JFK Assassination: The Hidell Draft Card

One thing that has nagged at me for the last 50+ years is the "Hidell Draft Card" that was allegedly found in the possession of Lee Harvey Oswald, which neatly tied him into the receipt of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle sent to the Hidell PO box. It did tie up neatly several threads of the "investigation", but I don't think I've ever seen a real serious analysis of that card itself.

Take a look at that card. It kind of looks like a "regular issue" draft card, except for one glaring exception: The photograph.

Selective Service registration cards did not have photographs.

Putting aside the questions as to whether that photo really is LHO, but assuming the Warren Report is correct and Oswald created that phony draft card so he'd have some kind of photo ID, the question is this: Why would he go out of his way to create a phony ID that pretty much every male in the United States would look at askance, since draft cards NEVER contained a photograph? Every male over the age of 18, at least since the end of WWII, was issued a draft card. Who would not question the validity of one that had a photograph?

So what do those numbers on draft cards indicate? Like Social Security numbers, they were an easy way to identify an individual.

Mine was 45 23 45 152

First box -- state (e.g., Washington is 45), arranged alphabetically (Alaska and Hawaii were not states when this was first set up, which is why the count is off now; Washington should be 47).
Second box -- Draft board number within the state (23), usually consisting of a county or similar administrative subdivision.
Third box -- Year of birth (1945).
Fourth box -- Numerical count of people registering for that birth year -- (I was the 152nd person to register).

"Hidell" Selective Service Number: 42 224 39 5321

Unless I miss my guess, 42 was Utah (Texas was 41), and it's doubtful there were 224 local draft boards in Utah. Oswald was born in 1939, but again it's doubtful that there were over 5,000 men at that draft board born in 1939.

So it's kind of odd that Oswald would put a photo on his already-obviously fake Hidell draft card, when literally every male in the country knew what one was supposed to look like. This really doesn't pass the "smell test".

I don't know, of course, and as usual, what it really means. It's just another anomaly in an event that is so chock full of anomalies that they are spilling out over the top.

More on the Kennedy Assassination

Regular readers know that I am fascinated -- maybe obsessed is a better word -- by the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I just stumbled on a fairly reasoned analysis on a site called Stratfor Global Intelligence that asks some questions that have been more or less ignored, and focuses on a neglected actor in the whole assassination cast of questionable characters: Marina Oswald.

The official story, found in the Warren Report, asks us to believe some pretty incredible things about the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald:

1. Marina, part of the Soviet upper-middle class, reasonably educated and an attractive young woman, meets Lee Harvey Oswald and is so smitten by him that she agrees to marry him in a little over a month — two weeks of which he spent courting her from a hospital bed.
2. The Soviet government grants Marina permission to marry him in the span of 10 days, despite the fact that this is an MVD colonel's niece marrying a U.S. defector.
3. Oswald immediately decides to head back to the United States, and in spite of her uncle's supposed objections — and Prusakov [her MVD, aka KGB, uncle] could have stopped this dead in its tracks if he wanted — she is granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in the company of an American defector. The time between her formal request and receiving permission is a matter of weeks.
Endless questions flow from this, ranging from what the mission was to why the U.S. embassy permitted Marina into the country. This now enters into the realm of speculation. However, one thing is clear to us: Any theory as to what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, that does not take into careful account the role of Marina Oswald is inherently flawed. This includes the Warren Commission's own findings. If Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, there has been no adequate explanation of Marina Oswald's role in this.

It's pretty interesting stuff. The author takes the position that the Warren Report is probably basically correct, but the glaring questions about Marina have gone unanswered.

As I've said before, the truth will likely not come out in my lifetime. Maybe not in anyone's lifetime -- after all, most of the participants and "interested parties" are now dead. It kind of bugs me that after 50+ years I will go to my grave without knowing the truth...

Parsing the JFK Assassination

I've been a student of the JFK Assassination as well as a critic of the official explanation contained in the Warren Report for over 50 years and have written about it on this blog periodically.

The only thing I am certain of is that the Warren Report is wrong. That said, I really don't know what is right. It seems like every time you turn around someone is popping up with a new theory. The whole thing is like one gigantic Rubik's Cube, except that you can eventually, with enough time and by keeping your wits about you (or by using a "cheat sheet") solve a Rubik's Cube.

