Vincent Salandria, Esq.
Although he was not personally in Dallas the weekend of November 20-22, Professor Peter Dale Scott was able to deliver a message that ended up being repeated on several occasions. "Since World War II it has become normal to control America by lying to it," he said in an email read aloud by Dr. Gary Aguilar. "Let us hope we can move to a different norm: that to govern a democracy it is necessary to tell it the truth.
"Perhaps a legislative proposal to this effect would be in order. We already have a statute, 18 USC 1001, that requires citizens to be honest when dealing with the government. I propose a complementary statute, that would make it a crime for government officials to lie about public business to the people."
There were several newsworthy developments at the weekend conference. At its conclusion, it was announced that John Judge is resigning from COPA, and that COPA is not scheduling another conference at this time. Unfortunately, I missed the formal announcement and was playing catch-up on this, but Dan Alcorn told me later that as new research and new developments warrant, conferences are possible somewhere down the road. It didn't sound, that weekend, as if COPA was going belly up.
The conference opened on Friday, November 20. That same night, on the CBS Evening News, there was a story about the Assassination Records Review Board and the 35th anniversary of the JFK assassination. In the course of this item, anchor Dan Rather stated that the ARRB "did find enough evidence to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman..."
This, of course, is patently false. As author John Newmen observed, "It never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist and turn and obfuscate and block this movement." He added that "This is a mass movement to find the truth."
Former Board member John Tunheim, in Dallas for the COPA conference, was asked about Dan Rather's report. "We did not reach a conclusion as a Board," he said. "The [ARRB Final Report] spells out very clearly that we did not reach a conclusion." For a complete transcript of the CBS story, and Tunheim's full reply, please see Dan Rather, Yet Again in this issue of Fair Play.
I had arrived at the Conference, held at the Amtrak Union Station near Dealey Plaza, in mid-afternoon on Friday. By that time the conference was well underway and I had missed a bunch of stuff, including meetings of Working Panels and, most important, a 1pm Press Conference. If the conference was covered by the print media I didn't see the articles. And I did look for them.
The first scheduled event I attended was a 7pm Welcome Panel. Speaking here, John Judge mentioned the Dan Rather report, and said: "There's certainly something in the air; it's not like this issue has gone away, or has no impact. We have George Lardner, no friend of ours in the Washington Post, writing about the possibility there were two different brains involved in the autopsy, and Mrs. Connally coming out against the Warren Commission. So whatever it is we're doing wrong --- we're doing something right."
Dr. Cyril Wecht said, "It is one of the most exciting periods in these thirty-five years since the assassination. We have had our highlights --- some of which are positive, some of which are extremely troublesome and frustrating. But there can be no doubt that this year, given the submission of the Final Report of the ARRB, the things that have come out --- the brain..." Here, Dr. Wecht shook his head in bewilderment. "Is it possible, maybe, John Kennedy --- a very bright guy, maybe he had two brains!"
The speaker I was most looking forward to was Vincent Salandria. Salandria is a Philadelphia lawyer who, immediately in 1963, began questioning the official story as it began coming out of Dallas. He was introduced by Dr. Gary Aguilar, who said: "He's a man whose earlier writings are a source of inspiration every time I read them, not only for their content, but for their eloquence."
Mr. Salandria spoke for about an hour. After he was done, I had the opportunity to meet him, and he was gracious enough to not only supply me with a copy of his speech, but to grant me permission to use it in this publication. The full text, entitled "The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes," will appear in the next issue of Fair Play. I will attempt here to present his most salient points.
"For one half of my seventy years," he said at the outset, "from almost the very date of the assassination, I have been convinced that the killing of President Kennedy was a patent Cold War killing --- the bloody work of the U.S. military-intelligence system and its supporting civilian power elite.
"For us to allow thirty-five years to pass, while debate rages on the subject, is not only an abdication of the required work of a democratic citizenry, but the debate itself actively serves the interests of the assassins," Salandria said. "Such debate masks the damage done to the constitutional structure by the extra-constitutional firing of the President."
To fully understand the Kennedy assassination, Salandria declared, one must view it in historical perspective. He said a process of militarization of the United States began at least as far back as 1898, when President McKinley authorized the use of armed forces against Spanish forces in Cuba. This was followed by a declaration of war against Spain and, Salandria said, paved the way for "an American Empire built upon the strength of the U.S. military."
United States participation in World War I resulted in "a tragic loss of democratic freedom. The Espionage Act of 1917 effectively snuffed out free speech by making felons of persons who exercised their First Amendment rights. The Socialist Party's presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was given a ten year prison sentence. His crime? He had simply spoken the truth. He had stated that the war had an economic basis. The war started the FBI on its path of gathering millions of files on people and organizations. Following World War I we saw political reaction sweep over our country in the course of which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were judicially murdered by the American establishment."
