Mark Lane, JFK assassination expert, has died.

[Octafish]

110. Thank you very much, Duppers. Here's what James DiEugenio wrote last week...

Outstanding article and interview, yours. FTR:, the backgrounds of the commissioners McCloy and Dulles demonstrate a preference for capital over democracy, to put fascism mildly.



[font size="2"]Mark Lane and Bertrand Russell[/font size]

The Death of Mark Lane

By James DiEugenio
Posted May 10, 2016

I finally understood the influence and reputation that the late Mark Lane had in America when I arrived in Pittsburgh for the Cyril Wecht Symposium at Duquesne in the fall of 2013. At the airport, I was picked up in a private car and driven to my hotel. The driver asked me what I was in town for. I replied a JFK conference on the 50th Anniversary at Duquesne. He asked me if Mark Lane was going to be there. I said yes he was. He replied that he wrote his first research paper back in college many years ago on the JFK case, and he used a lot of the work of Lane in doing it. He asked me to thank Lane for that inspiration. When I arrived at the hotel, I did see Mark and I conveyed the debt of gratitude from my driver.

After I did so I went up to my room and thought: Geez, there must be literally tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people across America who feel that way about Lane. For the simple reason that Lane was literally the prime mover in the dissent movement against the official version of the Kennedy assassination. Within just three weeks of Kennedy’s death, Lane had issued the first legal arguments against the public stampede to condemn the memory of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in the custody of the Dallas police. Lane wanted to publish his defendant’s brief in The Nation. But that liberal journal—and several other periodicals-- would not accept it. So he went to the even more leftist journal The National Guardian.

At that conference in Pittsburgh, there were a few copies of that original essay on a coffee table. Lane picked one up and said to me, “They had to print several reprints of this issue. They eventually sold a hundred thousand of them.” This was in mid-December of 1963, two weeks after the first meeting of the Warren Commission, when every major media outlet in America was accommodating leaks from people like Jerry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles about how compelling the case against Oswald was. But there was Mark Lane, the one attorney standing up for a dead man who was being walked over by every public and private institution in America.

Marguerite Oswald, mother of the murdered suspect, heard about Lane’s polemic. She wanted him to act as her murdered son’s defense advocate. But the Warren Commission would not allow it. When Lane forwarded his request to the Commission, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wired back to him the following message: “The Commission does not believe that it would be useful or desirable to permit an attorney representing Lee Harvey Oswald to have access to the investigative materials within the possession of the Commission or to participate in any hearings to be conducted by the Commission.” (See Lane’s A Citizen’s Dissent, e-book version, Part 2, “The Great Silence.&quot

In fact, one of the many travesties of the Commission was that Oswald was not granted counsel throughout the ten-month legal procedure. In that respect, the proceeding was a runaway prosecution. Lane was allowed to appear before the Commission twice, once in March and once in July. These were clearly token, adversarial appearances. In fact, it is hard to find another witness who the Commission treated with such hostility. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 243-45)

At around this time in 1964, Lane began to be surveilled by the FBI. Because he was doing JFK lectures abroad, he was also placed on the federal government’s “lookout list” for international air travel. Whenever Lane returned from abroad, the FBI was alerted he was back. (See Lane, op. cit) But beyond that, the FBI now began to interview certain radio hosts who had chosen to place Lane on the air. These Bureau visits resulted in Lane being banned from certain media outlets. And the buzz about those visits discouraged other outlets from having him on.

CONTINUED....

http://www.ctka.net/2016/marklane/the-death-of-mark-lane.html

Jim DiEugenio is a DUer, proud to say. Proud to be your friend, too, Duppers!