I have purchased, borrowed -- or out-and-out stolen -- and read well over 100 books on the JFK assassination, and most of the theories in them just seem to fall apart when you start asking the inevitable "Yeah, but what about...?" questions. No one has a waterproof and airtight theory.

The Kennedy Assassination has one solution. The problem is that it is not an easy one, an obvious one, an apparent one, and a lot of the data can go to support one theory or another. The single assassin aka the Lone Nut Theory? Plenty to support that. The Mafia did it? Got it. The CIA? Of course. The anti-Castro Cubans? Good case for that. The Kremlin? Okay, maybe... Castro himself? Hmmmm, well....

Those are the biggies, but there are many more theories scuttling around in the lower part of the curtains that latch onto one aspect or another and stretch it out beyond the breaking point: Oswald was actually shooting at Connelly because of his "undesirable" discharge from the Marines (Connelly had been Secretary of the Navy); the Secret Service agent who was driving the limousine turned around and shot Kennedy point blank with a pistol; a Secret Service agent in the followup car accidentally shot Kennedy in the head with his experimental weapon (actually a prototype of the M-16) when the first shot was fired; or my personal favorite, Kennedy was assassinated by the South Vietnamese version of the CIA in revenge for the assassination of Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem on -- get this -- November 2, 1963! Less than three weeks earlier!

All of these theories have their hardline enthusiasts who can show you the all of the clues that prove their point -- when the clues are lined up "correctly". The big problem is that many of those clues are all fairly easy to use when you pull together your own theory, if you line them up correctly. The key is that "correctly" -- we are all predisposed to see things that support our presuppositions and ignore any messy extraneous details that don't fit. See my post on Pareidolia from New Years Eve. The trick is lining them up really correctly, to fit all of the facts. Not so easy to do. Actually, it's apparently impossible to do.

Over in the newsgroup alt.assassination.jfk, which I check out regularly, there's a guy who goes by the name "Ralph Cinque" who is really into the photographic evidence from November 22. He runs a blog called Oswald in the Doorway which is probably worth taking a look at. The long and the short of it is that he thinks that Oswald is innocent and the famous Altgens photo, taken seconds after the first shot, clearly shows Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the doorway of the Book Depository Building; therefore he couldn't have been on the 6th floor. Lately Ralph's been obsessed with the Time Magazine cover that shows a long-lens shot of JFK and Jackie in the limo at some point just before the assassination -- he's convinced that it's been "doctored" in some way. I'll admit that it does look a little "off", but it was a telephoto shot and anyone who's ever taken pictures through a high-power telephoto lens knows that the resulting photograph will likely look a little "funny".

Sidebar: It is also interesting that in that Altgens photo, you can't even see Lyndon Johnson, who was riding in the right rear seat of the convertible that was the second car behind Kennedy's, with Ladybird sitting next to him (look between and behind the two motorcycle cops on the right side in the photo -- you can see his wife Ladybird, unmistakable in that hat, but where's Lyndon? He was 6'4" tall and he ought to be visible sitting on Ladybird's right). That fact, in and of itself, has resulted in another branching JFK Assassination theory, one that holds that LBJ was either involved in it or else somehow knew in advance that Kennedy was going to be shot in Dealey Plaza and scrunched down in anticipation of the shots as his car turned into Dealey Plaza. Since Lyndon Johnson was a notoriously amoral Texas wheeler-dealer, it's really not that much of a stretch when you look at that picture and wonder, Where's Lyndon?

Anyway, Ralph treats his blog like a newsgroup chat, which makes it really hard to follow, but if you alternate between it and his posts on that newsgroup, it sort of makes sense. Kind of.

The book I'm reading now, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald, by John Armstrong, posits that there were two different Oswalds, along with two different mothers, whose paths trail and cross and follow each other over time in several key locations: New Orleans, Fort Worth, the Marine Corps, and New York City. All of this was orchestrated by, of course, the CIA.