Salandria said that to this day, the truth about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is generally suppressed. He said it was plain to him, even as a schoolboy, that months of tension between Japan and the United States precipitated the attack, and that "inviting the Pearl Harbor attack was President Roosevelt's duplicitious device to eliminate the powerful neutralist sentiment in our country while thrusting us into the war. Later, some of our country's most distinguished historians ... came to this same conclusion."
A Presidential Commission examining the episode, however, laid responsibility solely on two top military men. This Commission, Salandria said, also became the blueprint for the Warren Commission.
"Armed with this historical perspective, on November 22, 1963, I began to examine the post-assassination events as they unfolded. I took note of the reports coming in about the alleged assassin. I wondered whether his alleged left-wing credentials were bona fide. Very early in my work in the peace movement, I warned that some ostensible peace activists were infiltrating government agent provocateurs who were not what they at first blush appeared to be. May I suggest that some of our critics of the Warren Report are government agents. Can we honestly expect that the powerful elements in our society who dispatched our President with that deadly Dealey Plaza fusillade and then sought to cover up the reasons why he was killed would leave to ordinary citizens to inform the public about the real meaning of the assassination of President Kennedy?"
Lee Oswald's murder on November 24, 1963, convinced Salandria that the assassination was "the work of the very center of U.S. power." An examination of news stories about Oswald led him to conclude "he was not a genuine leftist, but rather was a U.S. intelligence agent. It was apparent to me that no legitimate leftist straddles so many diverse political fences in a fractionalized American left."
Salandria said that he examined the facts surrounding the assassination, as released by the government and the media. "I submit that the manner in which the data were handled by our government demonstrate that 1), 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, 2), subservient U.S. government, civilian establishment and mainstream media persons criminally and systematically aided the warfare state in covering up the assassination; and 3) in light of this criminal cover-up by the American power elite that there is no logical way we can conclude that the assassination was not the product of our warfare system.
"There was also no way rationally to conclude that the assassination was a result of the labor of the Soviets, Castro, the Mafia, J. Edgar Hoover, President Johnson, or that any lower level U.S. governmental operatives had been solely responsible for the execution of President Kennedy.
"As I examined the evidence I was confronted with an unvarying pattern. Whenever evidence of a conspiracy emerged --- and mountains of facts were supplied by the government for us to scrutinize --- the government refused to act on that evidence. On the other hand, whenever any data emerged, no matter how thoroughly incredible, which could possibly be interpreted as supporting a lone assassin theory --- the government invariably and with the greatest solemnity declared that such data proved the correctness of the lone assassin myth. That is not the earmark of an innocent, blundering government."
Returning later to the subject of Oswald, Salandria reiterated that he had "all the earmarks of a U.S. intelligence agent ... in publicizing without criticism this false Marxist cloak of Oswald the American press joined the criminality of our U.S. intelligence assassins as accessories after the fact."
Once a conspiracy is deemed to exist, Salandria said, as the House Select Committee concluded was probable, Ruth and Michael Paine have to be considered a part of it. A plot such as the one that killed JFK can't work "unless the patsy is delivered to the scene of the killing. Ruth Paine accomplished the crucial twin assassination tasks of getting Oswald into the Dallas area and arranging to get him a job in the Texas Book Depository Building. Therefore, the Paines, albeit on a need-to-know basis, were involved in the plot ... [they] are criminal co-conspirators in the killing of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless government."
Salandria cautioned: "Please do not seek comfort in the probability that the killing of President Kennedy was the work of a low-level conspiracy. Chief Justice Warren, Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, all of the otehr government operatives, the U.S. media, the U.S. historians, would not have failed to perform the work which we have just performed in order to protect the Mafia or some small group not associated with the center of u.S. power." Neither would the Kennedy family have acquiesced, Salandria said, if the killers had not been at the very center of power.
"The effect of the government's deceit has been to create a confused and extremely protracted debate designed to hide the simple truth of a high level warfare-state conspiracy," Salandria continued. "Through Orwellian doublethink the government successfully involved us in years of fruitless debate as to the microanalytic details of how the assassination was executed and what obscure meaning the assassination had on our lives." By issuing the transparent Warren Report, he went on, the government "impressed upon us that we could not rely on our court system to accomplish justice."
As he reached the end of his speech, Salandria asked rhetorically, "What are we to do? We must accept as no mystery the question of why the assassination occurred. President Kennedy was killed for seeking to reduce the planet-threatening tensions of the Cold War. He was killed for accomplishing the test-ban treaty. He was killed for his eloquence in espousing peace ... [and] because he had refused to bomb and to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, although the Joint Chiefs and the CIA were much for this course of action."
