Note: Except for the Introduction, the following article was first published in People and the Pursuit of Truth, April 1977, Vol. 2, No. 12, and appears here with the permission of its author.

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The Design of the Warren Report, to Fall to Pieces

by Vincent J. Salandria

Introduction - 1999
After re-reading this twenty-two year old piece, I would not change much. My current judgment is that events seem to bear out that the military did in fact join with the Eastern establishment and the U.S. intelligence services in the conspiracy to kill and to obfuscate the reasons for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. The bloated U.S. military budget, in the absence of credible enemies, convincingly speaks to the rich benefits derived by the military and to the military-industrial complex for their role in the assassination of JFK.

The killing of President Kennedy and the layers of transparent conspiratorial contradictory explanations for this killing disseminated by our Eastern establishment and its mainstream media enabled the national security state to increase its hold over political power and the economy domestically and globally. This power structure used the killing of President Kennedy and the false debate over it to extend its capacity to frame and to shape the current thinking of our citizens. By achieving an understanding of the true reasons for the killing of President Kennedy we will be able to free ourselves from the Orwellian paralysis of thinking which grips our people.

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The Design of the Warren Report,
to Fall to Pieces

We must hunt out the truth of why John F. Kennedy was killed.

Bertoldt Brecht said in 1935 on the problems of uttering the truth on important social questions:

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.

Yes, Brecht wrote that in 1935. In 1977 I am sorry to have to say that I feel truth is even more difficult to express. In keeping with the prerequisite of truth hunting set forth by Brecht, many earnest people will be a match for the murderers of John F. Kennedy in terms of courage, keenness, skill and judgment. But with regard to cunning, that is an entirely different matter, for in cunning the murderers eclipse many earnest people. So instead of cunning let us substitute our love of life and humanity, and armed with such we will perhaps be a match for the assassins.

Questions to Arlen Specter, 1964
On October 22, 1964 Arlen Specter, who did the work on the Warren Commission in explaining the shots, trajectories and wounds of the assassination, spoke before the Philadelphia Bar Association. I attended that meeting and directed some questions to him. Following the meeting, some colleagues at the bar suggested that I write an article presenting a dissenting point of view. I did that during the same evening of that day. It was published on November 2, 1964 in The Legal Intelligencer at the behest of the then-Chancellor of the Bar, Theodore Voorhees.

In that early article I critiqued the shots, trajectories and wounds analysis of the Warren Report. The article ended with the following comment:

Having read the Report, I conclude that the evidence offered by the Commission indicates there was more than one rifleman firing on November 22, 1963. There were more than three shots. If Oswald was one of the gunmen, then with that gun, from that vantage point, in that time span suggested by the Commission, he could not have been alone in the performance of the terrible work that destroyed our President and wounded two other men.

The Design of the Warren Report...
to Reveal Conspiracy
What I did not know when I wrote that article in 1964 was that the Warren Commission's single assassin conclusion was designed to fall to pieces, was designed to be incredible, was designed to self destruct.

To my friend, Professor Thomas Katen, I owe the brilliant insight which he has characterized as the "transparent conspiracy". Tom propounded the view that the Warren Report was not a cover-up, but rather was a transparent conspiracy, the purpose of which was to reveal the assassination to be a conspiracy although the Report seemed to have been endeavoring to prove a single assassin killing.

Tom's concept was that the Warren Commission covered up the conspiracy in such a gross and clumsy way so as to reveal intentionally the existence of conspiracy. Make no mistake about it, the Warren Commission and its staff were made up of very able men. If these men had wanted to cover up the conspiracy more effectively they could have done so. As we shall see, the cover-up was accomplished in such a self-defeating fashion that one would have to suspend common sense and respect for evidence in order to accept the Report's conclusions.

Through the prism of the transparent conspiracy concept, let us look briefly at some of the evidence considered by the Warren Commission. Through this analysis let us make our own assessment of whether the Warren Report was ever meant to result in a reasonable inference of a single assassin killing.

The Presidential Limousine
The Warren Report tells us that the presidential limousine, onto and into which bullets rained that killed the President, wounded Governor Connally, and damaged the vehicle, was removed with the Presidential party from Dallas on November 22. The removal of that limousine, with its vital evidence of bullet strikes, from Texas, the jurisdiction of the crime, was an illegal act. The Federal government chose to show the world that it was from the beginning with respect to this assassination engaging in patent illegality.

