Sean Munger
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
1:43:57 · 706K views · Aug 3, 2022
The first part of a long two-part video series by historian Sean Munger arguing, with citations, that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and acted alone. It goes through the provable historical facts and addresses conspiracy theories.
HN commenters recommend it as the most exhaustive, well-sourced rebuttal of JFK conspiracy theories, often when new assassination claims surface.
5 comments from Hacker News
I used to be passingly interested in the conspiracy part of the JFK assassination until I watched this EXTENSIVE in length and sourced video on the assassination: this video It's all very logical and straightforward.
Fascinating video and indeed pretty straightforward. However, the bank robber analogy starting at 26mins this video does not sit quite right. You can't just stick with one theory and keep fitting other facts to that theory forever - there is going to be a breaking point. To keep going with that particular bank robber story - Jake. In the example barring other facts, it is 99.9% probable that Jake indeed is the bank robber. What if instead of finding $9k out of $10k, police only find $5k out of $100k on Jake? What if not only talking to his girlfriend about robbing the bank he also talked about robbing the bank at the bar the previous week? What if there was an amateur theatre troupe at that bar that night? What if one of those actors was also an accomplished make up artist and high speed driver? Okay, the story keeps getting sillier. Even with these new facts the prosecution would still win. Let's add a new fact security cameras at a bar also show Jake, with similar timestamps to the bank's cameras. There are 3 more patrons that are willing to swear it was Jake. An old lady reports that she saw a car drive up at a high speed to Jake's car and leave a package. At that point we have a problem with being so sure on Jake being the guilty one. There is some reasonable doubt now. My point is you can never be 100% sure. All you can do is adjust priors. With JFK as it currently stands we might say 95% chance that Oswald was the lone gunman and 80% that he acted completely alone. We can
The HSCA conclusions were largely based on the now discredited acoustic analysis of the police channel dicabelt recording. If it weren't for that the findings would have largely supported that of the Warren Commission. [LINK] A good summary of the evidence that Oswald acted alone can be found here: this video
This new stuff aside, there's an exhaustive two part series by Sean Munger that sets out the many interlocking lines of evidence that Oswald acted alone. I am pretty convinced at this point: this video
Another commenter linked a video which I’ll re-link[0]. Essentially the conclusion of the HSCA was, as you say, literally entirely based on that recording. If the recording hadn’t been there, the HSCA actually was on the verge of concluding the same as Warren. (In other words, if the recording evidence wasn’t there they would’ve concluded Oswald lone). The recording was, indeed, later found to not even be from the time of the shots but from an entirely different point in time, after police already noticed Kennedy shot. In that very recording, police officers say things in reaction to the shooting. After those voices, the “shots” from which the conclusion was drawn appear. Painfully obviously, that doesn’t make any sense. Also the recording was in an entirely different point in space too, as it wasn’t even from a bike in the motorcade, as the HSCA thought but it from a different 3-wheeled-motorcycle stationed where Kennedy would’ve been arriving. Drawing conclusions from that recording about the Kennedy shooting is probably less reliable than drawing them from the Live Aid concert version recording of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. In summary, after adjusting for that lone error in HSCA, Warren and HSCA concluded the same. [0]: this video