" hat, and living witnesses that have yet to come forward. Theories Note that the some of the following people and groups have been claimed by some to have been working together and as such these different theories are not allways viewed as mutually exclusive. - Vice President Johnson organized or took part in the assassination. Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy's death, as it promoted him to the presidency. President Kennedy had discussed with his closest aides (and even discussed with his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln) that he was thinking of dropping Vice President Lyndon Johnson before the 1964 U.S. presidential election. Richard Nixon, who was also in Dallas from November 20, 1963 until just an hour before Kennedy arrived, was quoted in the November 22, 1963 Dallas newspaper saying he also believed Kennedy would drop Johnson. President Kennedy was most likely seriously thinking about dropping Johnson because of the fact that Johnson was the subject of 4 criminal investigations involving government contracts, money laundering, bribes, murder, etc., (All 4 scandals "disappeared" after November 22, 1963) http://rense.com/general40/thewnk.htm Johnson biographers support that Johnson was politically aggressive and power-hungry, and others have written that Johnson was an agent of the mafia—being blackmailed by the mafia with several of his past criminal actions.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/8.html?sect=24
- The U.S. "Military-industrial complex," which had been preparing for an escalation of the Vietnam War since the French withdrew from Vietnam in 1955, knew that President Kennedy had seriously discussed plans and implemented actions to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam. At the moment that President Kennedy was killed, over 1000 U.S. troops were in the air on their way home as part of President Kennedy's initial steps of withdrawing from Vietnam.
- The CIA, or, rogue CIA agents, killed Kennedy for a number of reasons, mainly for not backing the CIA-orchestrated Bay of Pigs Invasion with air support. After the failed Cuban invasion, Kennedy fired CIA Director and future Warren Commission commissioner, Alan Dulles, and vowed to his closest advisors to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces" and possibly install his brother, Robert F. Kennedy as the CIA Director.
- John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy (who was also assassinated in 1968 when he ran for president) were killed by the Mafia in retaliation for their increasing crackdowns (12 times the number of prosecutions under Eisenhower) against organized crime. Documents that the Warren Commission never saw have revealed that the mafia was working very closely with the CIA on several assassination attempts of Fidel Castro. The CIA under the Kennedys approached the mafia because the CIA recognized the mutual motives of ousting Castro with the mafia's motive being the reclaiming of billions of dollars that the mafia lost from gambling, drugs, prostitution, etc. when Castro seized the mafia's assets in 1959. Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, and Santo Trafficante Jr., all of whom except for Hoffa worked with the CIA on the Castro assassination plots, top the list of the House Select Committee on Assassinations mafia suspects.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/7.html. The family of Chicago mafia Godfather Sam Giancana claims the Kennedys double-crossed him after the mafia, via workers unions that the Illinois mafia controlled, had helped Kennedy be elected President. Ruby had grown up working for mafia leader Al Capone in Chicago.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/kennedy/6.html
- Angry Cuban anti-Castro exiles trained by and still working with the CIA killed Kennedy for his failure to give greater backing to the failed Bay of Pigs operation to overthrow Castro's Communist dictatorship
- J. Edgar Hoover did not want to retire even though he was approaching in 1964 the then-mandatory government retirement age of 65 and would be retired by President Kennedy. It is known that Hoover despised the Kennedy's for many reasons stated by him to confidantes. Several people have provided sources that Hoover was a gay transvestite. He did live with one of his male lieutenants, Cartha DeLoach. If true, and if the mafia knew of Hoover's sexual preference, the mafia could have been blackmailing Hoover to secure his silence whether Hoover knew about the assassination conspirators beforehand, after, or not. This blackmail by the mafia of Hoover, like Hoovers good friend and next-door neighbor Lyndon Johnson, may have also extended to any investigations cover-up and guaranteed Hoovers compliance and silence after the assassination. It is documented that before President Kennedy was elected, that Hoover rarely acknowledged even the existence of the mafia. After Kennedy became president the prosecutions of the mafia by the Robert F. Kennedy led Justice department (of which the FBI was/is a part of) increased 11-fold. After President Kennedy was murdered, Justice department mafia prosecutions reversed back to the pre-Kennedy levels. In 1964, just days before his Warren Commission testimony, Hoover was appointed Director of the FBI "for life" by Kennedy's successor, Johnson.
- Persons who were politically to the far-right, specifically oil businessmen and their supporting bankers, many from Texas, who stood to lose billions of dollars of profits because President Kennedy wanted to discontinue the 27.5% oil depletion tax credit allowance.
- Cuban President Fidel Castro's agents killed President Kennedy in retaliation for the many times the CIA and mafia had worked together and tried to kill Castro. In September 1963 Castro publicly warned the U.S. about American leaders not being safe if they think they could kill him. On November 22, 1963 an agent of the CIA was assigned to kill Castro with a poison-pen weapon at their next meeting. It is notable that in 1962 the Kennedy's had ordered the CIA to cease the assassination attempts against Castro. The CIA ignored the president's order, and continued with assassination training and attempts, unbeknownst to the president or Robert Kennedy. Starting in the second half of 1963 it is also documented that President Kennedy, through private back channels, had approached Castro with overtures of a rapproachment in relations. http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/7.html
- The Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) was threatened by Kennedy's intentions concerning restoring precious-metals backing to U.S. currency. http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thefederalreserve.htm (Note that the Secret Service was created as a anti-money-counterfeiting agency, and was until 2003 an organ of the Treasury—a direct line from the Fed to Kennedy's security. The same anti-hard-currency motive is suspected in the Garfield and Lincoln assassinations.
