15-07-2009, 07:49 PM
Charles Drago Wrote:Paul, you're missing -- intentionally or not -- Peter's important point. The assassinations you cite were carried out in plain sight -- but in the cases of JFK and MLK, the hitters were hidden.
Actually, CD, it was me, not Peter, who insisted the assassinations were carried out in plain site - a point with which you clearly agree.
Charles Drago Wrote:The killer of RFK benefited from relatively sophisticated camouflage: the Sirhan distraction that confused perceptions and facilitated the further disguised point-blank shots.
Greer benefited from the fact the assassination site was at the end of the parade, at a relatively unpopulated site. He was further shield by the terrain, and the other vehicles in the motorcade. RFK's killer, by contrast, boasted the "sophisticated camouflage" of the victim's body; and was inevitably, like Greer, also seen shooting.
Now if you were more familiar with the fuller exposition of the Elm St shooting scenario which centers on Greer, you'd know that it, too, posits (a) decoy shot(s), only this time from the rear:
Quote:Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams, Murder from Within (Santa Barbara, Ca: Probe, 1974), Chapter 3, “Execution”:
“Just before a freeway sign, the driver began to slow down the presidential limousine.
Suddenly, a shot came from the top of Elm St., now a half block in back of the President. A Secret Service agent in the Vice-President's follow-up car had raised his left hand out of the partly open left, rear window. A revolver was fired skyward.
The crowd's attention was distracted from the presidential limousine by the sudden explosion.”
Late in the same chapter, the authors offer more on the subject:
Quote:The Decoy Shot
As the motorcade approached Elm St., an amateur photographer focused his movie camera on the presidential limousine and the front of the depository building. His lens also caught the Vice-President's follow-up car, the third car behind the limousine. This was perhaps a minute before the first shot was fired. The Vice-President' s follow-up car was approaching the left-hand turn into Elm St. when both of its rear doors opened, six to eight inches (Fig. 3-2). According to the film, no one got in or out of the car.
One witness, standing on the southeast corner of Elm and Houston Streets, saw the follow-up car's open doors. After it turned the corner, he "…heard the first report…" which he thought was a car's backfire. The Texas Highway Patrolman who was driving the Vice-President's car thought the shot "…appeared to come from the right rear of the Vice-President's car."
Many witnesses said that the first shot sounded like a "firecracker" or a "backfire" in the street.
Altgens' sixth photograph of those he took in Dealey Plaza (Fig. 3-3) tends to support the contention that someone in the motorcade fired a gun into the air at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets, when the limousine was about 100 feet down Elm St.
Altgens' photograph, which was taken about three seconds after the decoy shot was fired, when enlarged (Fig. 3-4) shows Secret Service agent Warren W. Taylor, in the rear left seat, of the Vice-President's follow-up car. His arm is outside of the open car door; the configuration of his hand suggests he is holding a gun. Those people in the car immediately behind smelled gunpowder.