Questions about Max Holland article

[Ron Ecker]

This article states that the KGB funded Mark Lane's JFK research. Is there some basis for that assertion? The article also states that "the current issue" of the British journal Science & Justice contains an article reaffirming that the acoustical evidence is invalid. Does anyone have info on that article? Thanks.

http://hnn.us/articles/21289.html

[Dawn Meredith]

Ron:

Link won't open. I would trust virtually nothing Holland writes on the

JFK assassination. His CIA ties and blantant bias over the years

renders his opinions usless, imo.

Dawn

[Ron Ecker]

Dawn,

I'm aware of Holland's work. But I'm interested in what he claims is a new development in the acoustical evidence. I'm also interested in knowing on what basis he publicly links Mark Lane to the KGB. Tim Gratz would have Holland in a court room in no time at all.

Ron

[Tim Carroll]

This article states that the KGB funded Mark Lane's JFK research. Is there some basis for that assertion? The article also states that "the current issue" of the British journal Science & Justice contains an article reaffirming that the acoustical evidence is invalid. http://hnn.us/articles/21289.html

Link won't open. I would trust virtually nothing Holland writes on the JFK assassination. His CIA ties and blantant bias over the years renders his opinions usless, imo.

The link works fine for me. The assertion of KGB funding for Mark Lane is skeletal at best. The idea that the KGB was "secretly underwriting his 'research' and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005 dollars)" is fairly obscure. Would "secretly" mean it was even secret from Lane? How much would $12,500 in "2005 dollars" be in 1966? It seems the amount would have been so insignificant that any evidence of such token funding would have been generated to deliberately discredit Lane (classic counterintelligence).

The thrust of the Holland article seems to be that lawyers have ill-served the research effort:

During forty-two years of controversy over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the legal profession has played an instrumental role. All seven members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the 1963 assassination, were lawyers. There were twenty-seven people on the commission's staff (including Norman Redlich, a Nation contributor since 1951), twenty-two of whom were aspiring or practicing attorneys. The combined efforts of these lawyers produced an imperfect report in September 1964, although its fundamental findings have never been seriously impeached.

But what the legal profession giveth, less scrupulous members of the bar taketh away. Since 1964 four other lawyers have been chiefly responsible for putting the Warren Report into undeserved disrepute. During a conference in November sponsored primarily by the Washington-based Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC)--headed, not coincidentally, by a lawyer--three of these four lawyers made rare public appearances or were otherwise represented in spirit.

The paterfamilias of disingenuousness, Mark Lane, was noticeably absent. An obscure New York attorney at the time of the assassination, Lane single-handedly set the standard for dishonest criticism. In 1964 he spread innuendo about an ostensibly sinister delay in the Warren Commission's investigation as he went barnstorming around the country giving what was then known as The Speech. Two years later Lane published a book titled Rush to Judgment, having conveniently forgotten his earlier accusation. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation during those years, steadfastly refused, to his everlasting credit, to propagate Lane's basic allegation that the government was indifferent to the truth. Little did McWilliams (or anyone else) know then that the KGB was finding Lane's work so useful that it was secretly underwriting his "research" and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005 dollars).

The Soviet intelligence service was engaged in a scheme to implicate the CIA, the FBI and the far right in the assassination and the subsequent murder of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, but had little to show for its efforts until New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison inserted himself into the case in 1967. Owing to a clever piece of disinformation implanted in a left-wing Roman newspaper, Paese Sera, in March 1967, Garrison became consumed by the notion that Clay Shaw, a prominent businessman he had charged with participating in an alleged conspiracy that killed JFK, was actually "an employee of the CIA...an agency man in Rome trying to bring Fascism back to Italy," as he put it in his 1988 memoir. Within a matter of months Garrison had succeeded in making the KGB's wildest fantasy come true: An elected public official in America was propagating Moscow's line. Not even Lane had dared suggest that official Washington was complicit in the assassination itself.

