JFK Lancer Conference

[Duke Lane]

The question that remains to be resolved is who (if any) were the co-conspirators. In a way, we are not too far apart on the issue whether LBJ was a co-conspurator. You argue he was a conspirator. I believe (suspect) he was given foreknowledge which might very well make him an accessory before the fact.

I have long been of the opinion that it would be nearly impossible - if not entirely so - to identify and, more importantly, indict any of the "top echelon" conspirators since if they had half a brain - as even anyone on this forum does, without any kind of training - they would have been cautious not to leave any incriminating evidence or connections (or, some might add, witnesses!) behind.

Hell, this is what people who hire "contract killers" (who usually end up being cops ... at least in those instances that we hear about!) to kill their wives or husbands for insurance money are out to do. Some undoubtedly succeed. Those, like CIA's lament about their successful ops, we don't hear about; only the unsuccessful ones.

If (some of) those people can get away with murder (quite literally), why should we not suppose that anyone "higher on the food chain" of a Kennedy hit would not do the same, only better and more successfully? Indeed, some of them (such as a J. Edgar Hoover) were so respected in their time that they would never have come under suspicion anyway, and if someone pointed the finger at them, they'd be laughed out of court. (Of course, in Hoover's case, that might no longer be the case ... but then, you'd still have to prove his involvement, right?)

If - and I consider this to be a relatively large "if" - someone were able to identify the functionaries, the guys working the deal at the "street" level, and came up with a case that at least warranted official investigation, then perhaps that would lead to them identifying someone - or several someones - who had a "higher" hand in it.

The trouble with that, of course, is that so many people want to be the Grassy Knoll Gunman or want to claim that someone else was (we have several examples of that even now ... it's their fifteen minutes of fame, I guess), and their stories are so full of holes if not patently false that it would be hard, I think, to get any "official" attention to the matter after all of this "crying wolf."

Or, at least, harder than it may have been without these flakes: few people are aware, for example, that the Texas Attorney General's office actually began an investigation into the Roscoe White affair. That it led nowhere is, according to far too many people, a result of "the continuing cover-up" rather than the fact that evidence to the contrary outweighed the (non-existant) evidence of his guilt.

As to Johnson, while again there would likely be nothing left behind with his fingerprints on it, while I've always kind-of thought of his visage in the photo taken of him behind and to the right of JFK talking in Fort Worth outside the hotel as having some sort of sinister cast to it (like "you'll be dead in a couple of hours!"), what has more struck me as odd is the photo taken of him with Harold Byrd sometime after his presidency was over: you'd think a wise politician who only attained his high office as a result of his predecessor's death would have a little more couth than to be seen - and photographed - publicly with the man who'd owned the building his predecessor was supposedly shot from!

Nevertheless, absent some other form of evidence, es machts nichts.

Still: to believe Lee Oswald did it by his lonesome, alone and unaided ...? Sorry, folks, but I've got a "reasonable doubt," and so would have to vote to acquit.