The track record of Breivik, a genuine ‘lone madman’, puts the record of Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly another one, in an interesting light.
Breivik brought all the weapons with him, Oswald after the assassination went home for his pistol. Breivik took every opportunity to declare his ideology — talking, for instance, for two hours in the dock — and Oswald did not. Breivik had no children (like every other US presidential assassin, and would-be assassin), Oswald had two daughters. Breivik immediately admitted his crime, Oswald looked genuinely puzzled when asked if he had killed the President.’No, sir, I did not,’ he said.
Breivik had a motive to do what he did, for him it was the first battle in the war against the foul tide of Muslim immigration, Oswald had none. Kennedy had been the Soviets’ best friend, averting nuclear war with them a year before, and lately proposing to get out of Vietnam after engineering the killing there of his fellow-Catholics the Diem brothers, and Oswald had spoken admiringly of both him and Castro, something many of us did in those days. He knew, he surely knew that Johnson, a man of Texas, would go harder on the Communists than Kennedy, a man of Massachussetts, and New York, and Harvard, who had diplomatic training and a good relationship with Khruschev.
Nothing that Oswald did after his arrest gave any indication that he was insane. He tried to get a top lawyer, one who worked for the ACLU. Visited in gaol by his wife and mother, he expressed concern for his daughters. Interrogated for seven hours, he testified so convincingly that all records of what he said were quickly destroyed. The presidential car, moreover, though a crime scene, was washed of its blood and its bits of brain (and evidence, perhaps, of a bullet from a different gun and another direction), the film of the President’s autopsy destroyed, the Zapruder film locked up for five years, the Warren Commission instructed to consider only Oswald as a suspect, and so on.
And evidence that Oswald was a madman, acting alone.
It was as plausible an idea as me saying a lone madman took out Osama Bin Laden.
Or Julius Caesar.
Or Philip of Macedon. Or King Saul of Israel. Or Benito Mussolini. Or Adolf Hitler. Or Olaf Palme. Or Salvador Allende. Or Mrs Ghandi. Or Rajiv Ghandi. Or Mahatma Ghandi. Or Benigno Aquino. Or Abraham Lincoln.
Or Bobby Kennedy, whose killer was waiting for him in a place he was not bound for but was abruptly led to by an authoritative white young man man who was never seen or heard of again.
There are not many lone madmen who successfully kill world leaders. Breivik, for instance, hoped to behead a former female Prime Minister but failed to. Usually, not always, the security is very good and it takes a conspiracy to get the assailant close enough to aim and fire, as in the case of Bin Laden. The twenty-six assassination attempts on Castro showed how hard it is. After twenty-six attempts, and six hundred CIA and Miami Cuban masterplans to kill him, he is living still.
And yet we are still told Oswald did it. And he didn’t bring his pistol with him. Had to go home for it. And another lone madman just happened to be walking his dogs near the front of the Dallas police station when Oswald, in mid perp walk, came into the vicinity of his pistol, which he just happened to be carrying, a lone madman with inoperable cancer who died in gaol two years later. What a coincidence. Two lone mad killers in the same town within three days, each of them successful, one of them with cancer. Wow. What a happy coincidence.
Give me a break.
The Lone Madman theory suits American arrogance — only a madman would want to kill our President — and closely resembles the Former Soviet Union’s longtime habit of putting in lunatic asylums those dissidents who disagreed with its policies and loudly said so.
It could be easily sorted by asking Sirhan Sirhan, under waterboarding perhaps, who the authoritative young man was, and who he was working for. It was the Mafia, probably, or the CIA or both. The ones who also, probably, took Jack out.
Oswald had no motive, but Lyndon Johnson, who suceeded Jack as President and was Dallas’s most powerful citizen, did. So did the CIA, which Jack had already fired the head of, Allen Dulles, and was planning to dismantle in 1965. So did J. Edgar Hoover, whom Jack planned to fire until he saw the many FBI photos of him, Jack, fucking, and was planning to fire in 1965 when he turned seventy.
It is usually the case that if someone without motive is found guilty of murder, the verdict is wrong. It was wrong in the case of Lindy Chamberlain, who loved her baby and threatened none of her other children. It was wrong in the case of OJ Simpson, who was wrongly said to have nearly hacked the head off the mother of his children while the children slept upstairs, and left her where they would find her in the morning.
Oswald had no motive. And he had two daughters to raise.
It is time this burden was lifted from him.