Garrison, having died in 1992, did not attend the AARC conference, but he was represented in spirit by Joan Mellen, a Temple University English professor who has just published a hagiography of the DA, whom Oliver Stone tried to rehabilitate in his 1991 film JFK. Mellen's reception was decidedly tepid, for Garrison, like Joe McCarthy, has always represented a fault line. Just as McCarthy was disavowed by many anticommunists because of his beyond-the-pale tactics, conspiracy "buffs," as Calvin Trillin memorably labeled them in a 1967 New Yorker article, have always been hopelessly divided over Garrison. Even buffs inclined to believe the DA's grand theory of a military-industrial-intelligence complex find it hard to square that with his persecution of Clay Shaw. The most vociferous critics among the buffs have never forgiven Garrison for setting back the movement almost irreparably. A jury declared Shaw not guilty in 1969 after a mere fifty-four minutes of deliberation, and if Shaw hadn't died prematurely in 1974 at the age of 62, Garrison would likely have found himself at the wrong end of an impressive civil judgment for misuse and abuse of his prosecutorial powers.

The fallow years following the collapse of Garrison's legal farce ended once Watergate proved that conspiracies and cover-ups could exist in high places. During Washington's season of inquiry in the mid-1970s, unresolved questions about the 1963 assassination resurfaced. Some of them richly deserved to be asked, and answered--such as the nature of the cooperation (or lack thereof) between the Warren Commission and the two agencies critical to its inquiry, namely, the FBI and the CIA. Led by Senator Frank Church, Democrats on the Select Committee on Intelligence dived into this issue with a vengeance--until the answers they started coming up with contradicted the still- prevalent view that once there had been a Camelot.

Then-Senator Gary Hart was more responsible than most of his committee colleagues for twisting unpalatable truths into the logical equivalent of pretzels and milking the tragedy for political gain. The only genuine conspiracy Hart and his colleagues established was the Kennedy Administration's attempts to kill Fidel Castro, and the subsequent efforts to keep that secret from one and all, including the Warren Commission. These days Hart--a lawyer before he entered politics--seldom talks about the Church Committee. Nonetheless, he made a rare appearance at the AARC conference to speak about the "still unanswered questions" raised by his three-and-a-half-month inquiry.

Listening to Hart was an exercise in time travel. The perspective gained after thirty years, not to mention information available from tens of thousands of recently declassified documents, was airbrushed out of existence. Hart forthrightly admitted that he has "not followed the research" but acted as if his conclusions were as fresh and relevant as when first issued in 1976. He remains a "total agnostic" on who killed Kennedy, and overly proud of his role in revealing that two groups were ostensibly motivated to kill the President: anti-Castro exiles and the Mafia. Those who testified before Hart have a somewhat different recollection of the former senator's probity. He was "only interested in [testimony] proving what he wanted proven," James Hosty, a retired FBI agent who testified before Hart in 1975, recently recalled.

When one young man in the audience had the temerity to ask why the Church Committee had not endeavored to answer questions instead of just raising them, Hart became testy, if not bitter. Had he been elected President in the 1980s, Hart averred, he would have reopened the federal investigation into the assassination (for the third time). The clear implication was that the American people will never know because Hart's bid for the presidency was unfortunately aborted.

Notwithstanding Hart's rare discussion--which included his hilarious impression of William Harvey, the CIA officer who negotiated the Mafia's participation in the plots to kill Castro--the centerpiece of the AARC conference was a banquet address by G. Robert Blakey, who was a professor at Cornell Law School when he became chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1977. It is due to Blakey that the federal government speaks (at least superficially) with a forked tongue about the assassination. In 1964 the Warren Commission unanimously found that "on the basis of the evidence before [it]...Oswald acted alone." In 1979 the HSCA infamously concluded that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," but the committee was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."

The pregnant construction of the HSCA's hedged conclusion hinged entirely on so-called acoustic evidence rammed through the committee at the eleventh hour by Blakey. Now a law professor at Notre Dame and a nationally recognized expert on the RICO statute, Blakey invariably fails to mention that three HSCA members dissented in 1979 because they found the uncorroborated acoustic evidence unbelievable. And their reservations soon proved correct: A National Research Council panel (aided by an Ohio rock drummer named Steve Barber) established in 1982 that the "shots" allegedly recorded on a police Dictabelt began approximately one minute after the President was mortally wounded and en route to Parkland Hospital (a finding that is reaffirmed in the current issue of Science & Justice, a British forensic journal). In point of fact, 99.99 percent of HSCA's report improved upon or underscored the accuracy of the Warren Report's key findings. But one would be hard-pressed to know that after listening to Blakey. The exploitation of the assassination by the likes of Mark Lane, Jim Garrison and Gary Hart, for whatever reasons, was bad enough. But someday a historian looking back will likely declare Blakey the most irresponsible of them all. Blakey was given a position of great responsibility in the mistaken belief that he would seek the truth.

