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Two Gunmen, One Verdict: How the HSCA Rewrote Dallas
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations shocked America by concluding that the JFK assassination was probably a conspiracy — overturning fifteen years of official history built on the Warren Commission's lone-gunman verdict. This episode breaks down the acoustic evidence, the Dictabelt recordings, and what it means that two official investigations reached opposite conclusions about the same six seconds in Dealey Plaza.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most official investigations close the book. The House Select Committee on Assassinations opened it back up.
Let's establish the baseline clearly, because the House Select Committee's findings only make sense against it. The Warren Commission, convened by President Lyndon Johnson just days after the assassination and reporting in September nineteen sixty-four, concluded that Oswald fired three shots from the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
Inside Dallas Police Headquarters, locked in a cabinet and largely forgotten, sat the original Dictabelt recordings of police dispatch radio traffic from November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. They weren't hidden deliberately.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report in nineteen seventy-nine. The headline was stark.
The committee's conclusions didn't settle the debate. They restarted it on new ground.
The acoustic dispute tends to draw attention away from something important. Physical evidence, the kind that doesn't require interpretation of tape noise, still presents unresolved tensions in this case.
Running underneath all of this, from nineteen sixty-three through every document release since, is the question of what was withheld and why. The House Select Committee worked with access to materials that had not been available to the Warren Commission, including some CIA and FBI files.
Here's where the record actually stands, stated plainly. The Warren Commission's core finding, that Lee Harvey Oswald fired at President Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, is supported by substantial physical evidence that has not been seriously undermined in sixty years.
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