Citizen Lane (Documentary on JFK Researcher Mark Lane)

[Truth4Youth]

Pauley Perrette ("Abby" on the hit television program NCIS) Producing Citizen Lane Documentary
In addition to appearing as counsel in cases from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, California, Mark Lane is writing his autobiography, speaking at national conferences, universities and colleges, and being filmed for a documentary about his life by Pauley Perrette, “Abby” on the hit television program NCIS. Pauley is shooting, directing and producing the film. If you have material for inclusion in the documentary or for the autobiography, please contact Steve Jaffe.

http://www.marklane.com/news/index.htm

This might be as good a time as any to ask about Lane's association with the Liberty Lobby. What was that all about?

[streeb]

This might be as good a time as any to ask about Lane's association with the Liberty Lobby. What was that all about?

The Liberty Lobby was successfully sued for defamation by E Howard Hunt because of an article in the Spotlight, written by Victor Marchetti, that implicated Hunt in the JFK assassination. Lane helped to get the decision reversed not out of any sympathy for the Liberty Lobby, but because it gave him the chance to depose Hunt and other senior CIA figures like Richard Helms. His book Plausible Denial is a very entertaining read about the whole thing.

If you're looking for something suspicious in Lane's CV, however, his relationship to the People's Temple might be the place to look.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

If you're looking for something suspicious in Lane's CV, however, his relationship to the People's Temple might be the place to look.

Wow! I had no idea he was so intimately involved!


Exalting 'Beauty of Dying',

Jones Leads 408 to Death

By Leonard Downie Jr.
Washington Post Foreign Service
November 21, 1978

snip

Two other members of the fact-finding group, civil liberties lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry, had stayed behind in Jonestown. They escaped into the surrounding tropical forest when Jones ordered that everyone in the compound must die and made their way to Georgetown where they gave a detailed account of the massacre at a press conference and in interviews yesterday.

Lane, 51, and Garry, 69, hid in the forest in a heavy rain Saturday night before finding their way to Port Kaituma on Sunday. They said here yesterday that Jones was unhappy that the two-day meeting with Ryan had ... a number of Jones' followers asking to leave with Ryan and another attacking Ryan with a fishing knife. Lane said yesterday that Jones told them some of his men had gone to attack the congressman and his party at the airstrip as they were leaving.

snip

Lane gave the following account:

One of Jones' top lieutenants, Don Sly, suddenly grabbed Ryan around the neck with his left arm, placed a knife against Ryan's neck with his right hand, and shouted: "Congressman Ryan, you motherf-----."

While Ryan struggled to push the man's hands away from his neck, Lane grabbed Sly's arms from the front and Garry, 69, grabbed Sly from behind.

Finally, "all kinds of people from the temple moved in," Garry said, and pulled Sly away from Ryan as the congressman fell to the floor. Sly's hand was cut in the struggle and blood from that cut was all over the congressman's clothes. Some Jonestown residents gave Ryan a clean set of clothes to change into later on the plane.

Jones calmly watched this incident from some distance, making no move. Lane and Ryan told Jones that police and a doctor must be called at once. Jones said they would be, but no one came.

Jones, visibly shaken, than sat down to talk to Ryan.

"Does this change things?" Jones asked Ryan, who told Jones that he still saw many positive things in Jonestown but that the knife incident did change his impression.

Ryan then asked Lane, "Are you mad at me?"

"No," Lane said. "I'm so grateful that you came here."

"I'll always be grateful that you saved my life," Ryan told Lane.

Lane responded by joking with the congressman: "Now no one can call this trip a junket."

After Ryan left to join the others at the air strip, Jones took Lane aside and kept repeating, "This is terrible, this is terrible, this is terrible." Lane said he tried to calm Jones down.

Jones then told Lane, "There are things you don't know. Those men who left a little while ago to go into the city are not going there. They love me and they may do something that will reflect badly on me. They're going to shoot at the people and their plane. The way Larry [Layton] hugged me, a cold hug, told me."

Then a woman came over and whispered something to Jones, and Jones told Lane to take Garry and go the East House on the far side of the compound.

Lane objected because he feared Jones was gathering residents of Jonestown for a mass suicide attempt, but Jones assigned a very tall, tough lieutenant to escort the lawyers away.

