The assassination of President Lincoln has spawned a century and a half of conspiracy theories, most of which have never been resolved. I read that in 1905 Lincoln’s son, Robert Lincoln, was found burning papers in his study. When asked what he was doing, Mr. Lincoln replied that he was destroying papers which implicated a member of his father’s Cabinet in the assassination. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton has long been suspected of being that person, but nothing was ever conclusively proved. Other conspiracy theorists insist that the man shot by federal troops in a barn south of Port Royal, Virginia, on April 26, 1865, was definitely not John Wilkes Booth. There is no end to these stories.
Similarly, various conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John Kennedy also persist, 61 years after the events. A lone shooter, in the person of disgruntled service veteran Lee Harvey Oswald – supposedly firing from the sixth floor of the Dallas School Book Repository with a rusted Italian rifle of questionable operability – quickly became the official theory of the event.
But a botched, amateurish forensic investigation by the Dallas Police, coupled with the murder of Oswald himself, two days after the assassination, cast lingering doubts on the credibility of Oswald having fired three highly accurate shots in the space of a few seconds. To my knowledge, no credible verification was ever issued that the old Italian rifle (with misaligned sights) recovered in the Book Depository was really the weapon that killed President Kennedy and wounded Texas Governor John Connally. Nor can I find any forensic report verifying that the bullet recovered in the presidential car was fired by that rifle.
Theories also persist that a second shooter, stationed on the so-called “grassy knoll” in front of the president’s limousine, fired the shot which blew part of the president’s skull apart – as shown in the Zapruder film, which caught the exact moment of the fatal shot. Indeed, this theory has been so persistent that the term “grassy-knollist” has been added to the lexicon to describe an incurable conspiracy theorist.
In the 1990s a British team of investigative reporters compiled an entire nine-episode documentary film, seven hours in length, entitled The Men who Killed Kennedy.1 They concluded that the assassination was planned and carried out by a team of assassins who were shipped across the Tex-Mex border by organized crime interests. The documentary also included testimony from a witness who knew that the autopsy of the president’s body was conducted in secret, and that photos of the fatal wounds were doctored to show that the fatal shot was fired from behind the car. Their private investigation was well-documented, but no official inquiry was ever undertaken to verify or refute its findings. So, the controversy rages on – probably never to be resolved. (In recent days the Trump administration has released over 70,000 pages of documents related to JFK’s assassination.)
During President Obama’s first term a controversy arose over the issue of his American citizenship. The key question was whether Mr. Obama was born on U. S. soil. That would ensure his eligibility to be president. Had he been born out of country, he could not serve as president, as Article II, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution stipulates. Mr. Obama had stubbornly resisted putting the controversy to rest by releasing his official Hawaiian birth certificate. Some skeptics believed that was because it didn’t exist.
After much controversy, Mr. Obama finally released a hospital “certificate of live birth,” which seemed to affirm that he was born in a Hawaiian hospital. But critics quickly claimed that this was not satisfactory proof that Mr. Obama was a natural-born citizen, since even the motor vehicle bureaus of most states will not accept hospital certificates as proof of citizenship (as I learned, personally, in the past year).
The controversy churned on with new demands from media-figure and putative presidential candidate Donald Trump that Mr. Obama prove his eligibility to be president. In response, the Obama campaign finally released a “copy” of Mr. Obama’s official, long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. Mr. Obama and his campaign managers evidently considered the media-uproar produced by Mr. Trump’s demands to be potentially damaging enough to Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects that they decided to lay the controversy to rest.
The birth-certificate copy seemed to contain nothing amiss, so commentators were left wondering why the simple proof was so long in coming. But critics unwilling to let go of the controversy speculated that the “copy” might have been doctored in some way to answer the natural-born issue. Some suggested that a birth-record from an entirely different person might have been modified, with Mr. Obama’s vitae entered, to create a fake certificate.
Even the release of the original document didn’t curb the enthusiasm of these conspiracy devotees. It is worth noting that modern computer technology can easily “photo-shop” a document, exactly as postulated by the theorists. At this writing, I’m unaware of any independent verification to determine if official state records are harmonious in every respect with the released document. A released copy is one thing. Seeing it referred to in official corroborating state records is another.
In the very same week as the birth certificate release, the news broke of the assassination of the internationally pursued terrorist mastermind, Osama bin Laden. President Bush had vowed to hunt him down to the ends of the earth, for as long as it took to bring him to justice. When it was announced, a fawning media immediately laid the credit for this sensational achievement on Mr. Obama, without any solid proof that the person killed was indeed the infamous terrorist.
There was no independent autopsy or forensic investigation of a body. Following a lavish 45-minute Muslim funeral ceremony – which produced much controversy of its own – the reputed body of bin Laden was buried at sea, where (as critics have noted) it can never be exhumed and examined. We knew only what various government arms told us. There were also no photos – or none that the public was allowed to see. Mr. Obama declined to release death-photos for public viewing, saying, “We don’t need to spike the ball.” He later clarified that he did not wish to inflame Muslims everywhere by releasing the grisly pix of the terrorist’s demise. All this assumes that photos do exist, which is far from certain.
We had only Mr. Obama’s word for any of this, which shows either of two things:
- Mr. Obama is either completely tone-deaf to the public’s natural need to be confident that we actually killed OBL; or
- He is making a deliberate attempt to conceal the fact that we did not get the 9-11 mastermind.
As things stand, we cannot know for certain if a terrorist was killed at all or, if one was, that it really was Osama bin Laden. Thus, a fresh conspiracy theory was produced, close on the heels of the “birth place” controversy, which (supposedly) had been resolved.
Perhaps the juxtaposition of these two explosive controversies is entirely coincidental. But experienced reporters (including Yours Truly) note that coincidences in politics and/or public events are so rare as to be virtually non-existent. The odds are enormously against one controversial event being “resolved” in the very same week that a second controversy emerges. They are almost certainly connected, politically.
So if there is a connection, what is it? One can only speculate, of course. But this observer’s educated guess goes back to my observation, during the Obama years, that the Obama gang liked to generate (or exploit) “diversions” to keep both the media and the public distracted from controversial political events which they want to keep hidden.
I gave several examples, including the much-hyped controversy over plans to build a mosque at Ground Zero in New York City, which took media-attention off the declining economy. And in December 2009 there was the incident of the Salahis’ apparent crashing of a White House state dinner – suggesting that it was a diversion invented by the Obama brain-trust to take media- and public-attention away from the momentous political debate and passage of Obamacare, which was then going on.
The ending of one controversy over Mr. Obama’s citizenship – if, indeed, it was ended – closely followed by a new controversy over whether we actually wasted Osama bin Laden, appears to be cut from the same cloth. The media obsessed over both things for months, while the glare of the public spotlight was taken off Mr. Obama’s ruinous handling of the economy, his juvenile attitude toward gigantic federal deficits, his laissez-faire treatment of economy-crippling energy costs, and disastrous international policies such as climate change and allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
The Obama Mafia honed the conspiracy/diversionary technique to a fine edge. (Is this a great country, or what?)
Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.
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- The Men Who Killed Kennedy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TS0fuBtsUk