Governor Connally's Clothing
From the Warren Report we learn that Governor Connally' s clothing was dry cleaned and pressed prior to being turned over for analysis. This clothing was critical to answering the question of whether Connally was hit with a bullet which was separate from any which had struck Kennedy. If Governor Connally had been hit with a separate bullet then more than three shots had been fired and a conspiracy would have been proved. The dry cleaning and pressing of Connally's clothing was the rough equivalent of wiping fingerprints from a murder weapon. Yet the Warren Commission revealed this dry cleaning and pressing to the reader without comment.

The Burned Notes of Commander Humes
Commander James J. Humes, who prepared the original autopsy notes at Bethesda Naval Hospital, burned the original autopsy notes of the Kennedy autopsy in his fireplace at his home. The Warren Commission exhibits contain Commander Humes' certification to this effect.

Denial of Access to the Photographs and X-Rays
The Warren Commission not only revealed that the original autopsy notes were burned, but furthermore advised the reader that the Commission never had access to the photographs and x-rays taken of the Kennedy body. So on the one hand the Commission informed us that the government destroyed vital evidence, and on the other hand the Commission revealed that vital evidence was withheld from the Commission. Such revelations were hardly designed to inspire confidence in the Commission's conclusions.

Contradictions in the Exhibits
The Commission's exhibits clashed with one another. The various exhibits such as the autopsy face sheet, the drawings of the wounds, the clothing of President Kennedy --- all contradicted one another as to the nature and positions of the Kennedy wounds. Here again the inevitable result of these Commission contradictions was to serve as a self repudiation of the Commission's conclusions as to the nonexistence of a conspiracy.

The "Cheap Old Weapon" that Oswald
Allegedly Fired
The alleged murder rifle which Oswald, according to the Commission, was supposed to have used at Dealey Plaza, was even at its best, during World War II, described as "the humanitarian" rifle because of its ineffectiveness in combat. But this specific rifle to which the Commission had attributed all the shooting was by no means at its best. The rifle which according to the Commission was fired three times in no more than 5.6 seconds, and in that time period hit the President twice and two other men each at least once, was a bolt action rifle. The Commission evidence tells us that this Italian Manlicher-Carcano rifle was described as a "cheap old weapon." It "could have been purchased for $3.00 each in lots of 25." This particular rifle had a defective bolt that required considerable effort to work. The trigger had a two-stage operation. The telescopic sight was defective and caused the rifle to fire high and to the right. The firing pin of the rifle was worn on the nose and was rusty. All of these problems of this tremendously lethal junk rifle were revealed to us by the Commission. Again, none of these problems inspire confidence in the Commission's conclusions.

The problems which the Warren Commission made for itself have led to the inevitable repudiation of its conclusions. Let us examine the thesis that the Warren Report's actual purpose was to reveal a conspiracy and not to conceal it.

The Zapruder Film
Let us consider an item of evidence which the United States government had in its possession the afternoon of the assassination and which the Warren Commission did review in detail: the Zapruder film. This item of evidence proves conspiracy for anyone who wishes to spend six seconds of viewing time. This 8mm film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder while positioned on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza destroys the Warren Report's conclusions. The Zapruder film demonstrates, among other things, that the impact of the head shot in Frame 313 of the Zapruder film forced President Kennedy abruptly leftward and backward, slamming him off the back seat of the limousine. Such a bullet strike, in order to have caused Kennedy to be driven leftward and backward, would have had to have been fired from the right front of the President. But the Commission, which posited a single assassin killing, placed its alleged assassin in the rear of the President, and therefore the Commission, in having Kennedy propelled leftward and backward by a shot delivered from the rear, suspended Newton's second law of motion.

The government had the Zapruder film in its possession from the afternoon of the assassination. Yet the government persisted in adhering to a single assassin theory. The Commission, in its Report, never mentioned that Kennedy's body was forced leftward and backward.

The Warren Commission's Report
"Disproved" the Laws of Physics
But this movement of recoil of the President is so dramatic and unmistakable that the Commission's conclusion that this shot was fired from the back of the President is the reductio ad absurdum of the Commission. This film, as you will see, compels all to reject the Commission's conclusions as criminally irresponsible. A look at the film reduces the Commission's report to obvious fraud.

The fact that the Zapruder film was inaccessible to viewing year after year from 1963 to 1968 by the public, and is still bootlegged and shown to small groups instead of being shown in theaters all over the United States is very close to proof of conspiracy existing in the United States on a massive scale.