Regarding Holland's mention of Science & Justice's findings that "A National Research Council panel (aided by an Ohio rock drummer named Steve Barber) established in 1982 that the "shots" allegedly recorded on a police Dictabelt began approximately one minute after the President was mortally wounded and en route to Parkland Hospital (a finding that is reaffirmed in the current issue of Science & Justice, a British forensic journal)," Wikipedia reports that the british journal's reportage is the opposite of what Holland claims"

An analysis published in the March 2001 issue of Science & Justice by Dr. Donald Thomas uses a different Dallas policeman radio transmission synchronization to put forth the claim that the National Academy of Sciences panel was in error. Thomas's conclusion, very similar to the HSCA conclusion, is that the gunshots impulses are real to a 96.3% certainty. Thomas presented additional details and support in the November 2001 [1] and September [2] and November [3] 2002 issues.

T.C.

Edited February 6, 2006 by Tim Carroll

[Ron Ecker]

Tim,

I'm aware of Thomas's work on the acoustical evidence. It is now several years old. Holland's article refers to 42 years of controversy about JFK, so I have to assume that this is a fairly new article. It refers to "the current issue" of Science and Justice discrediting the acoustical evidence. I have not heard of this new material before, and I will be surprised if no one else here has either.

Ron

[Ron Ecker]

Here's a link to the original article in The Nation (subscription required for full access). It was posted February 2, 2006, and is in the February 20, 2006 issue. It is therefore a new article, and there is (according to Holland) an article in the current Science and Justice that purports to invalidate the acoustical evidence. I guess we will eventually learn what it says.

http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20060220&s=holland

Edited February 6, 2006 by Ron Ecker

[Tim Gratz]

To Ron:

The allegation that Mark Lane's work was secretly funded by the KGB is very old news indeed. If I recall it is possible Lane did not even know about the funding.

What is curious is Lane's connection to the girlfiend of the star reporter for the Daily Planet, widely reported to be funded by the CIA as part of Operation Mockingbird. (Groan!)

Kidding aside, if Lane was funded by the KGB that may be exculpatory rather than inculpatory. If YOU were part of a conspiracy that killed JFK why would you want to be stirring up a hornet's nest and overturning the results of a presidential commission that found you innocent? If it were me, I'd prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

The article also states that "the current issue" of the British journal Science & Justice contains an article reaffirming that the acoustical evidence is invalid. Does anyone have info on that article? Thanks.

http://hnn.us/articles/21289.html

I have not seen the latest jurnal article on the accoustics, but I am not surprised to hear that it supports the National academy of science (Steve Barber) study. Bear in mind that Max Holland is flat wrong when he says that the HSCA relied solely on the accoustics in finding a shot from the knoll. All he has to do is read the HSCA report to see that is not the case. But what Holland and supporters of the Warren Commission invariably choose to overlook is that, while the NAS study shows that, if there is no accoustical evidence of a shot or shots from the knoll then, by the same token, there is no accoustical evidence of ANY shots from the TSBD.

This has significant implications when you consider that the NAA evidence has now been consigned to the junk heap by Robert Blakey himself, so that there is no longer any scientific evidence connecting the bullet fragments from the victims with CE399 or the limo fragments. As far as the scientific evidence is concerned, there is no guarantee that any shots were fired from the TSBD at the time of the assassination, there is still no blood or human tissue on 399 or the limo frags, and therefore there is no way we can safely assume that 399 and the limo frags were not planted, as the early WC critics claimed.

If the accoustics and the NAA are invalid, then the Dealey Plaza segment of this investigation is back to where it stood circa 1966/7, when Josiah Thompson wrote his book.

