Fox News is reporting that some lost documents and artifacts relating to the assassination of JFK were found in a Dallas courthouse. As someone who has been fascinated with the JFK assassination for years, this is obviously interesting news for a variety of reasons.

My first reaction was the sort of comic imbalance of the stark reality that an object possesses compared to its potential importance. Baseballs in the baseball Hall of Fame don’t really look all that different from some old baseball you have in your closet for 20 years, and yet people would pay millions of dollars for them on the open market. Moon rocks look pretty much like earth rocks, except that you have to actually physically travel to the moon and back to show them to all your friends and relatives. In the history of all kitchen knives that have been used as weapons there was a point when someone bought it at a store and used it to prepare food that they later ate. I’m sure the brown leather gun holster they found doesn’t look any different than that description would imply, except that at one point it was holding a gun that was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on national TV.

However, the documents that were discovered are even more interesting to me. After everything that I’ve read about the assassination, I think the most compelling conspiracy theory has to be the mob theory, which these documents would seem to support. It’s compelling for many reasons. One of the main reasons I find it compelling is that the first rule in assassinating someone is always kill the assassins. This is the essence of a dead end. Police can’t interview their main suspect when he’s dead. Without being able to ask detailed questions to suspects it’s difficult to uncover what really happened.

The mob has understood this very well and has a long and documented history of killing anyone who had any chance of telling the police anything. (Plus, as is mentioned in the article, the mob had serious motivation to kill JFK.) In Oswald’s case, it’s even more interesting because he claimed to have been setup prior to his death. This puts investigators in the unenviable position of trying to prove a negative - that he murdered alleged assassin *didn’t* actually do the assassination. If Oswald was framed and the framing was done at all decently, proving he didn’t really do anything without being able to ask him questions about everything leading up to the assassination can be extremely difficult.

Perhaps it would be easier to think of it using the analogy to the controversy surrounding baseball. Roger Clemens claims to have not used HGH or whatever. How can he prove that he didn’t? There’s no evidence either way that would be unimpeachable. Without irrefutable proof that a particular event actually happened in a particular way, it can be extraordinarily difficult to prove that the event in question didn’t happen another way. (BTW: This is not my first post on the JFK assassination that involved Roger Clements. This is. :-P)

This is in part because of the way the question is phrased. Thomas Pynchon once said,

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

This is most apparent in conspiracy theories. A conspiracy nut will ask you to prove that it didn’t happen any of a million different ways. Many of these may require a cogent argument to prove, but they are the wrong questions to ask. However, that is the wrong question to be asked. What should be asked is “How can you prove that Oswald acted alone killed JFK?” If this can be formed into a rational argument, then that would be the only argument that matters.

The difference is subtle. On the surface you might think that proving Oswald did something alone would be equivalent to proving that everyone else didn’t do it. In mathematics, proofs actually can work like that, but real life is different in that humans are imperfect by nature and therefore a certain level of uncertainty exists in everything we do. Uncertainty can either work in favor of an argument or against it. Conspiracy theorists force people to try and eliminate every possible uncertainty, which uses uncertainty as a weapon against an argument. However, if you accept that every argument is going to have an element of uncertainty and present your rationale supporting the theory of Oswald acting alone as the most certain of the arguments, then you are using the uncertainty of everything else to support your argument.

Anyhow, I suppose I’m no longer really commenting on the article and more accurately rambling like a true blogger. I’ll stop now and spare you, the reader, from further blather. :-)