So Mark Lane aka Mark Levy - strange like me walked ahead of the footsteps of a killer? Only was he behind or ahead of the victims? Now he was at Jonestown, associated with connections to Oklahoma and Heaven's Gate, and Dorothy Kilgalon who used to appear on her show Whats My Line spaced out of her with at times, and then Larry Flynt that guy got hook into Flynt .....never, never do you read one word about Jewish Mafia, and Meyer Lansky and KGB forming KKK with Walker spies and hoarding neo nazi literature to lead to wrong side of horse? Not much talk about Jim Garrison whose best friend was Carlos Marcello who ran with Meyer Lansky - all in the famly......and these people note carefully laid the foundation for one to believe that this Mafia "thing" that the Mafia was Italian? And all the time I thought the Mafia, was Italian for I had been blaming the wrong mob, for these murders. How Ted Kennedy can sit there on his big fat ass and let his family be murdered one by one knowing the killers came from the far left - not the right, is beyond me....... This thing has sabotaged our space program and the ultimate goal of course, is to take over the office of the President of the United States - but oh they missed target date.... There is one man I know who knows the truth of what happened; I always call him the Evergreen - and this stupid Hash Head Oliver Stone did not even mention him by name in his movie which was comprised of old hat stuff we had in the late 60 period...you see many people who did a lot of work had it stolen by people like Mark Lane, and somebody should call up Rick Strawcutter in Michigan and Mark from Michigian for had they known of Lane's connections to these other "untimely" deaths, perhaps they would not welomed this man to their table - for as they say, the Judas always lives to write the books. See how carefully they lead to wrong side of horse but we all know it was Judas who gave the final kiss of death and all the time I thought that guy was Italian???? Saba Critics & Anti-Critics Note: This is an arrangement of on-the-record statements. With the exception of "Lionel Mirthmint," all speakers are real people, and this story represents their real comments, some of them paraphrased. What follows is essentially a collage. It is not now, nor has it ever been, a real conversation. Lionel Mirthmint: This is a round-table discussion of various aspects of the John F. Kennedy assassination. It's a big table--there are a lot of people to hear from. Assassination researchers and their detractors are gonna slam-dance. We drew straws to see who would go first, and Anthony Summers won--he starts us off with some choice words for the movie JFK. Anthony Summers: Director Oliver Stone made some bizarre decisions. From a vast array of scholarship, he picked a book by Jim Garrison, former District Attorney of New Orleans, as his main source work. Garrison, many will recall, is a strange figure--considered crazy by some, and crooked by others-- Warren Hinckle: Like feuding Democrats, hardly a one of the assassination sleuths has anything nice to say about another one. Sylvia Meagher: As the Garrison investigation continued to unfold, I had increasingly serious misgivings about the validity of his evidence, and the scrupulousness of his methods. Jonathan Vankin: Could Garrison, some critics asked, be part of a second-level cover-up designed to discredit legitimate inquiries into an assassination conspiracy? Intended or not, Garrison produced that unfortunate effect. Anthony Summers: There were things Stone did not at first know about Garrison. About his separation from the Army, following diagnosis that he was in need of long-term psychotherapy-- Warren Hinckle: No man I have known had more legitimate reasons to become paranoid than Garrison; there actually were people constantly plotting against him. Jim Marrs: And because of the Garrison investigation, much new assassination information became known, and the assassination was addressed for the first time in a courtroom. Lionel Mirthmint: What about Mark Lane? He addressed some assassination stuff in a courtroom. Léo Sauvage: One would like to forget about Mark Lane, but this, unfortunately, appears impossible. Warren Hinckle: I can only cop out to brute instinct. Were I a dog, I would have growled when Lane came around. Mark Lane: I was interested in knowing who killed the President. Sylvia Meagher: Don't worry...you'll see, it was a Communist who did it. David Lifton: Often I would agree with some point Lane had made about the Warren Report, but disagree with his tactics or style of presentation. Mark Lane: I met President Kennedy on several occasions and he had been kind enough to endorse me when I was a candidate. Jim Moore: Lane was a member of the New York legislature, and, it's fair to say, made that body wish he had never been elected. Richard Warren Lewis: He was once struck by a beer can at an East Harlem political rally. It was never determined whether its trajectory originated from the left front or the