Lane and Garry saw eight or ten young men remove automatic rifles from storage near where they were taken. They also heard Jones speaking over a loudspeaker to the Jonestown residents about the "beauty of dying . . . it's an important part of what we've done . . . let's not fight among ourselves."

The guard watching Lane and Garry was then replaced by two young men with automatic weapons. Garry said yesterday that he recognized one of them as a man he had frequently helped when he was in trouble back in San Francisco.

"They all kept saying," Lane said , "We're all going to die . . . There is a great dignity in dying . . . It is a great way to end our struggle."

When he tried to argue them out this, they merely smiled calmly and repeated, "We're all going to die."

Lane worried that he and Garry would be shot but Garry said he knew these particular men would never do that even if they had been sent there to do so.

Lane asked the two young men: "At least Charles and I will be here to tell the story of what happened, won't we?"

Lane said the men agreed to that, hugged him and Garry and turned to leave, either to join the death ritual or escape.

"Wait," Lane called out, "first how do we get out of here."

The men told them where to run over a hill and into the forest where Lane and Garry were to spend the next 12 hours in darkness, soaked and chilled by rain, cut by the rough underbrush and bitten by insects.

Lane said they could still hear Jones shouting over the loudspeaker and eventually repeating just one word over and over: "Mother, mother, mother . . ." Jones' mother died about a year ago and she was buried in Jonestown.

Finally there was a period of silence and then a large number of shots rang out. The lawyers moved deeper into the underbrush and heard screams and shots around them but saw no one except three Jonestown men rushing down a road out of the compound carrying a large trunk.

http://www.gbs.sha.bw.schule.de/peoples ... _wpost.htm

Pretty horrifying. I wonder how much of this Garry was able to corroborate:

After listening to Temple members discuss the history of the case, Garry initially announced on September 8, 1977, that "[w]e've come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy by government agencies to destroy Peoples Temple as a viable community organization."[2] After further experience with the Temple, including reviewing the results of several Freedom of Information Act requests, Garry eventually changed his conclusion to the belief that there was little government interest, let alone a conspiracy.[2]

Throughout his representation, Garry argued with members of the Temple.[8] Garry had a tumultuous relationship with another Temple attorney, Mark Lane, because Garry felt that Lane repeatedly interfered in Garry's areas of representation and made too high profile the Temple's claims of a conspiracy against it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Garry

[American Dream]

From: The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre by John Judge, 1985


The Strange Connection
to the Murder of Martin Luther King

One of the persistent problems in researching Jonestown is that it seems to lead to so many other criminal activities, each with its own complex history and cast of characters. Perhaps the most disturbing of these is the connection that appears repeatedly between the characters in the Jonestown story and the key people involved in the murder and investigating of Martin Luther King.

The first clue to this link appeared in the personal histories of the members of the Ryan investigation team who were so selectively and deliberately killed at Port Kaituma. Don Harris, a veteran NBC reporter, had been the only network newsman on the scene to cover Martin Luther King's activity in Memphis at the time of King's assassination. He had interviewed key witnesses at the site. His coverage of the urban riots that followed won him an Emmy award.[228] Gregory Robinson, a "fearless" journalist from the San Francisco Examiner, had photographed the same riots in Washington, D.C. When he was approached for copies of the films by Justice Department officials, he threw the negatives into the Potomac river.[229]

The role of Mark Lane, who served as attorney for Jim Jones, is even more clearly intertwined.[230] Lane had co-authored a book with Dick Gregory, claiming FBI complicity in the King murder.[231] He was hired as the attorney for James Earl Ray, accused assassin, when Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about King.[232] Prior to this testimony, Ray was involved in an unusual escape plot at Brushy Mountain State Prison.[233] The prisoner who had helped engineer the escape plot was later inexplicably offered an early, parole by members of the Tennessee Governor's office. These officials, and Governor Blanton himself, were to come under close public scrutiny and face legal charges in regard to bribes taken to arrange illegal early pardons for prisoners.[234]

One of the people living at Jonestown was ex-FBI agent Wesley Swearington, who at least publicly condemned the COINTELPRO operations and other abuses, based on stolen classified documents, at the Jonestown site. Lane had reportedly met with him there at least a year before the massacre. Terri Buford said the documents were passed on to Charles Garry. Lane used information from Swearingen in his thesis on the FBI and King's murder. Swearingen later served as a key witness in suits against the Justice Department brought by the Socialist Workers Party.[235] When Larry Flynt, the flamboyant publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a, $1 million reward leading to the capture and conviction of the John F. Kennedy killers, the long distance number listed to collect information and leads was being answered by Mark Lane and Wesley Swearingen.[236]

