Beware establishment figures with a vested interest in maintaining a convenient fiction without revealing their motive.

Consider the February 18, 2008 episode of MSNBC's Countdown. Keith Olberman was interviewing Gary Mack, the curator of the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas about the release of a transcript (among other documents) of a purported conversation between Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby, approximately seven weeks before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The documents were kept inside a courthouse safe under the supervision of then-Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who prosecuted Ruby and, according to one document, had signed a movie deal in 1967.

The Chicago Tribune reported the conversation as following:

"There is a way to get rid of him without killing him," Oswald says.

"How's that?" Ruby responds.

"I can shoot his brother," Oswald says.

After a discussion of the logistics of shooting the president, Ruby says the money for the operation's coming from the Mafia.

"Are you with the Mafia?" Oswald asked.

"You're asking too many questions," Ruby responds.

Later, Ruby gives a lengthy warning that Oswald must not get caught or say anything, noting that "if you do talk, then the boys will make me follow you, wherever you go, and kill you."

The papers, such as they are, describe a plot by La Cosa Nostra to assassinate the President, which would result in the Presidency being assumed by Lyndon Johnson, enemy to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a nemesis of organized crime.

Many people, including Mack, have cast doubt on the veracity of the conversation. The curator contended "virtually all the hard evidence leads directly to Lee Harvey Oswald and no one else, at least so far. The problem is that most people just are not convinced of the official story."

One problem, Gary. Although you may be enamored of the Warren Commission report, there is no one "offical story," despite what some experts imply. Perhaps you missed the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970's investigated the assassinations of J.F.K. and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Committee concluded in part that: there were two gunmen, one on the grassy knoll, and the other Lee Harvey Oswald (who may have had ties with Jack Ruby, who fired three of four shots; both Oswald and Ruby had ties to La Cosa Nostra; the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had misled, and withheld information from, the Warren Commission; and the Warren Commission did not investigate the possibility of conspiracy.

So whatever one may think about the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, clearly there is not one "official" version of the assassination- a fact of which the "experts" are very much aware.