The nation's cities decay, and its poor suffer, while simultaneously the military industrial complex prospers "against imagined or impotent enemies," Salandria stated. "There is no mystery regarding how, by whom, and why President Kennedy was killed. Only when we strip away our privileged cloak of denial about the truth of the killing will we be able to free ourselves for the hard global work of changing our unfair and brutal society to one that is more equitable and less violent."
Mr. Salandria left the podium to a thunderous standing ovation.
Vincent Salandria, it seems to me, must be a tough act to follow. The next speaker was well-suited to the task. He was Dr. E. Martin Schotz, author and editor of the anthology History Will Not Absolve Us.
Readers may also remember Dr. Schotz from the concluding paragraphs of Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. Schotz is a participant in the "round-robin correspondence of a small group of friends" that also includes Salandria, who discuss major issues including the JFK case. Fonzi quotes him as writing, "To know the truth --- as opposed to only believe the truth --- is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility."
"One of my heroes is Duke Ellington," Schotz began, "and when he was asked about Billy Strayhorn, who was his great collaborator, he characterized him as his harshest critic.
"That's one thing that has guided the work that Vince and I and others have done within our group. And that is, we've never allowed any kind of personal relationship to in any way diminish the critical nature of our relationship. And it's in that spirit that I'm going to be speaking tonight."
Schotz said he wanted to explore the reason why the American people do not know who killed President Kennedy, and why. He said there are really three inter-dependent conspiracies. "These are: 1) The criminal conspiracy to murder the President by a cabal of militarists at the highest eschelons of power in the United States; 2) the conspiracy which aided and abetted these murders after the fact, by covering for the assassins --- also a true criminal conspiracy, involving an extremely wide circle of government officials across the entire political spectrum and all levels of government; and 3) a conspiracy of ignorance, denial, confusion and silence which has pervaded our entire public.
"The major focus of my talk is this third conspiracy on the part of the public, which includes our so-called critical community. I want to show you that our failure to know is not based on any lack of data, or because the data is ambiguous. It is all extremely simple and obvious.
"Rather, we don't know because we are deeply, emotionally resistant to what such knowledge tells us about ourselves and our society. Furthermore, the powers that be do not reward people for such knowledge. Indeed, if a person is willing to acknowledge the truth, is in a position to share such truth with the public, and wishes to do so, that the organized institutions of our society will turn sharply against such a person."
He related a parable about a society warned that all its water not specially horded would disappear, and be replaced with new water that would drive everyone insane. Only one man stored the old water. Everyone else drank from the new water, and started behaving differently --- although they had no memory of their old ways. They regarded the one man as insane. When the one man could no longer stand it, he drank the new water. He forgot about his horded water and behaved like everyone else; the others looked upon him as one who had been quite mad, but who had miraculously regained his sanity.
"The struggle for the truth in the assassination of President Kennedy confronts us with the problem of the waters of knowledge versus the waters of uncertainty," Schotz said. "Let me give you an example involving two important individuals who attempted to bring the truth before the American people. I'm speaking of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and filmmaker Oliver Stone."
Both Garrison and Stone understood that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, Schotz said. In the case of Stone, both he and his film JFK were targets of intense media attack even before the movie was released. "In the face of this attack, Stone was advised to compromise, and did so. He backed off telling the American people that his film was the truth, and instead claimed that his film, JFK, was, quote, 'my myth.'" In other words, Schotz said, Stone began saying that there was uncertainty about what really happened, and his movie was just one explanation.
"The instant Stone did that," Schotz said, "the campaign of slander essentially ended."
The example of Jim Garrison is different. Garrison, like Stone after him, was also the target of intense media attack. "It was claimed that he was a drug addict, that he had ties to the Mafia, that it was grandstanding and self-seeking. But Garrison never backed down. And because of that, even today, a noted biographer cannot get a major publisher to enter into a contract to do an honest biography of the man. He is still an outcast --- a madman, as far as society is concerned.
"Stone agreed to drink the waters of uncertainty, and society recognized him as having miraculously recovered his sanity. Garrison refused, insisting on drinking the waters of knowledge, and for this, he suffered accordingly."
There has never been a shortage of enough evidence demonstrating a conspiracy in this case, Schotz said. "In fact, we need very little data. Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, you can throw almost the whole twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission in the trash can. All you need to do is look at this."
Here, two slides were shown, which I am placing side-by-side in the above graphic. On the left is CE 385, the WC's explanation of the trajectory of CE 399 through Kennedy's body. On the right is Exhibit 59 from the FBI's Supplemental Report to the Warren Commission, a picture of the bullet holes in Kennedy's coat --- "which I'm sure you're all familiar with."
The two images say quite a bit, Schotz said. "They tell us the President's throat wound is an entry wound. That it is absolutely impossible that the back wound of the President could be in any way linked with the throat wound. We know from those two images that the President was hit from the front, and we need nothing more to make that conclusion as a matter of absolute knowledge.
