JFK, 9/11, and Timelines
Recently I read about one paragraph of an article that claimed to have new evidence about the Kennedy assassination. I never read these articles, for five reasons.
First, the evidence is rarely new. Second, there are rarely any footnotes or Web links to verify the supposedly new facts. Third, the authors are usually incapable of writing a coherent paragraph, let alone an entire article. They get bogged down in details -- trivia for the reader, or incomprehensible. Fourth, because there is always a rival theory, or multiple theories, which categorically refute the one you are reading . Fifth, because it would take a lifetime to begin to unpack even the basics of the topic. Therefore, I made a decision a long time ago to assume that Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and that the person or persons who did this will never be known for sure, and in any case, they are all dead by now.
One of the best historians I ever knew was William Marina. He was the only historian who was at Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. He had brought a group of college students to see the President. He then spent years studying the Kennedy assassination. He taught classes on the Kennedy assassination. He got the division of labor working for him, as students found bits and pieces of information that had not been previously discussed. At the end of his life, as at the beginning of his studies 35 years earlier, he believed that Oswald acted alone. But he never wrote the book he always said he would. On June 30, 2009, I wrote an article just for him on how to market his as yet unwritten book. I posted it on my website. On July 7, 2009, he died of a heart attack. I wrote his obituary. It was published on July 8. Such is life.
Marina was a details man, and detail men very seldom finish large projects. They produce bricks, not skyscrapers. The Kennedy assassination is a skyscraper. There are a mountain of bricks: at least 1,000 books on it. These books do not agree.
THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE
Let me get down to the basics. All of life is irreducibly complex. No matter how far out you aim your telescope, the universe proves to be far more complex than your theory allows. So, in desperation, you go to microscopes, and you find the same thing. No matter how small the object is that you are studying, there are a seemingly infinite number of factors that affect it.
Your get to the electron. You find out in your freshman chemistry class that you cannot know the location of the electron and its velocity. You can know its velocity, but you cannot know its location. Or, you can know its location, but you cannot know it is velocity.
Then somebody tells you that the very fact that you are investigating this electron affects it. The tool (light) that you use to observe it, affects it. Then what can you do? Well, this depends on what you want to do. Basically, you fake it. You ignore most things in your microscope. You hope for the best, but you fake it. You look for a large enough pattern to let you get by with whatever it is you are doing, and you hope that nobody discovers something about the details of your pattern that blows your theory to kingdom come. Or, if somebody does this, you hope that you will be able to find some clever answer that somehow refutes him, so that you maintain your job, your reputation, and your footnote in some obscure future monograph.
THE TIMELINE
There is one thing that every historian has to get right if he expects to be believed. He has to get the chronological sequence right. There is one thing that I can say categorically about the nature of history. If, on a particular date, at 6:23 AM, something took place, we can be assured of this: anything that took place after 6:23 did not cause that event.
This gets us down to bedrock causation. For any historical event, you need a timeline to prove your version of it. If you do not have a timeline that is sufficiently precise and sufficiently documented to make a plausible case for your theory of causation, you might as well not publish the article, produce the video, or be interviewed on late-night satellite talk radio. The timeline is not everything, but it is mandatory. The timeline has got to be accurate enough to support your theory of causation.
The problem is this: the more complex your theory of causation, the more timelines you need.
Let us consider the Kennedy assassination. If your theory is that Oswald did it alone, you need only two timelines. The first is what Oswald did during the day on November 22. The second is the timeline that brought Kennedy within gunshot range of the sixth floor of the Texas book depository in Dallas. But if you have a theory of multiple assassins, you need multiple timelines. Furthermore, you must line them up against each other, so that you can tell when each event took place on each timeline. Then you should be able to compare what was happening in the events of the alternative timelines.
Of course, you need documentation for the temporal location of each event. But you cannot get this. So, you must fake it.
If you create a timeline, it then becomes clear just how often you are faking it. This is why there are so few timelines.
The same is true of the four planes that were involved in 9/11. You have to have multiple timelines for the hijackers in those planes. If you say this was one coordinated conspiracy, then you have to have an integrated series of at least four timelines.
What if the United States government was involved? You now need a whole lot of new timelines. How many departments were in on it?
Not only do you have to construct these timelines, you have to verify them. You have to be able to rely on publicly available documents on which there are verifiable timestamps of one kind or another. Also, you have to make certain that the timestamps were not altered retroactively. Not many events have timestamps associated with them. So, you have to look around to find such documentation. To the extent that you cannot put a timestamp on an event recorded in a document, the guesswork begins. Then the faking begins.
Anyone who has a theory of the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, but who does not have a comprehensive timeline, is whistling past the multiple graveyards. If you do not have enough data to construct a timeline, you do not have a verifiable theory. You may have a curiosity. This curiosity will last only for as long as someone does not come along and create a timeline which blows your theory out of the sky.
You need another tool of investigation. You have to be able to show what could not possibly have happened. Usually, this is linked with your timeline. But it may not be. Maybe it has to do with the heat generated by a burning 747 in a tall building. What are the limits of the effects of that heat -- say, on the melting point of steel? What will be the effects of that heat across the street in a building half the size, which was not hit by a 747?
The best way to know whether the theory is weak is to find out what could not possibly have happened, and then see to what extent the theory relies on such an impossible cause. So, if you can remove those events which could not possibly have happened, either temporally or physically, you have reduced the number of possible rabbit trails which your theory is likely to produce. To save time, trouble, and energy, you have to reduce the number of rabbit trails. The best way to do this is to find out what could not possibly have happened. You do this by creating a timeline. Then you go to specialists in the field with respect to physics. If something was not physically possible, you can eliminate it as one of the causes.
Unfortunately, most conspiracy theorists do not have the patience to construct such timelines. They also do not have the patience to construct such negative causation websites.
We want to know exactly when something happened. But there is no such thing as "exactly when." Philosophically, we can never find that point in time, any more than we can find where the electron is and what its velocity is. When we say "exactly" with respect to time, we mean "a little bit later than one thing, and a little bit earlier than something else."
If you ever read an article on historical revisionism of a major event, and the author does not offer a footnote to a timeline, and which also does not have footnotes or links to public documents that are verifiable, then the best you can hope to gain from the article is a suggestion of what might have happened. It is at best a starting point. It is not to be taken seriously as a stand-alone effort.
Most revisionist positions get established early, and they do not change very much after that. There can be variations on a theme. There can be spinoffs of the theory. There can be back-and-forth debates between the official government view and the unofficial revisionist view. But neither side wants to create a detailed timeline, because each side has huge gaps in its account of causation, and a timeline would make these gaps visible to anybody. So, neither side wants to go to the effort of putting up an official timeline, because somebody else is going to blow all. When somebody else does that, it calls the entire effort into question. Nobody wants to have this happen to his theory, so everybody tries to cover for this by substituting a verbal summary for a timeline. They talk their way through it, because it would be too much work to construct the timeline.
One thing is sure: there are a lot more theories than there are timelines. There are a lot more revisionist positions than there are detailed websites devoted to proving what could not have happened, as a preliminary exercise for devising a theory of what did happen. Until you know what could not possibly have happened, you are not in a good position to offer your theory of what did happen. If you do not know the sequence of events, you are vulnerable.
CONCLUSION
I like revisionist history. I like conspiracy history. I also like timelines, but not if I have to produce them. They are a lot of work. Conceptually, they are difficult to imagine. They are difficult to find a programmer to create. I speak from experience. I have tried.
No matter how enthusiastic you become over a particular theory of historical causation, understand this: until there is a timeline available that is detailed and verified, event by event, sequence by sequence, curb your enthusiasm.