Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

 I get it that when people hear that JFK was shot in the back with a nerve agent, it triggers their most critical reaction, as if it is as harebrained as the Flat Earth Society. And often, they will shut their minds completely and refuse to give it further thought. 

But, do they not realize how totally deranged Kennedy is in the Zapruder film? He completely lost his ability to speak and to communicate in any way. He can't express himself with words, nor with a look, nor with his hands, nor with a head gesture. He is completely devoid of the cognitive ability to do it. Remember that in order to communicate, you need to have something to communicate. You need to be conscious; you need to be aware; you need to be able to understand the situation you're in; and you need to be able to form cogent thoughts and express them. Kennedy couldn't do any of that. So, what happened to completely devastate his mind? 

It's not just that he couldn't speak because of his throat wound, because if that were the case, he would have communicated with his hands and by pointing and gesturing with his head. He would have tried to do something. It wasn't just that his voice was gone; rather, his mind was gone. 

And then, there was the extreme muscular dyskinesia, in which his muscles seized up and solidified him. He became like a statue. So, what caused that? He had suffered no damage to his brain or spinal cord, so what caused such extreme cerebral and neuological manifestations to take place?

The JFK assassination was a once in a lifetime event. It was a once in a century event. There were other assassinations in the 20th century, including other political assassinations, including another Presidential assassination: William McKinley. But, nothing compares to JFK's assassination in the way it registers on us. We've become accostumed to looking at the Zapruder film with a JFK mindset- which is a mental realm in which the story of the Zapruder film- that JFK rode down the hill smiling and waving, and then disappeared behind the sign, and then re-emerged from behind it a different man- not just in the fact that he was wounded, but a different person- different as day and night. We accept his weird muscle contractions and his vacant mental state as normal for the JFK assassination, even though there is no way that his physical trauma could have caused it.

It is a clinical presentation crying for a diagnosis. Dr. John Lattimer tried slapping the term "Thorburn position" on it, but either Lattimer was a very stupid man or he was evil. I read Thorburn's paper about his patient who whose spinal cord was crushed, and I mean flattened, at the level of C5. What does that have to do with Kennedy? Nothing. Kennedy suffered no spinal cord damage. There are no parallels whatsoever between Kennedy and Thorburn's patient. 

I can very easily explain to you what happened to Thorburn's patient. He was paralyzed from C5 down. Most of his muscles were completely paralyzed, as in denervated. Now, you understand that there is such a thing as "muscle tone," right? And you understand that there are opposing muscles, such as the biceps and the triceps, which oppose each other. So, what do you think happens when your triceps are paralyzed and your biceps aren't? What happens is that the tone in your biceps is eventually going to contract it all the way to closure. Every time you twitch, it closes a little more, until it closes all the way, and there's no reversing it. 

So, the position of the arms of Thorburn's recumbent, unconscious patient was the result of muscle tone working unopposed. That is the most succinct way to put it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Kennedy.

So, we have a man, JFK, who has experienced a complete mental collapse, where he is incapable of comprehending his reality, and incapable of communicating from lacking the ability to form coherent thoughts, and at the same time, he is experiencing tetanic spasms throughout his muscles in a spreading fashion. 

That is a hell of a lot of pathology to occur instantly, so what could have caused it? Let's review his injuries. He had a shallow puncture wound in his upper back on the right side at the level of T3. Only the skin, fascia and muscle were affected. It had no clinical importance or significance. He also had a wound in his throat from a small missile that damaged his lower trachea on the left side. Dr. Perry also saw a slight contusion over the right lung, and because there was free blood there, he requested and got a suction tube for it. 

Now, that's it. That is the totality of the physical trauma that Kennedy had to that point. How could that have caused the clinical situation that Kennedy is in, where his mind is completely gone, and his muscles are completely out of control? It couldn't.   

Something happened to Kennedy that caused that bizarre clinical picture, and we are obliged to find out what it was. The idea that it was a poison-laced ice bullet is very reasonable because:

1) only an ice bullet could have gone from flight velocity to zero velocity in a distance of one inch. A metal bullet couldn't do it. It might stop within a person's body but not in an inch. It takes more tissue resistance than that to stop a metal bullet. 

2) we know that the ice gun which could deliver a nerve agent did exist in 1963. CIA Director William Colby told us so in 1975 with the gun on display.  

3) no bullet was found in Kennedy's back, and the claim that it fell out or was dug out is entirely speculative and unbankable. 

This comes down to what is called in Medicine "differential diagnosis." And there is no doubt that Kennedy's pathophysiology can be explained by the introduction of toxins into his sytem, and nothing else comes close to explaining it in a credible, plausible, and rational way. 

The toxin-lain ice bullet isn't the harebrained theory; it is the alternatives to it that are. And the truth is that there are no alternatives to it that are even remotely plausible. It stands alone as the only cogent deduction that you can make. 

So, the automatic rejection of people when they first hear this is a misfiring. It is much more emotional than it is cognitive. And they don't think about the fact that what they have instead is absolutely nothing. All they have is JFK going berserk and losing his mind for no reason at all. It just happened because it happened in JFK-land where such things happened. That is the best way I can articulate their sub-conscious thought process, and it is pitiful.