Remember, remember 22 November...

...with gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I know no reason why 22 November
Should ever be forgot.

If one exams the evidence in the assassination of JFK as an historian, evaluating the evidence and being taken by that evidence to a conclusion, one must conclude that JFK's murder was accomplished by a conspiracy and there was a conspiracy to occlude the facts of the case. Note that those do not have to be the same conspiracy and may overlap very, very little.

By the evidence, I mean, not the report of the Warren Commission or the report of the House Committee but the actual documents that they used. Examination of the documentary evidence strongly indicates that Lee Oswald was an agent of Naval Intelligence, sent to the Soviet Union as a false defector. The evidence demands that at least 4 shots were fired at the presidential limousine, which precludes the use of the weapon that Oswald was alleged to have used. The evidence is incontrovertible that the CIA concealed their knowledge of Oswald's alleged visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassys in Mexico City -- the Agency states that straight out -- and supplied false information regarding those visits to the Warren Commission. The evidence is incontrovertible that the FBI did not report credible threats on the life of the president in the weeks leading up to 22 November 1963 to the Secret Service, as they were required to do by Bureau policy and by law.

These facts alone lead the open-minded to conclude that there was at least one, and probably two, conspiracies.

The number of people who have examined the evidence and concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin is vanishingly small. Clearly, somebody was lying about something.

It doesn't require an enormous conspiracy and the cover-up of Oswald's intelligence connections doesn't even require much in the way of malicious intent, just your usual bureaucratic urge to cover the collective asses. Would you want it bandied around that your intelligence operative was involved somehow in killing the president? No. The FBI's role is a lot more sinister but, again, that is quite possibly just a product of Hoover's hatred of the Kennedys and his own personality.

The JFK assassination does not have to be a mirror held up to American society. You do not have to draw grand theories of murderous cabals masterminding the fate of America for fun and profit. You do not have to envision scores of operatives carrying out a plan of intricate detail. You just have to look at the evidence for yourself and draw your own conclusions. But you must look at the original documentary evidence, not the sanitized, twisted, contextualized versions that are attempting to sell you a pig in a poke. And you have to play historian: evaluate the evidence.

Which is more likely to have a kernel of truth, a first day interview with a witness or that witnesses testimony, 4 months later? Do you accept the evidence of physics or the assumption of an investigator? If an official military record says one thing and a Warren Commission investigator tells you something different, who do you think is more credible? If every Selective Service card you can locate (and the statements of everybody that ever carried one) shows that SS cards did not have photographs on them and you are shown Oswald's card and it has a picture on it and that photograph is the same one that appears on his Soviet internal passport but that picture was made at a portrait studio in Dallas after Oswald's return from Russia, what do you conclude about the card and the passport, that they were authentic?

I could go on and on and on about the evidence and will if there is an interest on the part of readers of this blog. But never forget 22 November.