Which evidence is essential?
March 2001
Given the huge mass of evidence in the JFK case, it is surprising that there
have not been more attempts to rank it in importance. To be sure, many writers
try this in a tentative, intuitive way, and scattered articles have tried it
seriously with the physical evidence. But there seems to have been no serious,
comprehensive attempt at it. The more I consider the JFK assassination and its
morass of evidence, the more I think that its lack of organization is a major
failing.
I have been toying with this subject for several months.
Recently I started to experiment with it in a small way, but exploring which
pieces of evidence are not needed to get the right answer. Such evidence might
be called "inessential." I began with an open mind, and first
considered evidence in the medical area because this part of the assassination
seems more confused than most. My very first entry dealt with whether we really
needed to know the height of the back wound, a contentious topic of late. Briefly,
one side agrees with the Warren Commission that Kennedy's back wound lay above
the scapula, the so-called "high" position. The other side claims that
the wound is actually inches lower, at the level of the holes in the shirt and
jacket, and maybe even on the photos of the back. This location might be called
the "low" position.
The stakes of the discussion are high. The high position
leads to a clear downward trajectory through the neck, and from there into
Connally's back (the single-bullet theory, or SBT for short). The low position
leads to thoughts of conspiracy. Since neither side seems willing to budge, I
started wondering just how vital this piece of information is, and whether we
couldn't work around it. My initial attempt confirmed that we didn't really need
to know the height of the wound, because evidence downstream linked the bullet
strongly to Oswald's rifle, which was fired from the sixth floor in the
depository.
Buoyed by this initial success, I started subjecting other
pieces of evidence to the same approach. For a while I feared that because the
physical evidence is so interlinked, everything would turn out to be inessential
provided that the other pieces were present. (This is like saying that the
tightness of the collection made every piece expendable as long as the rest was
present.) But I soon learned that this view was false, and that certain pieces
of evidence, even if only a few, are indispensable to understanding the JFK
assassination.
I am still at the beginning stages of this work. This
introductory page and its linked pages will develop rapidly during spring 2001,
for the topic they deal with is very important to understanding the assassination.
Do we need to know the height of the back wound?
My first attempt at writing down the logic about needing to
know a piece of evidence that is generally considered crucial. It appears here
in the form that I submitted it to the moderated newsgroup
alt.assassination.jfk, where it elicited several responses that could best be
considered "in the old mold" of thinking. To see this very short
essay, click
here.
Do we need to know the height of the rear head wound?
This is my second effort at determining which evidence is
essential and which not. The simple train of logic shows that because the NAA
connects the lead fragments from the head to Q2 from the front seat, and
ballistics connects Q2 to C2766 (Oswald's rifle), the bullet from Oswald's rifle
obviously passed through the head and into the area of the front seat. The rear
entry to the head must therefore allow this, and we don't need to know anything
more about its exact position. This powerful result is yet another manifestation
of the power of the NAA data. To see the chain of logic, click
here.
Do we need the Zapruder film?
(To be developed. In the meantime, see "The
Z-film hurt more than it helped.")
A summary table of essential and inessential evidence
(To be developed.)