Letters to the Editor
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Typical conspiracy approach
I urge everyone to go back and read Rob Anderson's interesting letter. Were I to parody a JFK buff I could not do a better job. It is just perfect.
The letter consists of a long list of supposedly factual statements, followed by an ad hominem attack on those who disagree.
By my count, Anderson makes 18 assertions of "fact." It only takes a few minutes to type those assertions, but it would take hours and blow away Salon's space considerations to address every claim.
Ten of the assertions are just wrong. Six are irrelevant. Two are in the "not quite" category. One is too vague to evaluate.
To take a few examples:
"Like how a clip-fed, bolt action Mauser rifle was the FIRST gun found, right there, leaning against the the other window, but that disappeared from the police report and evidence locker and history."
Factually wrong. No Mauser was found. One of the officers glanced at the rifle they did find, Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano and, as this officer later explained, mistook it for a Mauser. Another urban legend.
"Like the half-dozen people - some caught by Zapruder's camera, others by all the OTHER cameras of OTHER average folks hoping for a glimpse of the President - diving to the ground at the foot of the grassy knoll."
This is in the "so what" category. Gunshots were heard, men were shot, lots of people did what most of us would do: they hit the ground. Some of them were near the knoll. Others were not at the knoll. That people who just witnessed a gunshot crime were upset and ducked for cover is evidence that the witnesses were humans.
"Like the fact that Oswald was taught Russian and stationed at highly sensitive radar listening stations prior to his defection."
Not quite. The implication seems to call upon another urban legend, which is that the Marines (Oswald had joined the Marines) or some other government group "taught" Oswald Russian. Oswald tried to teach himself Russian but did not do a very good job. When he defected to the Soviet Union, he needed a translator in order to communicate. He learned the language while he lived there for two years.
As for his radar listening post, he was stationed in Japan and he worked at a radar post. Nothing he knew was valuable enough to interest the Russians. We know this because the Russians questioned him and said: this guy is worthless.
And so on. Rapid fire claims, most of them half-baked conspiracy myths, all of them adding up to very little. We have been getting this stuff since 1963. As some of the younger writers have pointed out, this is old news. It only lives on because the buffs are stuck in the past.
This is a true crime story, not a mystery.