right rear. Marguerite Oswald: Mark Lane was the only lawyer in the whole country who said that my son should not be condemned as a murderer without the evidence at least being looked at. Jim Moore: These critics--people like Thomas G. Buchanen, Mark Lane, Jay Epstein, Sylvia Meagher and Harold Weisberg--are they just smarter than the Warren Commission? Richard Warren Lewis: In 1961 Lane embraced the civil rights movement. He was arrested and convicted of breaching the peace in Jackson, Mississippi, where he and a Negro leader attempted to use segregated facilities at the Municipal airport. \ Mark Lane: We were arrested for spending five minutes in the previously segregated waiting room. Before the trial took place the district attorney moved for a dismissal of the charges, and the court granted that motion. Richard Warren Lewis: When I interviewed him, he was wearing a stylish English Mod jacket. Mark Lane: I was wearing a gray worsted double-breasted suit which had been purchased in Stockholm. Joseph Ball: I'd like to compare the integrity of the men of the Warren Commission and staff with the integrity of its critics: Mark Lane--Edward Jay Epstein--Harold Weisberg, the chicken farmer from Maryland--and Léo Sauvage, the Frenchman. Léo Sauvage: For those who may not have noticed, I will now formally declare that I have nothing in common with Mark Lane. Joseph Ball: Sauvage, you have no scruples, and reason from a record which you may consider adequate--but I don't. Léo Sauvage: I see nothing to indicate that Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy. Joseph Ball: Need I say more? Gerald Posner: Lee Harvey Oswald, driven by his own twisted furies, was the only assassin in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Harold Weisberg: All hail Gerald Posner! Jim Moore: Oswald was at the end of his mental and emotional rope, and saw Kennedy's visit to Dallas as a vehicle to propel him out of an existence he hated and into the history books. Richard Popkin: My analysis of the evidence tells me that Perry Mason, Melvin Belli, or maybe even Mark Lane himself could have caused jurors to have reasonable doubts that Oswald did the shooting, or did all the shooting. Mark Lane: Mr. Ball--everyone knows Joseph Ball was a Warren Commission attorney, right?--Mr. Ball, why have you consistently declined each of my numerous invitations to debate the facts in the JFK case? Joseph Ball: Why? I'll tell you why. Never in my life have I been so scurrilously attacked as by you, Mr. Lane, in your book Rush to Judgement. When you say I am a fraud, a cheat, I say, Mr. Lane, you are my enemy. And I say, Mr. Lane, that you are the biggest fraud of all. Mark Lane: Mr. Ball...your name does not appear anywhere in Rush to Judgement. Lionel Mirthmint: That's true. I checked. Joseph Ball: Uh... (some paper shuffling) Robert Groden: There are many loyal people who have worked long and hard in this investigation, working as private citizens. Peter Dale Scott: Indeed, the search for truth has been left, by default, to a small band of self-selected critics, usually derided as "buffs" or "assassinologists." Penn Jones Jr: A few of us continue to probe and prove. Bit by tiny bit, the pieces of the puzzle are being put into place. Gerald Posner: There are some researchers who sincerely believe they are seeking the truth, and others who hold on to the concept of a conspiracy with an almost religious fervor. David Lifton: I sensed that the critics behaved as a cult, and that unquestioned loyalty to the group was a high priority. The penalty for deviation: ostracism. I found myself cut off from my peers, and I was surprised and hurt. Vincent Salandria: I have long believed that the killers actually preempted the assassination criticism by supplying the information they wanted revealed and also by supplying the critics whom they wanted to disclose the data. Harrison Livingstone: The Old Guard has misled us all these years. People such as Mark Lane, Robert Groden, David Lifton, Gary Shaw, Mary Ferrell, Gary Mack, Cyril Wecht, and Harold Weisberg have nothing new to add to this case but have obstructed anything at all that threatens their control. Lionel Mirthmint: But you collaborated with Groden on High Treason... Harry Livingstone: Groden only wrote about five pages of that book. Peter Dale Scott: The often strident disagreements among Warren Commission critics may serve only to strengthen the general impression that the President's murder is a mystery which will never be solved. Harold Weisberg: My own investigation convinces me that, while pretending to preserve evidence of the assassination and make it available, the government, in fact, intends exactly the opposite, the perpetuation of its suppression. James DiEugenio: Harold Weisberg's Whitewash was self-published in 1965. The book is a passionate--perhaps too passionate--defense of Oswald. Harold Weisberg: And it was the first book on the subject. Lionel Mirthmint: That isn't quite true. Thomas G. Buchanen and Joachim Joestin had books out