With help from officials in Tennessee, Governor Blanton's office, Lane managed to get legal custody of a woman who had been incarcerated in the Tennessee state psychiatric system for nearly eight years.[237] This woman, Grace Walden Stephens, had been a witness in the King murder.[238] She was living at the time in Memphis in a rooming house across from the hotel when Martin Luther King was shot.[239] The official version of events had Ray located in the common bathroom of the rooming house, and claimed he used a rifle to murder King from that window.[240] Grace Stephens did, indeed, see a man run from the bathroom, past her door and down to the street below.[241] A rifle, later linked circumstantially to James Earl Ray, was found inside a bundle at the base of the rooming house stairs, and identified as the murder weapon.[242] But Grace, who saw the man clearly, refused to identify him as Ray when shown photographs by the FBI.[243] Her testimony was never introduced at the trial. The FBI relied, instead, on the word of her common law husband, Charles Stephens, who was drunk and unconscious at the time of the incident.[244] Her persistence in saying that it was not James Earl Ray was used at her mental competency hearings as evidence against her, and she disappeared into the psychiatric system.[245]

Grace Walden Stephens took up residence in Memphis with Lane, her custodian, and Terri Buford, a key Temple member who had returned to the U.S. before the killings to live with Lane.[246] While arranging for her to testify before the Select Committee on Ray's behalf, Lane and Buford were plotting another fate for Grace Stephens. Notes from Buford to Jones, found in the aftermath of the killings, discussed arrangements with Lane to move Grace Stephens to Jonestown.[247] The problem that remained was lack of a passport, but Buford suggested either getting a passport on the black market, or using the passport of former Temple member Maxine Swaney.[248] Swaney, dead for nearly 2-1/2 years since her departure from the Ukiah camp, was in no position to argue and Jones apparently kept her passport with him.[249] Whether Grace ever arrived at Jonestown is unclear.

Lane was also forced to leave Ray in the midst of testimony to the Select Committee when he got word that Ryan was planning to visit. Lane had attempted to discourage the trip earlier in a vaguely threatening letter.[250] Now he rushed to be sure he arrived with the group.[251] At the scene, he failed to warn Ryan and others, knowing that the sandwiches and other food might be drugged, but refrained from eating it himself.[252] Later, claiming that he and Charles Garry would write the official history of the "revolutionary suicide," Lane was allowed to leave the pieces of underwear to mark their way back to Georgetown.[253] If true, it seems an unlikely method if they were in any fear of pursuit. They had heard gunfire and screams back at the camp.[254] Lane was reportedly well aware of the forced drugging and suicide drills at Jonestown before Ryan arrived.[255]

[Truth4Youth]

This might be as good a time as any to ask about Lane's association with the Liberty Lobby. What was that all about?

The Liberty Lobby was successfully sued for defamation by E Howard Hunt because of an article in the Spotlight, written by Victor Marchetti, that implicated Hunt in the JFK assassination. Lane helped to get the decision reversed not out of any sympathy for the Liberty Lobby, but because it gave him the chance to depose Hunt and other senior CIA figures like Richard Helms. His book Plausible Denial is a very entertaining read about the whole thing.

i'm pretty sure that Mark Lane speaks highly of Michael Collins Piper's The Final Judgement

[cptmarginal]

Wow. Thanks for the info about Mark Lane & Jonestown - I did not know about the intimate connection.

[DrVolin]

The connection between Lane, Jones, and Ray is just about as mindblowing as the fact that Barry Seal was in the same CAP as Oswald and Ferrie. Now complete the circle by realizing that Lane wrote the book on JFK. Wow.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Before you get weirded out by Mark Lane at Jonestown, don't forget that all of his books expose the CIA's crimes and an effort to embroil him in a discrediting operation is only to be expected.

His 1966 'Rush to Judgement' was a best seller and tore the cover off the Warren Commission bandaid over the gaping conspiracy.

In 1970 he published 'Conversations With Americans,' interviews with Vietnam vets and deserters describing how they were trained to torture and execute prisoners and did. This was at the time of the scapegoat trial of Lt. William Calley for the My Lai Massacre.

CIA-Life Magazine pre-empted Mark Lane's book with a meme-reversal article about Marines torturing Marines at Camp Pendleton.

