JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
That brand of circular reasoning is exactly what we're seeing here. I admit it's often difficult to see when one is reasoning in a circle. In a certain way it makes sense to rebut a misrepresentation claim by saying, "Here's where the original materials say what the reporter reports," but that insidiously wrong when you've simply lifted similar language out of a larger body and called that the "relevant part." It's relevant in that it contains the language of the report, but it's not all that's relevant when the claim is that the report is misleading.
The problem with proudfootz's strategy lies in this characterization not being just JREF handwaving. The most common complaint lodged against Mark Lane from the world at large is his habitual sweeping under the carpet of additional information from his sources that dispute his summary of it.
This is a feature of legal argumentation as opposed to scientific or historical argumentation. In court, if a fact is not mentioned or brought to light in court, the judge and jury don't consider it. Those facts, even if they exist in the world at large, are largely invisible to the decision-making process. Lawyers try in court all the time to present only the facts that support their side of the story. You don't hire a lawyer to represent the truth; you hire him to represent your interests and argue diligently for them. That's why Posner, for example, can disagree with Lane on his approach to history, yet hire Lane to represent him in court when his own interests are challenged. For whatever Posner's sins may have been, he recognized in Lane the ability to drive home the desired conclusion.
It's up to opposing counsel to pry deeper if necessary and release additional facts to the trier of fact. And there are rules that govern cross-examination that don't apply to a more general historical inquiry. You can only cross-examine a witness, for example, on matters he has brought up in direct testimony. Shrewd lawyers can structure their direct examination of their witnesses so as to avoid "opening the door" to unfavorable facts that the opposition could discover upon cross-examination.
For example, in trying to ascertain the energy of impact in a car accident, a lawyer may ask the witness, "Did your airbag deploy?" The gist of the question is to establish to the jury a non-technical understanding of the threshold of violence in some vehicular impact. The implication is that if the airbag did not deploy, it may not have been a violent enough collision to have caused the claimed damage or injury. And the witness can answer, "No." It's up to opposing counsel on cross-examination to pick up on that and perhaps ask, "Does your car even have an airbag?" and thereby put that direct testimony in a proper context.
A purely scientific or historical analysis of that hypothetical car accident would put all the relevant facts on the table at the beginning, attempt to reconcile them, and synthesize from an initial hypothesis set the most likely explanation from among all competing claims, considered together. When Mark Lane pulls these lawyer stunts in his writing without an opposing counsel to call him on it, he gets away with "exonerating" Oswald only if, in his mock trial, the prosecution didn't actually show up on the day of the trial.