Breivik has shown what he should have been like.
And he wasn’t.
Name:
How about the attempt to kill Reagan?
Who sent Hinckley? Jodie Foster?
From wikipedia:
“Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity on June 21, 1982. The defense psychiatric reports had found him to be insane[62] while the prosecution reports declared him legally sane.[63][64] Following his lawyers’ advice, he declined to take the stand in his own defense.[65] Hinckley was confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he is still being held.[4] After his trial, he wrote that the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world”, and did not indicate any regrets.[66]“
He was indeed a lone madman obsessively driven, which makes him, and Squeaky Fromm, the only examples of lone mad assassins in the last eighty years, among twenty others who were conspirators — James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, the unknown killer of Olaf Palme, the doctors who took out Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith and mentally disabled Harold Wilson, the failed assassins of Joe Ramos Horta, Harry Truman and FDR, the politically driven assassins of the three Ghandis and Benazir Bhutto, the religiously driven killers of Pope John Paul 1, the Chinese killers of John Newman, the Estonian who rolled a grenade towards George Bush, the 9/11 conspirators whose plane aimed at the White House but crashed in Pennsylvania, and so on.
Your point being?
“the 9/11 conspirators whose plane aimed at the White House”
Inside job, Bob?
No. Conspirators planned to kill a lot of American people, including, they hoped, the President.
Except… (from Wikipedia)
Hinckley’s father was a financial supporter of George H.W. Bush’s 1980 presidential primary campaign, where Bush was Reagan’s closest rival for the Republican nomination prior to becoming his Vice President. Hinckley’s older brother, Scott, had a dinner date scheduled at the home of Neil Bush the day after the Reagan assassination attempt. Neil’s wife Sharon indicated in a newspaper interview the day after the shooting that Scott was coming to their house as a date of a girlfriend of hers, and that she didn’t “know the brother [John]” but understood “that he was the renegade brother in the family.” Sharon described the Hinckleys as “a very nice family” and that they had “given a lot of money to the Bush campaign.”
You might be onto something, Simon.
Curious…
Another conspiracy.
He gets like that on nights of the full moon.
I have great sympathy for Lee Harvey Oswald. At all relevant times he was an agent of the CIA; that is my conclusion based on my research amongst what primary sources remain, and reading between the lines of the innumerable secondary sources. I don’t think any of them has got it right, and perhaps now no-one ever can.
Oswald was doing what his country – USA – wanted of him at all times. He was a marine by training; he learned Russian in a US sponsored “finishing school”, and then pretended to defect to the Soviet Union. But apart from acquiring a Russian wife, the Russians were having none of it.
He re-defected (!) back to the USA and was allowed back in after three days debriefing, and took up life in New Orleans, ostensibly as a pro-Castro activist. But the Cuban leftists were having none of it either, and he was unable to penetrate the Castro movement.
So there he was, fairly useless to anyone. Then he was sent to Dallas, told to mail order a rifle, and apparently to attempt to assassinate General Walker (a noted rabid anti-communist) but he missed a stationary target from 30m.
Perhaps deliberately? Almost certainly, in an attempt to gain some leftist credibility. He is told to rant and rave against Kennedy.
Then in November 1963, Kennedy is shot just outside his building – I think I would get the wind up too.
He fled home but apparently still following instructions took a pistol (?) and went to a movie theatre (!) probably to rendezvous with his controller; who can know now?
Did he shoot police officer Tippett? Perhaps.
Did he shoot at Kennedy? Very unlikely. Did he kill Kennedy? Totally and utterly impossible, physically, scientifically, ballistically impossible.
Impossible.
Having begun as a conspiracist, my reading has led me to entirely the opposite conclusion, Doug. Oswald acted alone.
His alleged involvement with the CIA has been debunked convincingly.
I do concede motive remains at issue, although much has been plausibly put forward to lay this to rest. Even a cursory look at his life suggests much.
The problem with so much of the Kennedy assassination is the imbalance between the scale of the event and the assassin.
In every instance (RFK, 911, Princess Diana) it offends our sensibilities when the mighty are felled so capriciously.
It would not surprise me to read that some may accuse Breivik of being part of a wider and more sinister net for the very same reason.
There are even those that state Martin Bryant was not guilt of his massacre.
I’d like to see where “His alleged involvement with the CIA has been debunked convincingly.”
One hand never knew what the other hand was doing, need to know and
all that stuff.
It was, as I said, physically impossible for there to have been any ‘lone gunman’.
