General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. [View all]nyquil_man
(1,443 posts)than I am. Even when I believed in a conspiracy, my reasoning for believing in it had more to do with the evidence from Dealey Plaza. Commotions on the knoll, earwitness testimony, puffs of smoke, dictabelt recordings. I was even inclined to believe things like Badge Man and Black Dog Man, or the testimony of people like Ed Hoffman and Gordon Arnold.
The conspiracy view which clings most closely to the evidence is one shooter in the TSBD and another shooter on the grassy knoll. The earwitnesses overwhelmingly cited those two locations. But there are even problems with that; the overwhelming majority of earwitnesses also only heard three shots and only from one location, whether it was the TSBD or the knoll. What's more, that second shooter has never been identified, despite many people running in that direction following the shooting.
The evidence for a shooter in the TSBD is pretty hard for me to ignore. Witnesses report seeing a gun, with one of those witnesses providing a description of the shooter. Three witnesses on the fifth floor report hearing gunshots being fired from above them, with one of those witnesses even hearing the bolt being operated and the shells hitting the floor. I suppose it could be argued that all of those witnesses are mistaken or were coerced, but it's a stretch. And in the case of the TSBD, we do have a suspect.
I think that the path to discovering conspiracy lies either through identifying another shooter and exploring that shooter's connections and associations or in proving Oswald's connections to a conspiracy. And that is where my notions of conspiracy get dashed on the rocks. Attempts to put other shooters on the scene never pan out; attempts to create Oswald connections are mostly built on implication.