in 1964. Weisberg's book wasn't out til '65. Léo Sauvage: I demolished Buchanen's work in an article published in September of '64. Richard Popkin: Weisberg's book was the first critical study based on a close analysis of the twenty-six Warren Commission volumes. John Kaplan: We may pass over Whitewash in just a sentence. It is the most strident, bitter, and generally irrationally biased of all the attacks on the Commission. Out of charity, we will mention it no further. Mark Lane: It is true that one may hardly read Weisberg's work and escape his rather unique style. David Lifton: Whitewash is a carefully researched book, although somewhat shrill in tone. Jim Garrison: Harold Weisberg is one of the most indefatigable critics of the Warren Report. Warren Hinckle: I remember reading somewhere that Weisberg was the proud father of a stillborn brainchild called "Geese for Peace," a project developed for the Peace Corps which had to do with geese converting waste into protein. Mark Lane: Surely Weisberg would be the first to agree that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Harold Weisberg: Nothing the gander dislikes is good for the goose. Joseph Ball: All his chickens were killed by a sonic boom. Mark Lane: Weisberg raised geese. Low-flying helicopters disturbed them, but it is unlikely that they, the helicopters, got up enough speed to break the sound barrier. Warren Hinckle: Surpassing Weisberg in the capacity to be unloved was David Lifton, a pushy UCLA engineering student, who eventually wrote a book called Best Evidence. David Lifton: I was irritated that Hinckle's magazine Ramparts would not publish an article of mine. So I gave my copy of the manuscript to a friend who was editor in chief of the UCLA student newspaper. When Hinckle heard about it, he had Ramparts attorneys threaten a lawsuit-- Warren Hinckle: Listen, buddy--if you can't prove a conspiracy, settle for-- David Lifton: Years later, he wrote a memoir. In the book I am described as "a pushy UCLA engineering student," and he was still angry at the memory of my manuscript. Sylvia Meagher: Ramparts didn't do anything on the assassination until its issues of November 1966 and January 1967. Each included major articles and editorial support for a new investigation. The article co-authored by Lifton and David Welsh was a scholarly analysis of the evidence relating to the source of the shots and the autopsy findings. Lionel Mirthmint: I've always considered Penn Jones one of the most courageous of the critics. Harold Weisberg: Penn is one of the bravest people I have ever met--doing and saying what he is, in Texas, only twenty-five miles from Dallas. His book is called Forgive My Grief. Richard Warren Lewis: Forgive My Grief is the Bible for his faithful flock. The slender volume consists mainly of twenty-five columns which first appeared under the heading "Stump Water," among the garden-club news and luncheon menus printed in the Midlothian Mirror. Warren Hinckle: This man, Penn Jones--this prime-rib slice of middle America--swore on a stack of Bibles that a dozen or more people that were connected to the assassination had met mysterious deaths in its aftermath, and that more deaths were in the cards. Sylvia Meagher: These deaths may have remained unknown but for Penn Jones. Gerald Posner: Most of the deaths have nothing but the most tenuous connection to the case. Warren Hinckle: Penn pledged allegiance to no creed but the truth, which--and his corny country parlance gave dignity to the cliché--he called the "cross and grail" of the newspaperman. Penn Jones Jr: A century from now historians will criticize us for doing such a poor job of research.We plead guilty and ask for merciful understanding. Lee Israel: It was Penn Jones who first revealed the meeting between Dorothy Kilgallen and Jack Ruby. Warren Hinckle: Penn couldn't get over the fact that Kilgallen was the only reporter ever to interview Jack Ruby alone. Just before she died she was going around New York telling friends that she was about to "bust the Kennedy assassination wide open." Mark Lane: People laugh because they think of her as a gossip columnist. Well, I'm going to tell you something. She was a very, very serious journalist. Melvin Belli: If a reporter was resourceful enough to arrange the interview, Jack would talk to anyone, and I didn't try to stop him. Jim Lehrer: When Belli says that Ruby was accessible for interviews, he is wrong about that. I never got an interview with Ruby and neither did anyone else. And I tried. Yes, indeed. Dorothy Kilgallen: This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive--and there are a lot of them. Thomas G. Buchanen: I don't believe this case is closed. I do not think it will be, until some more satisfying answer has been given to the question: Why was the President of the United States assassinated? Jim Marrs: After her death, no trace of Dorothy's notes or writings about what she may have learned from Ruby was ever found. Warren Hinckle: I know of no serious person who really believes