Once having seen the Zapruder film it becomes clear that the Warren Commission had to have been deliberately structured to reduce itself to absurdity. For the evidence of the assassination was such that a single-assassin idea could not have been made consistent with the Dealey Plaza ambush. That ambush had assassins positioned in and firing from more than one vantage point. Again I must assure you that the Commission and its staff, made up as they were of able men, once having seen Zapruder frame 313 and the frames that followed, knew as well as you and I know that there was more than one assassin.

The Design of "Concealment"
And the Commission and its staff could have concealed the multiple assassin killing more successfully than they did. But ultimately, the very nature of the killing was itself designed to reveal a conspiracy. Then why did the killers --- if their purpose was solely to do away with Kennedy --- not undertake to kill him in a manner which would have concealed, rather than revealed, conspiracy?

You will recall that the good Dr. Martin Luther King was dispatched quickly and eternally with a single life-extinguishing bullet. The veritable fusillade of shots fired from a complex ambush was not required to dispose of Kennedy. What then were the many angry voices of those excessive overkilling guns telling us while they were accomplishing their deadly work? Bullets were the medium of Kennedy's death, but was there for us a message in that medium?

The Level of Power Behind
the Assassination of Kennedy
What purpose could have been served by the killers having executed the assassination in such a manner so as to signal to the whole world that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy? How could the killers have been brazen enough to have had the conspiracy perpetrated in such a way so that people would know at some time and at some level of consciousness that there was a conspiracy? Could assassins who possessed little or no power have dared deliberately to reveal a conspiracy? Then what does the transparent nature of the killing tell us about the level of power which as behind the assassination?

How could the killers have known that in the midst of a Cold War that the governments under the influence of Soviet Russia would cooperate with our government by not pointing an accusatory finger at the government of the United States? Why did the Soviet government not make an effort to demonstrate that the government of this country, in contradistinction to its image as the leader of the free world, in fact had the odor of a banana republic? How could the killers have known that Russia would cooperate in this respect when the idea of a single assassin killing was not accepted by the people of any country either in the East or the West (except the United States)?

Who Benefited from the Conspiracy?
and What Effects Did It Have?
What benefits were derived from the United States government peddling this giant falsehood to the whole world when the transparent nature of the conspiracy made the lie as capable of being swallowed as a flea is capable of swallowing a watermelon? What benefits were intended to flow to the killers by having the people forced to know by the transparent nature of the conspiracy the real truth? What purpose was served by the government's use of Orwellian doublethink in vigorously denying conspiracy on the one hand while presenting overwhelming evidence of conspiracy on the other hand?

Who benefited from having Earl Warren, the beloved Chief Justice of our august Supreme Court, conduct secret Warren Commission hearings? What purpose was served in having liberal and distinguished Earl Warren sponsor the Warren Report which from the beginning, through its own evidence, revealed itself to be an ugly abortion of the truth? What effect did Earl Warren's lending his name to the Report's lies have on the people's confidence in our court system to accomplish truth and justice under the law?

What effect did the transparency of the conspiracy have on the people in terms of how they looked upon their Congress? For Congress was represented on the investigating Commission, and Congress maintained silence about the conspiracy and raised no questions in the face of deep skepticism by a majority of the American people. In the face of Congress' failure to give voice to the people's doubts, what confidence could the people have regarding the representative nature of the Congress?

What effect did the transparency of the conspiracy have in terms of how people looked at their local police forces in the face of the less than illustrious job the Dallas police did in protecting first the President's life, and then the life of Oswald, the alleged assassin? Was it not immediately after the assassination that the counter culture began its campaign to have the police considered not as human beings which they are, but rather as pigs?

What effect did the transparency of the conspiracy have in terms of how people viewed the Presidency when Kennedy, a popular, loved, independently rich, and world-renowned President could be killed without the courtesy of a common-law inquest which is a basic right of Anglo-Saxon justice extended to the most humble of citizens? And if President Kennedy had no rights, then what effect did the transparency of the assassination have on the way people looked upon the inviolability of their own civil rights?

And if a President with a powerful and rich family and many friends from around the world could be killed by a transparent conspiracy and all of the family and all the friends would not dare raise their voices in outrage, then what effect did this have on people? What effect would the silence of the Kennedy family have on the way our youth would feel toward people over thirty? What value would people see in maintaining old and committed friendships? And isn't this loss of confidence in family and friends that special type of despair which we call alienation?

What effect did the transparency of the conspiracy have on the way people looked at the constitutional and electoral structure when under a hail of bullets a duly-elected President was literally fired from his office and was then buried under another hail of lies issued by the same government which he had been elected to lead? What happens to the importance to which people attach to elections when power shifts without the benefit of elections?

Is not the answer to all of these questions self-evident and known?

