MARK LANE HAS PASSED AWAY

[Pat Speer]

I am reading "A Citizen's Dissent" right now (strangely enough, I stopped reading "Praise From A Future Generation" to read Lane's book.) Boy, the BBC really did a number on Lane. They invited him to participate in a program with Arlen Specter following a screeing of the film "Rush To Judgment", and then seemingly did everything in their power to stack the deck against him. It was almost comic. Also a relief that the people watching the broadcast still thought Lane won the "debate."

And the CBS shenanigans are pretty shocking. I'm reading about how they fudged the rifle tests. Many times they had to stop the test because of rifle difficulties, but didn't ever factor in the stops when calculating the average shooting times.

That's correct, Denny. Whenever someone had trouble operating the bolt in the time required, they said the rifle jammed and didn't count it. It is to their credit, however, that they did report on this difficulty. But it just goes to show how "off" the program was.

They had Cronkite say that the pressure of the situation would serve to make Oswald fire faster and more accurately than normal, when their own tests using rifleman of superior skill proved that firing under such pressure only served to jam the rifle.

[James DiEugenio]

Tom:

This is what he says about the Italian rifle test.

"For example, representatives of three of Italy's leading newspapers arranged for a rifle test from the sixth floor of the Book Depository. With a camera fitted to a Mannlicher Carcano carbine, Dallas rifle experts were asked to fire at another reporter who was driven past the building in a convertible. When the developed film showed that the local experts had not been as proficient as Oswald, the order came to seal off the Book Depository to all media representatives and nongovernmental investigators. The American public was thus spared the possibility of exposure to future tests while at the same time the American media declined to publish the results of the Italian test. In this fashion foreign enterprise was rendered less competitive." (p. 12)

Lane footnotes almost everything he writes in this book. Unfortunately, this passage is not.

Sound really interesting though.

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, since I could not find anyone who had read Citizen Lane, I started reading it yesterday,

I got about fifty pages into it, and I was just marking up book pages, not taking the usual nnotebook notes I do.

What a book. I made a mistake not reviewing it when it came out.

But when I listened to Tanenbaum's reverie about Lane on Black Op Radio, that peaked my interest in Lane's earlier career.

After he graduated from Brooklyn Law School, Lane deliberately opened up his law office in Spanish Harlem. His idea was that he wanted to represent people who did not have access to legal services, or the court system. He was also a part of the National Lawyer's Guild. Because he thought the ABA had succumbed to the fear of the HUAC and the Red Scare.

So he began his career defending accused murderers who were parts of gangs: teen agers who would never have had a lawyer before. And who the DA would have easily sent to the electric chair. With Lane there, that didn't happen.

He then began to defend and organize tenant's groups to exercise their rights against terrible city plumbing facilities.

Once he developed a name, a young man escaped from what was supposed to be a mental ward for those deemed to have non functional IQ's. Lane decided to visit the place with a reporter. It turned out that the place was really a prison the state was secretly running, and the kid who escaped had an IQ of 115. A three day series ran in the papers about the scandal. It forced the state of New York to go ahead and review the place on a case by case basis. At this time, Lane was barely 30 years old.

I am going to have to review this book belatedly. If anything I underestimated Lane's career. As with Garrison, its important to establish these things about who he was before the JFK case. Because the MSM and the Dark Syde like to caricature who they were once they got involved with the JFK case.

Edited May 29, 2016 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Read this and you will see the kind of lawyer Lane was and the kind of cases he took:

http://justicedenied.org/arcadia.htm

There was a documentary film made out of this story http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5180332/

He was a kind of lawyer for the outcasts and the abandoned.

Lane later said that the day Richardson was freed was the greatest day of his professional life.

Edited May 29, 2016 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, Lane went around the country trying to get high profile lawyers to sign a petition to get a new trial for Richardson.

Many did sign.

Vince Bugliosi would not.

[James DiEugenio]

Tonight on Black Op Radio, I will be talking about Mark Lane's book Citizen Lane.

Since no one had read it, I decided to do so.

I am glad I did.

In my elegy for Mark, I noted some of the things he did outside the JFK case. Little did I know that I was so ignorant of what this guy really achieved with his life.

Its really remarkable in retrospect. He was sort of like a mini more sixties oriented Clarence Darrow.

In fact, its hard to find a controversial area from back then that he was not involved in in some way.

To give one example that no one knows about: He actually ran an underground railroad to Canada to get native born Vietnamese pilots out of the country who were training in Texas, but did not want to bomb civilians in Laos. He literally did this for like 12-15 of them.

I mean no wonder that book did not get reviewed. He also exposes the NY Times, McAdams canard about interviewing Vietnam vets who did not exist.

Anyway, tune in for the discussion.

PS, If you have not heard Len Osanic's five hour tribute to Lane's passing, just click here http://www.ctka.net/2016/marklane/the-death-of-mark-lane.html

then scroll down to the end.

An excellent program.

Edited June 3, 2016 by James DiEugenio

[Tom Neal]

Tom:

This is what he says about the Italian rifle test.

"For example, representatives of three of Italy's leading newspapers arranged for a rifle test from the sixth floor of the Book Depository. With a camera fitted to a Mannlicher Carcano carbine, Dallas rifle experts were asked to fire at another reporter who was driven past the building in a convertible. When the developed film showed that the local experts had not been as proficient as Oswald, the order came to seal off the Book Depository to all media representatives and nongovernmental investigators. The American public was thus spared the possibility of exposure to future tests while at the same time the American media declined to publish the results of the Italian test. In this fashion foreign enterprise was rendered less competitive." (p. 12)

Lane footnotes almost everything he writes in this book. Unfortunately, this passage is not.

Sound really interesting though.

Thanks, Jim.

REALLY Interesting is right! It would be REALLY interesting to hear what the Italians wrote about this experiment...

I wonder who the 'authority' was who arranged to "seal off the TSBD" to all future media and non-gov't investigations?

Tom

Edited June 2, 2016 by Tom Neal

[James DiEugenio]

I agree, with the info from Roger Feinman in my CBS essay, its pretty obvious that no one has replicated this on the first try.

Edited June 3, 2016 by James DiEugenio