that the death of Dorothy Kilgallen was related to the Kennedy assassination. Still...we included her name on our list of those mysteriously dead--but with a question mark after her name. Penn Jones Jr: Journalism is so timid and weak. How else to account for the almost total disregard on the part of the national press of the many persons--missing, murdered, or met with death strangely--who were related to the tragedy in Dallas? Jim Marrs: The year 1977 produced a bumper crop of deaths connected to the JFK assassination. And well into the 1980s, witnesses were hesitant to come forward because of the stories of strange and sudden death that seemed to visit some people with information. Lionel Mirthmint: This is too much. Warren Hinckle: Sometimes, only sometimes, the wildest stories turn out to be true. And this is one of those times. Peter Dale Scott: In America we are now approaching a consensual state of mind about the Kennedy assassination that is perhaps as bizarre as the assassination itself. Increasingly, it is admitted that the facts of the President's murder are not fully known, let alone understood. Thomas G. Buchanen: Throughout the world most people do, in fact, reject the findings of the Warren Commission. Gerald Posner: The Warren Report is almost universally derided--mostly by people who have never read it. Penn Jones: I really think that the only way you can believe the Warren Report is not to read it. David Lifton: Sylvia Meagher represented the view that the Warren Commission and its staff were conscious concealers of the truth--deliberate, criminally culpable liars. I no longer subscribe to that view, for it fails to take into account falsified evidence. Richard Warren Lewis: She checked the footnotes and compiled the index for Edward Epstein's best-selling book Inquest. Later Epstein took closer notice of the furnishings in her apartment. He said, "When I saw all those books on flying saucers, my heart dropped." Peter Dale Scott: No one ever claimed that Sylvia Meagher was infallible. Still, many researchers, like myself, would name her book, Accessories After the Fact, as their chief inspiration and guide. Sylvia Meagher: Intensive study of the evidence against the alleged lone assassin has convinced me, as intuition alone could not, that the truth about Dallas remains unknown and that Lee Harvey Oswald may well have been innocent. Henry Hurt: To me, evidence is overwhelming that Lee Harvey Oswald was someone's tool in a conspiracy to murder the President of the United States. Anthony Summers: It is certainly possible that a renegade element in U.S. intelligence manipulated him--whatever his role on November 22, 1963. That same element may have activated pawns in the anti-Castro movement and the Mafia to murder the President and to execute Oswald. Vincent Salandria: The federal government's intelligence agencies must have known that the material which the government issued would indicate a conspiracy existed. So why did we get the evidence? Peter Dale Scott: The collective response to the Kennedy assassination has been marked by psychological denial. The need to deny ugly facts about our civilization is a universal one. Through writing poetry I have come to accept its presence in myself. Richard Popkin: Many of us in this country are afraid to face reality. Jim Garrison: Not me. The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a political execution accomplished by a power elite within the government. David Lifton: Me, either. I found evidence that someone had altered the President's body prior to the autopsy. Evidence suggesting that the autopsy report actually described a body no longer in the same condition as it had been immediately after the shooting. Dave Powers: Lifton's story is the biggest pack of malarkey I ever heard in my life. The coffin was never unattended. Not even thirty seconds. I never left it. Harry Livingstone: The autopsy photographs and x-rays are fabricated--not the wounds. Henry Hurt: It is useless, if not futile, to argue conclusively in favor of a particular theory. Jim Garrison: We need no longer pretend, however, that there is any mystery left about the assassination of John Kennedy. Mark Lane: The prize that eludes us all is an America quite well again. Warren Hinckle: LBJ himself thought the Warren Commission was full of beans. Anthony Summers: Asked whether all the testimony taken by the original enquiry would be made public, Earl Warren replied: "Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime." Thomas G. Buchanen: It is not the light that we must fear; it is the darkness. All statements of fact in this story (yep, it's just a story) are either direct quotes, or paraphrases of quotes, and are attributable to the speaker. Copyright (c) by John Kelin, November, 1993 Now this is Saba Note: Gotcha......that Kelin had a birdseye view into mass hysteria and ignorance......as for me, I follow the footsteps of Orpheus and that guy ain't Italian either.
http://shell.rmi.net/pub2/jkelin/critics.word.fairp+.html