Possible Models of Explanation
Let us explore possible models of explanation for the transparent nature of the Kennedy conspiracy. In brief fashion let us assess possible explanations of why the conspiracy to kill Kennedy was transparent.

The "Psychoanalytic" Model
First we might consider the psychoanalytic theory. Under this theory the killers and those assigned the task of covering up the conspiracy consciously wanted to cover up a conspiracy but because of their heavy burden of guilt unconsciously blundered and revealed the truth. But the evidence does not support this view.

The cover-up of the conspiracy was systematically bad and incredible. The Warren Commission Report produced twenty-six volumes of exhibits and transcripts and an enormous archives which abounded in proof of conspiracy. So much guilt does not systematically reveal itself in an organized and careful way unless there is a conscious --- and not an unconscious --- desire to advertise the guilt.

The "Military-lndustrial Complex" Model
Another theory is the hostage theory. This idea is that a military-industrial complex was behind the assassination and forced the Warren Commission to lie by holding the Commission and its staff captive. This theory would hold to the view that, pretending to follow orders, the liberal Warren Commission and staff let us see the truth while ostensibly supporting the lone assassin cover story. But the military-industrial complex, if it had killed Kennedy, would have had a very different post-assassination history.

Once having framed Castro by using Oswald, an apparent pro-Castroite, as a scapegoat, would not the American military have sought to invade Cuba? Would not North Viet Nam have been bombed into the stone age by our military, if they had free reign? Would not the society have been militarized rather than becoming remarkably antimilitarist? Would not the peace movement have been crushed rather than have grown to such hefty proportions? Would not a larger share of the country's wealth have been allocated to the military budget? Would the draft have been abolished? Would the military have been made to look guilty by burning the autopsy notes prepared at the Bethesda Naval Hospital? No, the evidence is much against the proposition that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy.

The Russian or Cuban Model
Next let us explore whether the Castro or the Russian governments were behind the killing of Kennedy. Would Castro have selected Oswald, who headed up a Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans (of which incidentally he was the only member) as the killer? Would the Russians have chosen Oswald who had been ostensibly a defector to the Soviet Union? Would Castro or the Soviet Union have risked the transparent nature of the assassination in killing Kennedy so as to invite hydrogen war? Was it worth killing liberal John F. Kennedy for Cuba and Russia to get very conservative L.B.J. as the head of the United States government? Would the FBI and CIA have covered for the Cuban or Russian governments? Would Warren have lent his liberal name, long attached to human rights, to a Warren Report which had as its purpose to protect collectivist totalitarian governments? Would our military have remained silent, especially when so much of the blame for the cover-up was heaped on the military, if the Cuban and Russian governments were behind the kiiling? No, Cuba and Russia did not kill Kennedy.

The "Eastern Establishment" Model
Then what was the purpose or purposes behind the killing of President Kennedy in a transparently conspiratorial way? The purpose for the transparent conspiracy to kill Kennedy, in my judgment, was to attain for the Eastern establishment, through the use of the intelligence community as its executive and executing arm, power over American politics and ultimately preeminent power over the minds of the American citizenry.

How This Model Explains and Explains Well
The transparent nature of the conspiracy was designed to frame the right, the liberals, and the left, so as to make us all feel alienated politically from one another.

The right was framed by having the killing occur in Dallas, a citadel of conservatism. The right was further framed by throwing guilt on the Dallas police the FBI and the military. Oswald was, after all, a Marine.

The liberals were framed because Oswald, after all, was a member of the ACLU. The liberals were also implicated because Warren was a liberal.

But the left was also framed. Oswald, after all, was a defector to Russia. Oswald, after all, headed up a Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And Oswald, after all, was in communication with the Communist Party the Socialist Workers' Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Cuban and Russian embassies. Those who believed in the socialist countries could only suffer quiet humiliation and disillusionment from Soviet Russia's indiscreet silence in this matter which concerned all of mankind.

The Court system was framed by having its most respected and prestigious member involved in the transparently fraudulent cover-up of the assassination.

The Congress was demonstrated to be impotent by having it remain silent in the face of massive repudiation of the Warren Report by the American people whom the Congress was supposed to have served.

The new President was framed by having the killing occur in Dallas in his very back yard, and therefore having the suspicion hang heavy over him that his boys may have done it for his benefit.

The people were paralyzed by steeping them in mourning and having them retreat to their television sets to fix with glassy and unthinking stares on those hypnotic screens, while the roll of the death drums pounded home to them their own helplessness in the face of the extinction of American democracy. And to deepen the despair, Oswald was dispatched by Ruby on camera.

