Larry Craig: The "JFK Assassination" Angle

Senator Arlen Specter’s tantalizing speculation on the outcome of the Larry Craig case:

Sen. Craig skips Senate's first day back after resignation announcement

...Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested Craig’s GOP colleagues who pressured him last week to resign should re-examine the facts surrounding his arrest June 11. (continued)

“The more people take a look at the situation, there may well be second thoughts,” Specter, a former prosecutor, said today. If Craig had not pleaded guilty in August to a reduced charge and instead demanded a trial, “I believe he would have been exonerated,” Specter said...

It is interesting to speculate on Specter’s speculation. Could the Senator be considering the possibility of an extended investigation that will ultimately clear Craig by raising serious doubts about his culpability?

Specter’s career as an investigator may be coming full circle. He rose to fame as the proponent of the famous and controversial “single-bullet theory” explanation for how Lee Harvey Oswald might have been solely responsible for the death of President Kennedy in 1963. Specter’s contributions to the Warren Commission Report represented an attempt to dispel the notion that more than one assassin was involved in the shooting.

So it is ironic that Specter now seems to be proposing some “conspiracy theory” of his own in order to exonerate his Republican colleague.
What will Specter’s theory look like, once it is fleshed out? We don’t know, but we can guess.

Specter will probably try to prove the existence of “someone else” in an adjoining bathroom stall—a “second shitter,” if you will. The presence of a second person or persons unknown, seated on “the gassy knoll” in close proximity to that of the arresting officer, would go far in exculpating Craig—if it could be shown that it was a physical impossibility for Senator Craig to reach down for piece of toilet paper on the floor with his PALM FACING UP, as he claims.

A second shitter would also explain the toe-tapping and “the hand with the gold wedding ring” that the officer SAYS he sighted, rubbing the bottom of the adjoining stall. Millions of American men wear gold wedding rings; that is not conclusive evidence that wearers are not gay, or that the hand that Officer Karsnia saw beneath the stall was Craig’s.

Clearly, Specter does not accept the theory propounded by those who would pin the blame on Craig, and Craig alone—the so-called “single toilet theory.” It stretches the bounds of credulity to believe that Craig was “acting alone,” that a United States Senator (however wide his stance) would reach down to pick up a piece of toilet paper off the floor in such a way that could be mistaken for sexual invitation by an experienced officer in the next stall.

Specter will also point out that many of the potential witnesses to the incident have “disappeared.” Men using the busy airport restroom facilities at the date and time in question are “unavailable” to the press and public—either that, or they’re refusing to testify about what they saw. Coincidence--or something more sinister?

Officer Karsnia’s police report notes that Senator Craig “did not flush” after exiting the stall. I submit that Karsnia included that fact in his report as evidence that Craig had entered the men’s restroom for non-excretory purposes. It should be noted that failure to flush before leaving a restroom stall is a crime in Singapore.

Yes, it is. In law school I had a Chinese friend who grew up in Singapore. He explained to me that citizens who did not flush after exiting the stall were reported to the authorities; the punishment was to run their photographs in the local paper.

This may ultimately prove irrelevant, if Singapore does not try to claim jurisdiction over the case, but I feel it is important to include an international law perspective here. Whatever argument Craig tries to present in his defense, there is no excuse for not flushing the toilet after leaving the stall.