So Lane is in no way an ally of The Man. More likely a target.

[pepsified thinker]

From: The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre by John Judge, 1985


The Strange Connection
to the Murder of Martin Luther King

One of the persistent problems in researching Jonestown is that it seems to lead to so many other criminal activities, each with its own complex history and cast of characters.

[...]

the attorney for James Earl Ray, accused assassin, when Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about King.[232] Prior to this testimony, Ray was involved in an unusual escape plot at Brushy Mountain State Prison.[233] The prisoner who had helped engineer the escape plot was later inexplicably offered an early, parole by members of the Tennessee Governor's office. These officials, and Governor Blanton himself, were to come under close public scrutiny and face legal charges in regard to bribes taken to arrange illegal early pardons for prisoners.[234]

[...]

With help from officials in Tennessee, Governor Blanton's office, Lane managed to get legal custody of a woman who had been incarcerated in the Tennessee state psychiatric system for nearly eight years.[237] [...]

(I'm trying to pull out the parts that deal with Blanton because...)

FYI--Fred Thompson, the former U.S. Senator and also actor and briefly great white GOP hope for the presidency (before the mantel settled on McCain) in the last election, was the attorney who helped bring down Blanton. There's a movie with Sissy Spacek called 'Marie'--she plays the role of a woman appointed to the parole board (IIRC) who discovers the sneaky deals being done to get prisoners out early if they pay bribes to right Tenn. officials, and she crusades against those officials and eventuallys wins. It's based on a true story (supposedly) and in the real-life version, the woman who actually did the crusading had Thompson as her advisor/lawyer. He played himself in the movie version and that's how he started his acting career.

weird ass tangled shit, eh?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

From: The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre by John Judge, 1985
......
the attorney for James Earl Ray, accused assassin, when Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about King.[232] Prior to this testimony, Ray was involved in an unusual escape plot at Brushy Mountain State Prison.[233] The prisoner who had helped engineer the escape plot was later inexplicably offered an early, parole by members of the Tennessee Governor's office. These officials, and Governor Blanton himself, were to come under close public scrutiny and face legal charges in regard to bribes taken to arrange illegal early pardons for prisoners.[234]

[...]

With help from officials in Tennessee, Governor Blanton's office, Lane managed to get legal custody of a woman who had been incarcerated in the Tennessee state psychiatric system for nearly eight years.[237] [...]

(I'm trying to pull out the parts that deal with Blanton because...)

FYI--Fred Thompson, the former U.S. Senator and also actor and briefly great white GOP hope for the presidency (before the mantel settled on McCain) in the last election, was the attorney who helped bring down Blanton. There's a movie with Sissy Spacek called 'Marie'--she plays the role of a woman appointed to the parole board (IIRC) who discovers the sneaky deals being done to get prisoners out early if they pay bribes to right Tenn. officials, and she crusades against those officials and eventuallys wins. It's based on a true story (supposedly) and in the real-life version, the woman who actually did the crusading had Thompson as her advisor/lawyer. He played himself in the movie version and that's how he started his acting career.

weird ass tangled shit, eh?

yikes. Typical CIA-Hollywood meme-reversal.

http://open.salon.com/blog/frogtown_div ... s_movement

CHARLES STEPHENS

Drunk "witness" to man leaving rooming house where Ray's rifle was left under the bed. Star witness if Ray had a trial.

GRACE WALDEN STEPHENS, Common-law wife

"Saw a man much shorter than Ray, weighing no more than 125 lbs. Grace locked in "mental" institution for ten years.
QUESTION: WHY DID MARK LANE, ATTORNEY FOR JAMES EARL RAY, REFER TO "Grace Walden" before the committee, without demanding her testimony that a man other than James Earl Ray was leaving the rooming house?

Mark Lane is leaving Los Angeles, Calif. and moving to Memphis, Tenn. Grace Walden will accompany him and move back again to Tenn.

