Mark Crispin Miller Nails the JFK Cover-up and Casts Light on 9/11

From: Off-Guardian

JFK 55 years on: Casting Light on 9/11 & Other 21st Century Crimes

Graeme MacQueen

1962: US statesman John F Kennedy, 35th president of the USA, making a speech. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

Fifty-five years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although there has been a great deal written about this event over the years, I want to draw attention to one exceptionally important article, originally delivered as a talk on November 20, 1998. Vincent Salandria gave this talk in Dallas at the invitation of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. (See Sources.)

Salandria had been a high school teacher at the time of the assassination (he later became a lawyer) and was one of the first people in the US to write essays expressing dissent from the government narrative of lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, maverick leftist.

In his 1998 talk Salandria went through over a dozen of the famous obstacles to the government story—the grassy knoll witnesses, the “magic bullet,” the testimony of the doctors at Parkland Hospital, and so on—but he did not let himself get sidetracked into detailed debates on any of these. By 1998 he had already seen, and participated in, 35 years of such debates. He had long ago concluded that, “the national security state at the very highest level of its power killed President John F. Kennedy for his efforts at seeking to develop a modus vivendi with the Soviets and with socialist Cuba.”

In 1998 he felt it was time to warn researchers about the danger of wasting time in “false debates,” where the essential facts had clearly been established and the wrangling served only the purposes of the assassins. Rather than repeat the debates, Salandria decided in 1998 to outline his basic approach. I will call this the Salandria Approach. I draw attention to it because I believe it helps us find our feet when we tackle not only the JFK killing but many of the killings in the 21st century’s War on Terror.

Here are Salandria’s words:

I began to sift through the myriad facts regarding the assassination which our government and the US media offered us. What I did was to examine the data in a different fashion from the approach adopted by our news media. I chose to assess how an innocent civilian-controlled US government would have reacted to those data. I also envisioned how a guilty US national security state which may have gained control of and may have become semi-autonomous to the civilian US governmental structure would have reacted to the data of the assassination.”

 He adds that,

only a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins would consistently resort to accepting one improbable conclusion after another while rejecting a long series of probable conclusions.”

Let us take two cases from Salandria’s list of over one dozen in order to see what he was getting at.

THE GRASSY KNOLL

Dozens of witnesses thought there were shots from an extended grassy rise, containing several structures, situated west of the famous Texas School Book Depository Building. Salandria, refusing to get drawn into the familiar debate, says:

Let us assume arguendo [for the sake of argument] that all of the eyewitnesses who had concluded that shots were fired from the grassy knoll were dead wrong. But an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong and would not have immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched single assassin theory as fact.”

Note that Salandria’s emphasis is not on the details of the grassy knoll discussion but on the method the government followed in its investigation. And he is right, both about the immediate claim that Oswald acted alone— presented, as he explains, by a government representative on November 22 itself—and about the identical statement presented later by the Warren Commission.

In both cases the claim flew in the face of the eyewitness evidence. For example, despite the fact that there are references to dozens of witnesses to shots from the grassy knoll in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report, the Commission itself displayed little interest in them. And when the Commission dismissed every single one of the grassy knoll witnesses to protect its lone gunman theory it did so without bothering to make a sustained argument.

It chose instead to play a credibility game. It pronounced:

No credible evidence suggests that the shots were fired from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass, the nearby railroad yards or any place other than the Texas School Book Depository Building” Warren Report, p. 61

In other words, the Commission decided to gather together into one great agglomeration the credibility of its seven well dressed and high-ranking white men associated with government and use this to crush the credibility of the “good citizens” who were present in the Plaza and witnessed, with their senses, the unfolding of events.

It was a breathtaking move. But in what way could it be said to characterize an innocent government? How could any serious investigator pretend to solve an evidential problem by playing a credibility game? Standard practice in a homicide investigation would be to find all witnesses, to interview them, and to record their statements impartially, making sure to ask each one of them where they thought the shots came from and why they reached their conclusion. How would the opinions of congressmen, spies and the like possibly be relevant to the case when these gentlemen declined to offer adequate counter-evidence or to give a serious argument to support their peculiar conclusion?

Readers who have never had the opportunity to see and hear for themselves the good citizens in question may benefit from Mark Lane’s documentary:

Well, where, in such a case, does the Salandria Approach lead us? We have no choice but to conclude that the Warren Commission’s investigation was not what we would expect from “an innocent civilian-controlled US government.”

It was more characteristic of “a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins.” There was a predetermined perpetrator and an insistence on the guilt of this perpetrator, while evidence suggestive of a conspiracy was systematically ignored, distorted or suppressed.

Suppose we were to apply the Salandria Approach to events of the 21st century–to the eyewitnesses at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, for example? We have over 150 witnesses who reported that they saw, heard or felt explosions at the time of the beginning of destruction of the Twin Towers. (See Sources for assertions in this and the following paragraph.)

Their testimony constitutes very significant support for the theory that the Trade Center was blown up and did not undergo collapse from structural failure caused by airplane collision. We are not simply talking about loud sounds here. We are talking about sounds that experienced firefighters suspected were caused by bombs. We are talking about patterns of explosions seen pulverizing the buildings. We are talking, in some cases, about witnesses who say these explosions threw them through the air. Now, avoiding the debates about the details of this testimony, let us follow Salandria and ask: What did the government’s 9/11 Commission do with these eyewitness accounts, all of which were in its possession?

The answer is that it called for no comprehensive search for eyewitnesses (neither did the FBI, as far as I can discover), nor did it have such witnesses asked the appropriate questions. It devoted to these witnesses a single line in the roughly 585 pages of its Report. And that single line is both dismissive and extremely misleading.

What about the National Institute of Standards and Technology, assigned by government the task of looking in detail at the destruction of the Trade Center and sorting out the reasons for its destruction? In the thousands of pages of its reports on the Twin Towers we find not a single mention of the explosion witnesses. Despite NIST’s pride in its interviewing techniques, and despite its access to all the relevant information, it somehow missed over 150 witnesses. It made no attempt to find them, to sort out their testimony, or to discover how their words might illumine the mystery of the so-called “collapses.”

We should recall that the efforts of the 9/11 Commission and NIST were mere follow-through. A strenuous attempt to promote the structural failure hypothesis was begun on the very day of September 11, 2001, in the absence of serious evidence in its favour and in bold contradiction to what large numbers of witnesses were saying. (Sources)

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