[Owen Parsons]

I'm really failing to see how Mr. Holland gets published in the Nation with all the McCarthyite redbaiting he does. Has he ever taken a single "progressive" stance anywhere?

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I'm really failing to see how Mr. Holland gets published in the Nation with all the McCarthyite redbaiting he does. Has he ever taken a single "progressive" stance anywhere?

As I typed on the other Holland thread, the CIA has a known history of targeting left liberal magazines like The Nation PRECISELY BECAUSE OF THIER STRATEGIC POSITION ON THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM. In many ways the CIA is more likely to directly intervene in a left-liberal magazine than in a right wing mag.

This function is sometimes refered to as "left gatekeeping"

The book to Read is The CIA and Culture by Francis Saunders. It was published by the New Press in 2000.

I know Im repeating myself here, but in view of latest Holland tripe published this week, this history of the CIA domestic political warfare has to be brought to the attention of as many people as possible.

[Robert Howard]

Max Holland is a piece of s---; I think media assets who ply in deception, and obfuscation should be taken out and ........I think the gist of the media spinsters who prey on JFK researchers every word, or spread lies and deceptions about same are a sign that the government assets have been instructed to 'turn it up a few notches.'

[Owen Parsons]

I'm really failing to see how Mr. Holland gets published in the Nation with all the McCarthyite redbaiting he does. Has he ever taken a single "progressive" stance anywhere?

As I typed on the other Holland thread, the CIA has a known history of targeting left liberal magazines like The Nation PRECISELY BECAUSE OF THIER STRATEGIC POSITION ON THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM. In many ways the CIA is more likely to directly intervene in a left-liberal magazine than in a right wing mag.

This function is sometimes refered to as "left gatekeeping"

The book to Read is The CIA and Culture by Francis Saunders. It was published by the New Press in 2000.

I know Im repeating myself here, but in view of latest Holland tripe published this week, this history of the CIA domestic political warfare has to be brought to the attention of as many people as possible.

Yeah, but he's just so blatant. Its like they aren't even trying anymore.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

There is a good two part searies on the Taking Aim Radio show that airs on WBAI about The Nation magazine and its relationship with the CIA. Max and his recent disinformation regarding the Kennedy Assassination is at the center of this, but it also mentions goes into that mag's ties to Phillip Zelikow, the man who personally selected all of the witnesses who appeared before the 9/11 commission, and edited the final report. Zelikow, of course, was on the Bush transition team, wrote a book with Condy, and now WORKS WITH HER AGAIN! (Is shame a vestigial emotion in today's corporate media?)

I Strongly urge everyone to listen to this two part searies BY GOOGLING TAKING AIM. Part two will be downloadable by next Tuesday.

Please post this info on other sites. Its a good way of instructing novices into the ways of CIA disinformation, and overcoming the naivity of some left-liberals re: the disinformation tactics of the CIA.

[Brian LeCloux]

Yeah, I thought the piece by Holland in the The Nation was really a stretch. The whole concept of lumping all these lawyers together as a theme was ridiculous. Totally divorced from any discussion of the evidence.

Notice how the Nation is, and rightly, usually critical of government cover ups? Only in this one instance do they defend the status quo attempt to restore faith. Why? Is Earl Warren's liberal ghost still dominant in the mind's of the Nation's editors? If so, this is their blind spot, for Holland's article was hardly scholarly or even logical. Notice how he doesn't factually take on the heavy weights at the JFK conference such as Professors David R. Wrone and Gerald W. McKnight. These two scholars know the evidence backwards and forwards and those who take them will be shown up as ignorant of basic fact in this case.

One thing Wrone and McKnight highlight which is ignored even by many of the critics is the very essential discussion of Dr. Joseph Dolce. Dolce tangled with the Warren Commission lawyers, such as Arlen Specter, who were trying to craft the single bullet theory hoax. Dolce pointed out that it was impossible and he conducted experiments with bullets given to him by the Commission that proved the single bullet theory was not true. As he pointed out, even at low velocity this bullet couldn't do what the Commission claimed. Exactly because he conducted the tests and because of his expertise and his opinions he was not called as witness, merely interviewed for a memorandum.

Well, do you think Holland would be conversant on this primary evidentiary information?