Reply #179: Ah HA! [View All]

[William Seger]

So it was O'Neill who started the "ice bullet" silliness in his affidavit to the HSCA, some 15 years after the fact. But... excuse me, where does he say that it was Humes who engaged in "some discussion," and where does he indicate that he or Humes or anyone else accepted that as a credible hypothesis? I'd take that ending sentence -- "There was no real sense either way that the wounds were caused by the same kind of bullet" -- only as a comment on the back wound versus the head wound, and directed at the issue of whether both bullets came from the same gun. In fact, in that same affidavit, O'Neill explicitly restates the opinion that I cited above from his original report in 1963: "It was and is my opinion that the bullet which entered the back came out the back."

Really, that isn't such a far-fetched theory, if it's considered in isolation of the other facts, and if we presume that something slowed the bullet down enough that it only had enough energy to penetrate a short distance. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald's first bullet missed completely, perhaps because it hit a tree branch. Well, if there really weren't any evidence that the back wound connected to the throat wound, and that the throat wound was an exit wound, then perhaps the most plausible theory would be that the tree branch slowed down the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back, and Oswald's second bullet hit Connally.

But there is independent evidence that the throat wound was an exit wound: the shirt fibers around the front bullet hole were bent outward, not inward. And, in fact, the autopsy does indicate three addition points of damage in Kennedy's neck that connect the rear and front wounds in a straight line:

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Issues_and_evidence/Single-Bullet_theory/Line_of_damage/Line_of_damage.html

<pong>