BStrong
Penultimate Amazing
Here you go:
In the late 1970s, as a lawyer for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, Lane appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a congressional probe into the Lanecircumstances surrounding the separate assassinations of the civil rights leader and President Kennedy. HSCA said of Lane in its report, “Many of the allegations of conspiracy that the committee investigated were first raised by Mark Lane . . . . As has been noted, the facts were often at variance with Lane's assertions . . . . Lane was willing to advocate conspiracy theories publicly without having checked the factual basis for them . . . . . Lane's conduct resulted in public misperception about the assassination of Dr. King and must be condemned.”[9]
With the publication of his latest book Lane’s modus operandi has clearly not changed. In fact, his new tome depends on readers’ ignorance, and no independent knowledge of the dramatis personae of the assassination literature or how the CIA behaved at the time of the assassination. For example, the author of the book’s introduction resurrects the myth that FBI agents listened to a tape recording of a “Lee Oswald” at the Soviet embassy during the assassin’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the assassination. The allegation that such a tape existed was debunked many years ago by HSCA. The story of the existence of tapes had originated with only one FBI agent out of many who handled the transcripts of the tapes because the tapes had been copied over as per the CIA’s usual procedures. [10]
And Further:
Central to Lane’s the-CIA-did-it thesis is his chapter entitled “The Indictment—The People of the United States v. the Central Intelligence Agency.” It is a regurgitation of his endlessly voiced but unproven vociferations that the CIA was not only at the center of a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy but that Watergate burglar and former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, along with others, had been part of the plot.
His publishers promote the book by proclaiming Lane had successfully persuaded a jury that the CIA killed Kennedy. On the inside book flap they loudly state, “Mark Lane has tried the only case in the history of America . . . in which jurors concluded that the CIA killed President Kennedy.” In fact, the jury concluded nothing of the sort.
Lane’s story about CIA involvement in the assassination begins with a 1976 article published in an anti-Semitic magazine, Spotlight, which alleged that CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars, was in Dallas on 22 November 1963. The article, written by Victor Marchetti, a former CIA official, alleged Hunt had a role in the Kennedy assassination. The allegation had its origins in a photograph taken at the time of the assassination which purported to show three mysterious tramps in the railroad yards behind the infamous Book Depository being taken into custody by the Dallas police. One of the tramps bore a resemblance to Hunt. It was not until the 1980s and the release of Dallas Police files that the tramps were identified and they had nothing to do with the assassination.[15]
Hunt won a libel judgment against the magazine in 1981, but it was thrown out on appeal, and the case was re-tried in 1985 in Miami in a civil, not criminal, trial. Hunt lost his case but the jury decision, with the exception of one juror, was based not on their belief that Hunt was a participant in a CIA plot to kill the president but on the fact there was not “actual malice” (a principle of law established by a 1964 Supreme Court ruling) in the magazine’s publication of the article, not that the article was necessarily true. When a “public figure” like E. Howard Hunt is attacked in the media, he cannot win a libel judgment merely by showing that the attack is “untrue and unfair.”
Lane claims the jurors accepted his premise that the CIA was responsible for murdering the president. Lane wrote, “The evidence was clear, she [jury forewoman Leslie Armstrong] said. The CIA had killed President Kennedy. Hunt had been part of it, and that evidence, so painstakingly presented should now be examined by the relevant institutions of the United States trial government so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.”[16]
However, two of the jurors told the Miami Herald they did not believe Lane had proven that Hunt was a co-conspirator. Suzanne Reach said that the jury’s verdict was “absolutely not” the reason for the verdict. “We were very disgusted and felt (the article) was trash”, she said, “. . . . The paper published material that was sloppy – but it wasn’t malicious.” While Lane avoids literally telling lies in his book, he uses the same convoluted expositions he used before the Miami jury to persuade his readers that Hunt was indeed guilty of conspiring to kill the president.[17]
Lane trades on the sound presumption that the vast majority of his readers have no way of knowing what he’s doing. In the Lane tradition of carefully concealing from his readers any information that might undermine his thesis, he portrays Hunt as having only two alibi witnesses at the trial, and denigrates these because they were CIA employees. But in fact there were three CIA employees who testified at the trial, and three witnesses (two of Hunt's children and a domestic) who swore to the 1974 Rockefeller Commission that Hunt was in the Washington area, and not in Dallas, on the day of the assassination.[18]
There's more, but I believe readers can go to the link to see the rest.