Armstrong, with a huge number of footnotes to source materials,  does a good job of bringing together such various well-known discrepancies as the height of Lee Harvey Oswald that is reported differently in several places (e.g., 5 ft 9 inches here, 5 ft 11 inches there, 5 ft 8 inches in another place), the scars that he did and sometimes didn't have, and also resolves the question as to how Oswald could be enrolled in two different junior high schools in two different states at the same time, how he could work two jobs at the same time, one in New Orleans and one in Texas, how he could also work a job in New Orleans while he was already in Japan in the Marine Corps, how he could be seen in anti-Castro training camps in Louisiana and Florida while he was also in Minsk in the Soviet Union. And it also answers the question that seemed to come out of left field a few years ago: Was Lee Harvey Oswald living in North Dakota at one point? Reliable-sounding witnesses say yes, the Warren Commission supporters say no.

The only solution, according to Armstrong, is that there had to have been two different Oswalds, the original and one who looked a lot like the original but who spoke fluent Russian (everywhere except in Russia!) and who slowly took over Lee Harvey's identity in order to be able to "defect" to Russia on a CIA spy mission. This other Oswald -- whom Armstrong calls "Harvey" as opposed to the original Oswald, "Lee" -- was the one who went to Russia pretending not to speak Russian (and Marina is the only one who has said that he did speak Russian while he was in the Soviet Union) and came back to Dallas just in time to be set up as a "patsy" for the JFK assassination. I know, it is convoluted, and Armstrong takes some 1200+ pages to deliver it.

BTW, the theory of Two Oswalds has been around almost from the beginning of the investigation. A guy named Richard Popkin, a respected academic, even wrote a book, The Two Oswalds which identified the many discrepancies between the Oswald that the WC (Warren Commission) wanted us to see and a shadowy "Second Oswald" hiding in the dark corners. For example, the Oswald who drove a car vs. the Oswald who never learned to drive, the Oswald who was acting the dick at a shooting range vs. the Oswald who was at work at the same time, etc.

Harvey and Lee is an expensive book, $90 on Amazon. Better to find a library and try to get it from them, either directly or through Inter-Library Loan (ILL) -- if you can; I found a couple of out-of-state libraries who had it but wouldn't loan it out to another library. But I did manage to find it in a kind-of choppy pdf format for free from a questionably-legal Box account. It does not contain the disk of photos and documents and other exhibits that comes with the book, though, and that's too bad. But if you want to look for them, Armstrong gives you enough information to find them with a little diligent searching. Use this Box at your own risk, but it also contains numerous other rare and out-of-print books on the Kennedy Assassination in addition to this one.

For a brief look at Armstrong's theory, check out his blog, Harvey and Lee where you see such photos as this one:

Look at those pictures and tell me that you would bet your next paycheck on both of them being pictures of the same man. On the left is the USMC photo of Oswald, on the right is the Dallas Police mugshot of Oswald. Check out Armstrong's site, but try to ignore the early-days-of-the-Internet look of his web design, though. I don't think it really does his presentation of the facts a good turn.

Another blog that covers this is called Oswald's Mother and if you dig down enough you will find some side-by-side photos of the two Mrs. Oswalds -- something is definitely a little "off" there as well.

With pretty much any event, you are going to find what appear to be anomalies. Those Six Seconds in Dallas are probably the most analyzed six seconds in history, and it's weird that the more they are analyzed, the further we seem to get from the truth. A few anomalies, well, that's coincidence. But when you start stacking up the anomalies, at some point you get beyond a mere string of coincidences and start to wonder just what the fuck is going on?

There are more loose threads here than you'd find in Rick Santorum's sweater-vest after he's been ravaged by pit bulls. None of them seem to lead to anything close to a satisfactory conclusion.

Fuck that. I want the Unified Field Theory of the Kennedy Assassination. Chances are I'm not going to get it. Just like Chief Justice and Committee Chair Earl Warren said, "not in this lifetime."

It actually bugs the shit out of me to realize that at my age I will likely not learn the truth as to who shot Kennedy, and how, and who else was involved, before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

More on Bill O'Reilly, the Serial Liar

Over at Wonkette you will see the story that goes with this mostly-unrelated picture:

Jeez, it turns out that our friend BillO was an earwitness to history. He was on his way to interview the strange George De Mohrenschildt, a shadowy figure connected to the assassination of JFK through his odd friendship with putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

According to BillO's own words, he was on De Mohrenschildt's front porch when George blew his own brains out with a shotgun rather than provide testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977.

