This passage from Four Days in November captures my thinking nicely. Note the bolded sentence.
During a search of the sixth floor after the assassination, a detective for the Crime Scene Search Section of the Dallas Police Department found a lunch bag with chicken bones, a piece of waxed paper, and a little piece of Fritos in it in front of the “third” double-window over from the south easternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. He also found a Dr. Pepper bottle nearby. (7 H 146, WCT Robert Lee Studebaker; CD 1245, p.84, FBI interview of Robert Studebaker on May 29, 1964) Since Bonnie Williams had chicken, Fritos, and a Dr. Pepper for lunch at that exact place, that should have been the end of it. Lieutenant J. C. Day dusted the Dr. Pepper bottle for fingerprints, and no prints of Oswald’s were found. When Day later found out the food and drink had belonged to Williams, he decided the lunch bag and Dr. Pepper bottle had no value to the case and threw the sack and bottle away. (CD 1245, p.83) Not so fast, said conspiracy theorist Sylvia Meagher, who said that since Day “saw no need to check the empty bottle for fingerprints other than Oswald’s, we will never know if fingerprints were on the bottle, or whose they were.” And even though Studebaker, whose job it was to search the sixth floor, saw the food and drink next to the third double-window over, and several other witnesses said they saw them in the same place (e.g., 6 H 330–331, WCT William H. Shelley), and Williams himself said that’s where he ate his lunch, Meagher proceeded to cite other witnesses who said they saw food elsewhere, for example, Luke Mooney (3H 288–289), who said he saw a piece of chicken on top of one of the boxes surrounding the sniper’s nest. (Meagher, Accessories after the Fact, pp.39–41)
Other than her and her colleagues’ insatiable passion for pointing out normal (not to them) inconsistencies in the recollections of witnesses, nowhere does Meagher tell her readers what the relevance of these inconsistencies was. Was it her point that Williams was lying, that the chicken eater was the assassin in the sniper’s nest (who wasn’t, Meagher would assure us, Oswald), or Williams was not lying, but the assassin in the sniper’s nest was also eating chicken while he waited to kill the president? I wish the theorists would tell us the relevance of the many inconsistencies they cite in the Kennedy case instead of feeling that the inconsistencies are an end in themselves and nothing else has to be shown or argued.
Or, in Dan's case, that the not-wholly-consistent six officers' statements "are an end in themselves" and Alyea's statement and the internal inconsistencies in BRW's statements are irrelevant "and nothing else has to be shown or argued."