- South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem found out in June 1963 during electronic surveillance of the U.S. embassy in South Vietnam that the U.S. was helping his political enemies plan a coup against Diem. Diem was also profiting from exporting drugs from the Asia "golden triangle" to the French mafia and on to North America via the U.S. mafia and if he were ousted in a coup, millions of dollars of Diem's drug profits would be lost. Even though Diem was killed in a coup on November 2, 1963, the plans to assassinate Kennedy went ahead for revenge and/or because of Diem's illegal co-entanglements with the world mafia organizations and the mafia motives.
- Kennedy was killed to prevent World War III, a direct nuclear war with the Soviets. While Kennedy would be outwardly insulting and embarrassing to Soviet leaders, he was in reality perceived by the Communists as too young, idealistic and inexperienced for the Soviets to take him seriously. Kennedy was considered to be the ultimate cause for the breakdown in relations between the US and USSR, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The high tensions of this event led many to fear that Kennedy's rhetoric could only lead to a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Hard-line planners had decided to take the initiative in replacing Kennedy. Another side effect of killing Kennedy was that it would demoralize Americans. This theory is highly unlikely, as KGB documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union state that the KGB's report to Russian leadership on Kennedy's death specifically accused Lyndon Johnson.
- Kennedy was killed by avenging persons who plotted to defend the honor of first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who had supposedly suffered greatly through the repeated indignity of JFK's alleged compulsive womanizing.
- In an effort to relieve the severe physical and emotional pain with which he was plagued, John F. Kennedy took the unusual step of planning the assassination himself and thus in effect indirectly committed suicide, which his Roman Catholic faith would not permit him to do directly. Earlier in 1963, JFK had spoken to friends about making arrangement for his death.
- Kennedy's death was staged; there is no hard evidence that he was in fact killed in 1963, and the description of the body on which the autopsy was performed does not match JFK's actual body.
Johnson, Vietnam, and World War III right One of the combined-theories for the assassination of Kennedy was that it served to replace a young, reckless, and disregarded Kennedy with a mature and forceful Johnson. Johnson, who may or may not have had a role, would likely (or would have been known to) pursue the strategy of escalating the conflict in Vietnam, and the defense industry profits derived from the war, to the maximum. The assassination itself was orchestrated by various intelligence officials, who recruited sympathetic figures from criminal organizations to do the act itself. According to the theory, Johnson was either thought of as better suited than Kennedy, was blackmailed because he was being investigated for complicity in 4 investigations, and/or Johnson was simply part of the plan itself. The degrees to which Johnson had acted out of personal greed or perceived necessity are speculative. At some point, it was decided that Kennedy should be replaced, and a patsy pro-Communist assassin would both distance Johnson from the assassination, and to set the public agenda again toward "fighting communism." It is interesting that Johnson also used the potential threat of at least forty-million Americans being killed in a World War III when he persuaded Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the Warren Commission. (Warren, initially, did not want to head the commission) The Cold War was by far the most urgent issue, and the young Kennedy was perceived as being both reckless and unauthoritative in the eyes of the Soviets. Because of these factors, many had feared that Kennedy would inevitably draw the US closer to an all-out war with the USSR; the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite having "ended successfully" were in fact complete failures in the view of many in security planning and intelligence. The general US plan (of which Kennedy had originally supported) included the inflammation of the existing Vietnam conflict (hoping to be a pressure valve for tensions with the USSR), but it had not yet been put fully into motion. Central to the "strategy" was the portrayal of the conflict as one between a Communist North and an "anti-Communist" South, when instead it was civil war within the South between an ethnic minority in power, and a peasant majority that was open-minded to the North's communist land reform policies. The U.S. and the minority Vietnamese government would "purge" the country of its majority political dissidents. Less than six years after Kennedy's assassination, even the once hard-line Johnson had begun to concede that the cruel realities of the Vietnam War could not be reconciled with its claimed "anti-Communist" intent, and he declined to run for a second term. Kennedy's first years in office confirmed to critics that he was not capable of projecting the seriousness required to effectively confront Soviet expansion. He had also begun to understand that escalation of conflict in Vietnam would lead to mass-scale human slaughter, and had started to recall U.S. forces, turning backward on the plan which he had previously been in support of. Johnson, unlike Kennedy would pursue the Indochina proxy war strategy with gusto, immediately resending recalled troops back to Vietnam, and continuing in the policy of escalation. Shortly after Kennedy's assassination, Johnson increased US involvement in Vietnam, and ordered the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a way to publicize the war to Americans as an aggression by the North. This quick change in US policy is a key issue that confirms for many Johnson's role in Kennedy's death.
|
 |
|
| Copyright 2005-2009 OnPedia.com. All Rights Reserved |
|
|