There's just one little problem with that narrative. BillO was in Dallas at the time, a fact verified by numerous sources more credible than the Official Faux News Bully-in-Chief.

Wonkette calls it Ace Reporter Bill O’Reilly Killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Ran Area 51, Co-Piloted Amelia Earhart’s Plane on the Glassy-Eyed Knoll.

Is Bill Orally the Jack Crabb of the 20th Century?

I hate to jump on the heap with all this piling-on abuse of Poor BillO -- I know I should probably feel bad for fanning the flames, but come on. It's Bill O'Reilly!!!

BTW that picture is one of my favorite mockup Photoshop photos of all time, one that the Dead Kennedys should have grabbed for an album cover.

November 22, 1963

Those of us of a certain age can tell you, for a certainty, exactly where we were 51 years ago today. That date is burnt into our souls the same way that December 7, 1941 was for our parents, and September 11, 2001 is to our children.

Much has been made of the JFK assassination over the years. JFK Conspiracy Theory has gone from a cottage industry with the publication of Who Killed Kennedy? by Thomas Buchanan in early 1964 (the first "conspiracy theory" book) to the lucrative field it is today, with every possible scenario, from the military-industrial complex to the Mafia to the CIA to the South Vietnamese (as retribution for the killing of Ngo Dinh Diem, just three weeks earlier!) to the French.

And yet we are no closer to solving the case than we were in November 1963. Most serious critics of the Warren Report believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. From that basic premise it spirals out into the Oswald-Was-A-Patsy to Oswald-Was-An-Active-Communist-Agent and everything in between.

I've read extensively in the case, examined all of the evidence I could get my hands on, and I have yet to formulate a "unified field" theory of the assassination. No matter which scenario you follow, too many loose ends are left hanging.

I once heard it described this way (and I can't remember the source or I would credit him): At Judgment Day, when all will be revealed, the Big Question of Who Killed JFK? will be answered. Some nondescript guy in the back will say, "It was me. I did it."
And all of the assassination researchers will turn around to look at him, and then turn to each other and ask, "Who the fuck is that guy?"

November 22, 1963. That was 51 years ago today, and people of that "certain age" have crept up in years, to the point where now the person you are asking pretty much has to be older than 55 -- and that's stretching it a bit. But go ahead and ask anyone you know over 60. The only people who didn't know where they were that day were, of all people, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush and Howard Hunt.

Make of that what you will...

The Kennedy Detail: Book Review

I don't ordinarily do book reviews except for my Book of the Month selections, but I have to talk about this one.

I just read The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence by former Kennedy-era Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine (cowritten -- i.e., ghostwritten -- by Lisa McCubbin).

As you might expect, it's basically a cover-your-ass account of the inner workings of the Secret Service White House detail leading up to, at the time of, and immediately following the JFK assassination. We don't get any breathless accounts of Kennedy's womanizing, for example, or any real behind-the-scenes gossip. Instead, the authors take great defensive pains to cover up or explain away the many failures of their protection of the president, and to support the official Oswald-did-it-and-did-it-alone Warren Report version of events.

Except for one notable exception. Taken from the narratives and reports of the actual boots-on-the-ground Secret Service agents who were actually at the scene, two of whom were in the death car and four of whom were on the outside of the followup car, it becomes clear that they all agree that two different shots hit JFK and John Connally.

This is almost buried in the almost-too-much-extraneous-detail of the events in Dealey Plaza, but it is a bombshell. Or it should be, if the media was doing its job.

Even a casual student of the assassination knows that if JFK and Connally were hit by two different bullets (which is what Connally said all along and which is what a careful examination of the infamous Zapruder film shows), then the flimsy fabric of the Warren Report is left in shreds.

Here's why: The Warren Commission found that only three shots were fired (this was a foregone conclusion even before the commission was set up, since the FBI "established" that there were only three empty shells and stated without a doubt that Oswald was a lone assassin. There's also the basic physics involved. Given the obstructions provided by a large signboard and a couple of trees, there just wasn't enough time for more than three shots to be fired with the weapon found in the building).

