DR. DAVID W. MANTIK SAID:
The final irony of this Discovery program ["JFK: Inside The Target Car"] is the reliance placed on eyewitnesses—there are just two, and it is, after all, 45 years later. Of course, the program had no choice: because the Secret Service bucket brigade had done its job so well at Parkland Hospital, the program could present no objective evidence of blood spatter from the actual crime scene. .... However, lone gunman theorists repeatedly remind us that eyewitnesses cannot be trusted and that their comments should simply be ignored. Now that the shoe has shifted, will anyone notice?
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Totally untrue, of course.
Witnesses like Brennan, Markham, Davis, Davis, Scoggins, Benavides, and Callaway certainly haven't been "ignored" by lone-assassin believers.
And that's simply because those particular witnesses said something (such as IDing Lee Oswald with a gun in his hands) that is fully corroborated by OTHER STUFF (like ballistics evidence, fingerprints, and Oswald's own actions and lies). Ignoring those witnesses would be just plain silly.
Can anyone name one "conspiracy" type witness in Dealey Plaza or on 10th Street or at Parkland Hospital whose observations can be backed up with ballistics evidence (or any other hard, physical evidence of some kind)?
Alas, no such "conspiracy" witness exists, of course, because no shot was fired from the Grassy Knoll. Therefore, it's perfectly proper to dismiss such witnesses in favor of better evidence (such as the autopsy photos and X-rays, which prove ALL of the Parkland witnesses to be wrong, as amazing as that may sound).
Also....
Mantik's above comment -- "the final irony of this Discovery program is the reliance placed on eyewitnesses" -- is a rather weak argument when the "Inside The Target Car" documentary is weighed in full.
Dr. Mantik is referring to only two "blood spatter" witnesses in that above quote -- and, ironically, one of the two is motorcycle policeman Bobby Hargis, who is almost always used by the conspiracy theorists (not by LNers) when discussing the head "spray" and debris that struck Hargis after the fatal shot hit JFK in the head.
The only other witness referred to in the Mantik quote is a young man who happened to be in the Parkland parking lot and looked inside the bloody back seat of JFK's car before the crowd was shoved further back by police.
IMO, these two witnesses could have easily been cut out of the Discovery Channel program altogether, because they don't have much to offer anyway.
The "Target Car" program was mainly about re-creating the fatal head shot, and observing the differences in a surrogate head when that head is hit by a bullet being fired from both the rear and the front.
And that type of SCIENTIFIC reconstruction (and an evaluation of the holes in the mock heads after they've been struck with bullets from various locations) doesn't need any "witnesses" at all. The surrogate heads were simply shot from different locations, and the results were then filmed and examined. No Dallas witnesses required at all.
So when Mantik props up the Discovery Channel's "reliance" on those two completely unneeded eyewitnesses (who are peripheral, at best, to the program's main content), it sounds to me as if Dr. Mantik is digging deeper than usual for some "CT chaff". And that's probably because no conspiracy-favoring wheat was available for him to prop up in this instance.
David Von Pein
December 24, 2008