Frame-up, Paralysis, and Alienation
"DIVIDE ET IMPERA"
So the transparent nature of the assassination in a very real sense framed us all; made us feel guilty, and served to paralyze us in a grippng sense of inadequacy. The transparent conspiracy paved the way for our despair and demoralization of the people. It eroded our trust in the nation states. But the alienation was deeper and more personal than the separation of people from confidence in their governments. The transparency of the assassination effectively destroyed politics. A counter culture was cultivated by the media and supported by the establishment which was to substitute for constitutional democracy and serve as an outlet for dissident energies.

And thus a post-Orwellian, Huxlyian world was ushered in by the new rulers. The drug culture was promoted. Individuality gave way to the abandonment of freedom and dignity and responsibility. The mind-expanding properties of drugs were to take us beyond human freedom and dignity. The embracing of our new servitude brought on by drug-induced pleasure and/or new charismatic mystical and religious movements moved people away from rationality.

The importance of education was downgraded. Only that was worth learning which was "relevant". Relevant was a catch word to describe that which gave us immediate sensory kicks. Nothing that required tough analysis and drudgery therefore was worth learning.

Work was rendered less and less essential. The accelerated application of computers to production --- the cybernetic revolution --- made all the more imminent and possible the nightmare of human beings being relegated to the status of mere means to technological ends. Teenage unemployment in our society grew to frightening proportions. Was it just accident which caused the teenagers to drop out of society just before society's use of the computer rendered the work of many of our teenagers unnecessary for production?

Orwellian Result
Thus deprived of a hopeful and useful future it was no difficult matter to turn teenagers against their parents by the invention of an artificial barrier called the generation gap. The young were taught to distrust everyone over thirty years of age. They were instructed that there was nothing to be learned from the past. They were taught to have contempt for the future. They became "the now generation". A generation without a past and without a future is not a now generation but a forever lost generation.

The sexual revolution threatened the elimination of family structure and mocked the long-term committed and responsible love relationship. To a large extent the woman's liberation movement was perverted to set woman apart from man in opposition to natural chemistry. Unisex was pushed by the media as chic instead of sick. Sexual license was passed off as a satisfactory substitute for free society.

Either Aldous Huxley anticipated all of this or the killers of Kennedy, having read Huxley well, employed his work as a model for our society. I excerpt from what Huxley said in 1958 in a preface to a reprinting of his Brave New World:

...the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, and in the immediate past, rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to reduce economic and social confusion. To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased...

"There is no Reason why the New Totalitarianism
Should Resemble the Old"

...There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient, and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned in present-day totalitarian states to ministries of propaganda. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and participating scientists will call "The problem of happiness" --- in other words the problem of making people love their servitude ... The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep personal revolution in human minds and bodies.

"Bread and Circuses" = Welfare and TV
In Brave New World Revisited Huxley said: "Individuals must be suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work, but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of professional mind-manipulators ... Probably the happy mean between gullibility and a total skepticism can never be discovered and maintained by analysis alone . This rather negative approach to the problem will have to be supplemented by something more positive --- the enunciation of a set of generally acceptable values based upon a solid foundation of facts. The value, first of all, of individual freedom based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry --- the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the value of intelligence without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

"...The older dictators failed because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator education will really work --- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

"Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom, but some of us still believe that without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freeedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them."

What Are We to Do?
In accord with Huxley's sense of duty, what can we do? We can look at humanity as a species with a proud past, a difficult present and a troubled but still-hopeful future. Each of us can draw strength from the past. From the past we must draw upon those traditions which offer to mankind purpose, identity and love of his fellow man.

Each of us must draw strength from the present. From the present we must seek to understand power and the tools of mind control. We must presently accept that tyranny has gained new and effective technology in its age-old war against man's liberty. In studying the present we must raise our threshold of fear so that we can face hard truth. Hard truth will tell us that everywhere power seeks to defeat man's individuality, to program man to be alienated from all other men; to manipulate man to seek pleasure and not responsibility. The present task of those who love humanity is to get men and women to move, work, and join together in common love of human freedom, knowledge and justice.

For the future, what are we to do? We must unite in the task of freeing humanity from a drugged and pleasure-driven servitude. Should we be successful in joining people together, this work will transform our future world into one which is marked by social justice, human freedom and a more equitable distribution of wealth.

As a first small effort toward these ends, let us engage now in a discussion wherein we will use the Kennedy assassination not as a mechanism for practicing a debilitating exercise in double-think, but rather let us use the assassination as a means of expanding our understanding of our times.

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