One shot went wide and hit a curbstone before wounding slightly a bystander named James Teague. One shot -- the final one -- blew off Kennedy's head. That leaves only one bullet left, which had to do all the work of going completely through JFK, making multiple entries and exits through various bones in John Connolly before ending up in his thigh, only to emerge later, "found" at Parkland Hospital, in almost pristine condition. (Connally's thigh wound, it should be noted, contained more lead than was missing from the bullet.)

The bullet became the notorious Commission Exhibit 399, and you can see why even supporters of the Warren Commission's conclusions call it the "Magic Bullet".

It was physically impossible, given the self-imposed restrictions of the commission ("Oswald did it alone") and the physical restrictions of the crime scene, to account for two men getting hit by different bullets.

If the agents are right, then there were four shots (witnesses testified to hearing more than three shots but they were slighted or ignored) fired.

Which means at least two shooters.

Which means a conspiracy.

The Truth? You Can't Handle the Truth!

One of the things that I have followed avidly for the last 47 years is the continuing controversy over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

That also means that I have followed the media's obsession with furthering the cover-up of what really happened.

While I have had, a lot of the time, an enormous amount of admiration and respect for the work of Dan Rather and CBS News -- especially Rather's coverage of the Nixon debacle and the George W. Bush military service fabrication -- that respect has always been tempered by his lapdog service to the Powers that Be when it comes to a critical examination of the actual evidence of a conspiracy when it comes to what forever will be known to my generation as The Assassination.

One of my favorite blogs on this topic is the kind-of-oddly-named but chock-full-of-invaluable-information blog, Oswald's Mother, and George Bailey, the blog owner, has a recent post that pulls together the various strains of media complicity in the assassination coverup The Sum of All Things, and the lack of journalistic integrity when it comes to reporting on the assassination.

However, one thing that he regrettably doesn't touch on in his post, and one which I would like to expand on in this post, is the craven behavior of Dan Rather.

Back in the early days, before the Warren Report was issued -- before it was even written, but not before Lee Oswald was convicted of the crime by the FBI, the White House and the Media -- back when Time-Life Inc., owned the Zapruder film and had no reason to suspect that it would EVER become public, and the never-resolved question about the wound to the front of Kennedy's throat -- was it an exit wound, was it an entry wound, and if it was an entry wound, how could a gunman who was above and behind the president shoot him there? -- was still unresolved, Dan Rather, later star of CBS News and then a local stringer and self-important nabob, went public after a viewing of the film and stated that the throat wound was an entry wound because the president had turned around to his far right to wave at someone behind him. He also "reported" that Kennedy's head was "thrown forward" by the fatal head shot.

Okay, fair enough. If it really happened, then Rather was on safe ground with his statements that JFK had first turned around to wave, and then was violently thrown forward.

But wait, before we accept Rather at face value, let's look at all the evidence. And what's better evidence than the actual Zapruder film?

Okay, do you see him turning around nearly 180 degrees during that disturbing sequence? Do you see him violently thrown forward by that fatal head shot? No, me neither.

So does that tar Dan Rather forever in the minds of the American people, the paying consumers of network news, the people that sheepishly eat the media fodder fed to them daily?

You'd think so, but no, in 1966 he's a media superstar, and goes on national television with a CBS "microstudy" of the assassination which, despite its charge to "get to the bottom" of the assassination, comes down solidly on the side of the Warren Report.

Two of the things that have stuck with me all these years are the CBS "News" statements about Lee Oswald (only assholes who consider him guilty call him Lee Harvey Oswald) during the course of this broadcast:

1. Rather reminds viewers -- with that "ominous" tone of voice of his -- that "Lee Harvey Oswald" was awarded the second highest award for rifle marksmanship during his stint in the Marine Corps. That sounds all impressive and shit, until someone who has actually been in the military (your humble correspondent, for example) brings up the point that there only three awards for rifle prowess in the whole military establishment: Marksman, Sharpshooter, and Expert. You could just as easily -- and just as accurately -- claim that Oswald had the second-lowest award...

2. Even Uncle Walter (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite">Walter Cronkite, the "most trusted man in America") gets into the act and he has to -- reluctantly, it seemed -- admit that it was nearly impossible, under normal circumstances, to make the infamously-inaccurate Mannlicher-Carcano rifle hit what it was aimed at during the tiny time frame available -- but, he says, "these were not normal circumstances -- Oswald was shooting at a president". Yeah, like that was gonna make a difference on the side of accuracy. Jesus Christ, Walter, a former war correspondent like you oughta fucken know better!

