Mark Lane (author)
Mark Lane (born February 24 1927 in New York City) is a U.S attorney and author of many books, including the bestseller, Rush to Judgment. This book was one of two major books published in the immediate wake of the JFK assassination which questioned the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Rush to Judgment was made into a documentary film in 1966. He later wrote the book A Citizen's Dissent documenting his response to the Warren Commission's governmental findings on the Kennedy assassination.
In the 1968 presidential election, Lane appeared on the ballot as a third party vice-presidential candidate, running on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket with Dick Gregory.
During the civil rights movement, he was arrested for opposing segregation as a "Freedom Rider".
In 1970, Lane wrote Conversations with Americans, an anthology of anecdotes of US war crimes in the Vietnam war. Anti-war journalist Neil Sheehan wrote in the New York Times Book Review [1] of a 'McCarthyism of the Left', using doubtful stories of war crimes for the advancement of agenda or career, as being as doubtful as the stories of Communist membership promoted Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Lane would then be asked to leave the Winter Soldier Investigation by Jeremy Rifkin.
The 1973 movie Executive Action is largely based on Lane's writings concerning the Kennedy assassination.
Lane was one of two lawyers for Jim Jones' People's Temple in its last years of existence and was one of nine fleeing survivors of the Jonestown mass murder/suicide. Lane was injured defending the life Congressman Leo Ryan in a stabbing in Guyana.[citation needed] Lane survived and Ryan was later shot and killed. Lane survived by escaping into the jungle with lawyer Charles Garry and tying strips of undergarments to trees.[citation needed] He writes about Jonestown in his 1980 book The Strongest Poison. That book, since its publication, has been widely regarded not only as a long list of unsupported conspiracy theories, but also as a repeat of the stories told by Rev. Jim Jones to keep his followers in a state of fear, such as that CIA-employed mercenaries were posted nearby and slaughtered Jonestown residents as they tried to flee through the jungle. Lane was roundly criticized for this in Tim Reiterman's 1982 book Raven.
He also wrote Murder In Memphis with Dick Gregory (previously titled Code Name Zorro, after the CIA's name for King) about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he alleged a conspiracy and/or government coverup. He is the author of the book Arcadia in which he details the effort to prove that James Richardson, a black migrant worker in Florida, had been falsely accused of killing his seven children by unlawful actions on the part of the authorities involved. Richardson had been on death row for the crime, but after the book was published he received a new trial in which he was found not guilty. Richardson was released from prison after 21 years and Richardson's babysitter later confessed to the murders.
Lane represented the right-wing group Liberty Lobby as an attorney when the group was sued over an article in The Spotlight newspaper implicating E. Howard Hunt in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Hunt sued for defamation and won a substantial settlement. Lane successfully got this judgement reversed on appeal. This became the basis for Lane's book Plausible Denial. In the book, Lane claimed that he convinced the jury that Hunt was involved in the JFK assassination, but contemporary news accounts show that most jurors decided the case on the issue of whether The Spotlight had acted with "actual malice," rather than merely engaging in sloppy and irresponsible journalism.[1]
It was later said that the KGB was providing Lane with funds for research and travel. [2]. Mark Lane refutes this.[3]
Lane recently moved to Charlottesville, Virginia.[4] He still practices law and lectures on many subjects, especially the importance of the United States Constitution (mainly the Bill Of Rights and the First Amendment) and civil rights.
References
- ^ http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/smearing.htm Mark Lane: Smearing America's Soldiers in Vietnam
- ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Basic Books, 1999. Excerpted here
- ^ *Letter to The Nation from Lane
- ^ "Rushing to judgment-- and everywhere". Hook weekly. November 23 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-09.
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