"Number two. The minute we see those images, we know from those images that the Warren Commission knew there was a conspiracy, because it was obvious, and the Commission was engaged in a criminal conspiracy, after the fact, to obstruct justice. The Chief Justice of the United States was a criminal accessory to murder. Senator Arlen Specter is a criminal accessory to muder ---" and here, Schotz was interupted by a smattering of applause --- "the Warren Report is not a mistake; it is an obvious act of criminal fraud.
"Now think of this for a moment. The Warren Report is an obvious act of fraud, and no history department in any college or university is willing to say so. What does this silence mean?
"It means we are dealing with something that has affected every history department of every college and university in our society. Every major newspaper and magazine, all means of mass communication --- it has effected virtually every loyal American. This phenomenon is what George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called Crimestop, or protective stupidity." Sort of a mass head-in-the-hand syndrome, I guess.
Many speakers that weekend invoked the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Schotz was among them. "We have a very strange sort of democracy," he said. "It is a democracy in which the press is so free, that the President can't have sex with a White House intern without being hauled before the court of public opinion. But the military intelligence establishment can openly assassinate the President, and escape without any serious effort by that press to call it to account." This remark drew a modest round of applause.
"The President lying in a civil deposition and supposedly obstructing justice over something that is totally meaningless gets infinite attention from our media. This, while the clear obstruction ofjustice in the murder of a president passes in silence. To see such a thing is to realize that when we call ourselves free and democratic, we are wrapping ourselves in the window dressing of a modern militarist empire --- an empire of which we are subjects."
Society presents us with a choice, Schotz said. Speak the truth and become marginalized, or compromise the truth and get acceptance and credibility. "The problem is, that the moment you compromise the truth --- the moment you contribute false uncertainty --- at that moment you have joined the coverup. This is the critical point."
And this, Schotz said, presents a serious problem within the research community. "Given what I have set before you, the whole effort by the critical community to petition the United States government to establish a board which would assist it in resolving the mystery of the assassination --- such an effort represents precisely the process ... in which people choose to live in falsehood, to make ourselves instrumental in remaking conditions which bring us indignity, loss of self-esteem, and again bind us to the task of re-conditioning evil cycles of denial, and truth, and justice to ourselves.
"The President was assassinated. The government covered for the assassins. The media covered for them. And all the established institutions of society fell in line with this, and the public was not prepared to take matters into its own hands. This is the sorry truth of our democracy, and there is nothing to be done about it, other than to witness the full horror and shape of it, to feel the helplessness that is our reality before this state, which has been gripped with militarism, and the economic interests which this militarism serves."
The problem for people who want the truth to be known, Schotz asserted, is that the public lacks the ability to think its way through the lies, and get at the truth. And it is to the critical community's shame, he continued, that rather than correct this problem, they have by and large aligned themselves with the government, furthering public confusion.
Schotz said that the Assassination Records Review Board was set up on the false premise that the Government was never open enough when it came to the assassination. "Not one member of the Board is capable of coming before you and stating the most simple and axiomatic truths of this case: there was a conspiracy without a doubt. The Warren Report was an obvious act of criminal fraud. Senator Arlen Specter should be indicted for criminal obstruction of justice.
"Can any member of that Board come before you and say that? Of course not. Because respected members of the legal and academic Establishment who can get the appropriate security clearances to serve on that Board, are incapable of speaking simple truths like this. And if you try to get them to admit this kind of thing, they look at you as if you're some kind of weirdo, or nut.
"And I remind you, they do not feel that way about Oliver Stone today, because he is not saying these are facts. These are only theories --- myths --- and he's not claiming he knows what happened, so he's not a problem. If fact, they can use the film JFK, and claim they are responding to the film through this Review Board.
"And COPA, and JFK Lancer, and all the respected members of the critical community go and praise this Board, and testify before it, and they and the Board embrace each other. What is there to say? This is our independent research community?
"If this is our independent research community, there is no mystery why the public doesn't know who killed President Kennedy, and why.
"I was going to read to you how the press is using the statements of various respected researchers who are here. I was going to read the COPA mission statement, and dissect it --- but what is the point?"
Dr. Schotz was nearly finished. "To those of us who attempt to defend the coverup by suggesting that the truth would have been too painful for our country to endure --- I want to remind us that the people of Vietnam were not spared the turmoil ... the people of Latin America and South American have not been spared. By cooperating, and holding this society together through lies, we have made it much more possible for our military intelligence apparatus to impose enormous suffering on the people throughout the world. And this turmoil and mayhem has by no means ended."
Truth, Schotz said, is the primary word. "Discovering the truth is painful --- but it is without a doubt a healthy and liberating action."
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