So, will we ever know what happened -- what really happened -- in Dallas on November 22, 1963? At this point I'd have to say that it's extremely unlikely. Even a deathbed confession like that of E. Howard Hunt (your remember him, don't you? CIA Agent, Watergate burglar, Bay of Pigs leader, etc. etc.) get exactly zero traction in the MSM.

Whattaya gonna do? I'm reminded of Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men: "The truth? You can't handle the truth!"

No, apparently not.

JFK Assassination Anniversary

Those of us of a certain age can tell you in great detail exactly where we were, what we were doing, and who we were with when we heard the news of death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. But not all of us. Interestingly enough, former president George H. W. Bush, for example, couldn't recall where he was and what he was doing, nor could E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame...

Okay, before I go all tinfoil hat on you, I will tell you up front that I never believed in the official answers to the JFK Assassination.

I don't need to go into the whole thing, since by now everyone knows the story, and those who buy into the Warren Report are incapable of listening to evidence to the contrary, and those of us who believe that there was some kind of conspiracy going on have our usual suspects and we are not willing to entertain motions to dismiss.

A terrific blog on the assassination is Oswald's Mother, and it's one that should be required reading for even a casual student of the events of Dallas 1963.

Think you know something about Lee Harvey Oswald? Think you know everything? You'll change your mind after you read the four-part Oswald Was One Weird Dude.

And what is probably the most complete and best book on the real history behind the JFK Assassination is Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann's Ultimate Sacrifice:John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK, which is probably about as close as we are going to come to a "Unified Field Theory" of the Kennedy Assassination.

It's a pretty long book, but it is heavily footnoted and documented. And it is a "must read" for students and critics of the Warren Report and the subsequent government coverups of both the JFK and the Robert Kennedy Assassinations.

Election Results -- B'bye Magic-Bullet Specter

Yesterday's election results were good news for progressives across the board. Especially in Pennsylvania, where a Democrat kept control of the Murtha Seat in Congress, and where Republican turncoat Arlen Specter lost -- and lost big time -- in the senatorial primary.

And that was despite the fact that the big guns in the Democratic party all campaigned for him, including some "robocalls" made by Obama himself.

Why did he lose? People are fed up with Democrats who are "Rethug Lite" -- look at Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, for example -- and are ready to go with the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Besides, I believe that a lot of people, myself included, have never forgiven Specter for the two things that will live in infamy in American history: The appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is one.

And the other?

The Single Bullet Theory in the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of JFK.

The Theory, dreamed up and fabricated out of whole cloth by none other than Arlen Specter himself when he was a Warren staff attorney, has never been able to stand the cold hard light of reality, despite desperate attempts by such disparate persons as Gerald Posner and the otherwise-rational Vincent Bugliosi.

It, almost by itself, derailed the actual investigation and assisted in the now-decades-long confusion and coverup of the true facts.

No, I'm not ready for the tinfoil hat just yet, but I've been a student and critic of the Warren Commission and its phony "report" for 45 years, and I can say with absolute certainty that there is simply no way under the laws of physics that Commission Exhibit 399 (aka the "Magic Bullet") could have been responsible for all of the damage it was alleged to have caused to two separate individuals.

At this point I'm willing to concede that we will probably never really know the truth about the Kennedy assassination(s). Thanks, Arlen. G'bye and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Good riddance.

Another Dealy Plaza Shooting

It's all there: A vintage Lincoln, the pergola, the Dal-Tex Building, the Grassy Knoll, the perch on which Abraham Zapruder stood to shoot the famous 8-mm film, even the Texas School Book Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire the shots that killed JFK.

It's probably THE most-photographed urban area in America, if not the world, but there's something ... different ... about this video.

Maybe it's the fact that it's a video shoot that features musical performer Erykah Badu walking down the sidewalks of Dealy Plaza slowly shedding her clothing until she is finally completely nude at the foot of the Grassy Knoll.

At which point something surprising -- but ultimately not unexpected -- happens.

You'll just have to watch the video.