“Sam Holland originally said the "puff of smoke I saw definitely came from behind the arcade through the trees." In his testimony, Holland said he ran there first: "Went up to behind the arcade as far as you could go."
The "puff of smoke" could be anything. Six months after the events, Holland still wasn't sure: "There was a shot, a report, I don’t know whether it was a shot." By time he met Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson, he was re-enacting a gunman's position behind the fence line.”
Sam Holland is one out what, twenty witnesses, that said the shot came from the grassy knoll, twenty to one aren’t good odds.
“The heads of the two agents in the back seat don't go higher than the heads of the agents on the running boards. Neither agent in the back seat is elevated enough to fire a shot over the Queen Mary windshield. Pat Speer flipped the line drawing of the Hickey shot from the "Mortal Error" book and superimposed it over a Bronson film frame.”
Witnesses to Hickey holding and possibly firing a “rifle”:
• Dallas Mayor, Earl Cabel. see’s one Secret Service agent standup with a sub-machine gun.
• Senator Yarbrough also saw a rifle.
• Agent Winston rides in the front of JFK in the lead car. He noticed Agent Hickey standing up in the follow up car, “I first thought that he had fired it”.
• Sam Holland, a witness, is standing on top of the underpass as the motorcade is going under him. “After the first shot, the Secret Service agent raised up with a machine gun and dropped back down into the seat. WC Vol XIX, ex 5323, pg 480
• Roy Kellerman testified there was an AR15 in the motorcade.
• Hugh Betner saw one Secret Service agent pull out a gun, he was standing watching the motorcade. vol XXIV, ex 2003, pg 200
• A police officer on the over pass as the motorcade passing under saw an agent swinging around the gun.
• Margaret Chisolm WC vol XIX, ex 5323, pg 472 saw agents stand up and sit back down.
• Jean Hill – Saw JFK grab his chest and fall forward and she thinks she saw men in plain clothes shooting back. WC Vol XXIV, Ex 2003, pg 212
• Ralph Yarborough saw a SS Agent pull out a rifle. WC Vol VII, pg 439
“The Warren Report offers their actual rationale.”
We know what the purpose of the Warren Report was, hide the fact that it was a conspiracy.
"So they wanted it to be known an assassination team took out Kennedy, albeit Keystone-Cops-esque? Or... if the conspirators wanted a lone-assassin subterfuge, they picked a lousy way of accomplishing it."
No, the only shot that missed was the first one, all the others hit a target. I believe they did want it to look like a lone gunman but they had the shooter on the grassy knoll as insurance, he was not getting out of there alive.