On the matter of the CIA and under Hoover. The CIA was highly corrupt and the US was rotten with thuggery, ex intelligence, and police and military force and Mafia to the core and across nations.
Here in QLD pre Fitzgerald (and after) it was a scene of widespread conglomeration of players through all levels and walks of life with multiple ties and most unknowingly intertwined.
the movements of black ops was very interesting if true,that was mentioned in one of the movies.
I would refer you to the HSCA’s extensive investigation of any possible CIA association. These included interviews, depositions and executive session hearings.
They covered serving and past serving personnel including division chiefs, clandestine case officers, area desk officers and research analysts.
Each of these employees were released from their oath of secrecy. This was a serious and thorough investigation. The full report can be read online (I think I quoted the link last time we locked horns).
We have previously covered the reasons why I hold your statement as to the physical impossibility of their being a lone gunman to be false.
For a quick, yet thorough, review of the case against conspiracy, Allthumbs gave you a link to the McAdams website. It represents a good, sourced overview.
We must agree to differ, because the HSCA was ineffective, and incapable of investigating its own lunch menu.
I referred to it only in that it broke the brick wall which the Warren Commission erected.
The USA kept its secrets quite well, pre internet.
Hoover was FBI, not CIA.
I agree. We have reached a disagreement on the veracity of sources and can go no further; until the next provocation, of course
Thank you.Nearly forgot- CIA- bodyshirt or Hawaiian print, and pilot sunglasses. FBI-short sleeve workshirt.
Why would a man with two daughters kill a politician he liked?
Why?
I haven’t indulged in any matter of Breivik. I will spare myself any look into his mind and the contemplation of the families mass pain.
He doesn’t have to be insane. By community demand and expectation, yes. Look what people are capable of doing to each other through history. Torture, cruelty, deceit and butchering and execution.Home for tea and forgot it by 8.30. In many cases it is just the person type.
Watching someone getting their head hacked off with a butcher knife on the net could’ve shocked a gentle person, enough to an eventual act of madness I think. A tipping point of horror amongst much other in someone’s life just all clicking into place.
I wonder how many more and fragile souls from the wars, may be pushed to brinks?
His crime, I have no word for the horror, but what IF he was a beautiful person so horrified, shocked and damaged by what was around him and politics courtesy of global media that has lead to this?
Many people do to others what is done to them. It is in nature.
Oswald, I’ve always wondered if he did’nt do it from a child because of his mannerisms that I viewed on TV. Besides being bashed around, he seemed to be any of us in a nightmare and getting through it thinking of his day in court or for anyone to listen.
I shot roo’s on the plains and scrub, pigs, foxes and wildcats for twenty years and the spray never looked right from the shot from where we were supposed to be viewing from. My eyesight is not so good now, too much smoking, night driving and spotlighting but I am very good with angles and trajectories and from machining and timber work.
Then again, Oswald was a professional. He would have walked through thoughts ,scenario’s and dreams in his calling and prospects much worse by far than what he went through. It would have been a walk in the park and a life and career climax for someone not so right.
I’ve seen some matter on 9/11 conspiracy and much of it was totally explainable. A fellow blogger put pictures up supposedly of one of the planes that was eye raising but i’m sure it was explainable as the rest.
How did we get on to all this?
Now you just leave Tony and the Liberals alone Bob.
jim, both Breivik and Bryant are insane, Bryant went to jail and Breivik will go into some kind healthcare place for rehabilition…
9/11 is one conspiracy I won’t come at, except that Bush may have connived at allowing an attack on the USA; but both he and Osama bin Laden were astonished at the scale of the destruction.
For al qaeda, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but have lately reaped the whirlwind.
Jesus, what are you talking about? 9/11 was a conspiracy. Eighteen or nineteen suicide hijacker-bombers were in it, plus maybe twenty other organisers and planners.
A conspiracy does not have to involve George bush to be a conspiracy.
He wasn’t in on the death of Lincoln.
Get it right.
No, it was a lone gunman!
The Warren Commission had the single bullet theory, the magic bullet which went through Kennedy and Connally, bouncing off bones and emerging almost intact; in the case of 9/11 the five aircraft were piloted by the magic hijacker, who is probably still alive protected by the CIA Mossad and the Taliban in a joint operation.
(serious content follows)
Of course, what I meant was that the USA did not try to blow itself up merely so it could generate sympathy and then invade almost everywhere.