"Grace Walden Stephens had been a witness in the King murder. She was living at the time in Memphis in a rooming house across from the hotel when Martin Luther King was shot. The official version of events had Ray located in the common bathroom of the rooming house, and claimed he used a rifle to murder King from that window. Grace Stephens did, indeed, see a man run from the bathroom, past her door and down to the street below. A rifle, later linked circumstantially to James Earl Ray, was found inside a bundle at the base of the rooming house stairs, and identified as the murder weapon. But Grace, who saw the man clearly, refused to identify him as Ray when shown photographs by the FBI. Her testimony was never introduced at the trial. The FBI relied, instead, on the word of her common law husband, Charles Stephens, who was drunk and unconscious at the time of the incident. Her persistence in saying that it was not James Earl Ray was used at her mental competency hearings as evidence against her, and she disappeared into the psychiatric system" (1985, John Judge) .

[streeb]

i'm pretty sure that Mark Lane speaks highly of Michael Collins Piper's The Final Judgement

I really don't know anything about that. All I can do is refer you to the passages in Plausible Denial that explain Lane's uneasy decision to work with the Liberty Lobby, which is the only source I've ever known on the subject.

Hugh said:

So Lane is in no way an ally of The Man. More likely a target.

I lean towards that.

[MinM]

my source says Schrade is the only good guy in the bunch.

Thanks for the article.

I am just curious of what issues you or your source have with DiEugenio's credibility.

My issue is that he tends to overlook, and dodges the issue when asked, some of the questionable actions of Mark Lane. Particularly with those related to Jonestown.

viewtopic.php?p=446905#p446905

Looking up information on Khaiber Khan, I found another source for his trust in Lane...

Show #422
Original airdate: May 7th, 2009
Guests: Russ Baker / Jim DiEugenio
Topic: Family Of Secrets

# Play Part Two - Jim DiEugenio
# The Puppet and the Puppet Masters Part 1 and Part 2
# Jim doesn't believe Gonzalez and Dubois wrote the second Puppetmasters article
# He believes James Phelan was the likely author
# Phelan a 'bought and sold' author... CIA
# The Mormon Mafia incapacitated Howard Hughes with drugs and stole his empire
# Something happened at Playboy to stop Part 2 from becoming a decent article
# Lamar Waldron and Thomas Hartmann not only screw up the JFK assassination, but also the RFK and MLK assassinations
# Grace Stevens' institutionalized for being a credible witness to disprove James Earl Ray as an assassin
# Legacy of Secrecy completely leaves out Judge Joe Brown
# Self hypnosis all but impossible... Sirhan couldn't have done it
# Michael Wien (Michael Wayne) and Khyber Khan
# The book says Thane Cesar did not shoot RFK yet he was the ONLY person in the perfect position to
# The bumbling Watergate burglars... really a setup job focusing on the removal of Nixon

http://www.blackopradio.com/black422b.ram

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

viewtopic.php?p=447001#p447001

Mark Lane won the release of the incorruptible Grace Stevens.

[elfismiles]

I finally posted my footage of John Judge talking about Jonestown...

John Judge on Jonestown
http://www.blip.tv/file/2465052

"Discussion of the MLK Assassination leads to the Deep Politics, Conspiracy and Parapolitical covert-ops surrounding the Jonestown Murders."

... having problems with the footage playing though ... seems like all the footage isn't there.

Well it seems to be playing right at these links:

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5730102/15009882

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... d=61848935


Jonestown Query
viewtopic.php?p=279821#p279821

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSZYmWUITNY


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqW5xlFvntI

[MinM]

Show #416
Original airdate: March 26th, 2009

# Part Two - Mark Lane
# Pauley Perrette is doing a documentary on Mark's life called "Citizen Lane"
# Lane and Dick Gregory wrote Murder in Memphis", a revisionist view of the MLK murder
# A J. Edgar Hoover dirty trick
# Hoover wanted King dead
# It was known to King's people of an FBI "Kill King" squad
# King was originally to stay at the Holiday Inn Rivermont
# Hoover started the racist campaign to get King out of the Holiday Inn where he was safe
# The Lorraine Motel stay was arranged specifically by Hoover
# The bizarre relationship between Hoover, Clive Tolson and the FBI
# Hoover's secret files kept him in power
# Mark's personal experience with Martin Luther King

http://www.blackopradio.com/black416b.ram

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html

This documentary must have put "Abby" at odds with her NCIS producer Donald P. Bellisario

[bks]

If Tim Reiterman is right, Lane is very lucky to be alive, and Charles Garry had every reason to despise him.

I corresponded with Judge [back in 2009] during the time I was learning about the background of the People's Temple and Jones. We had a couple of rather lengthy email exchanges and at least one phone call. There was a lot in those exchanges to follow up, and I never did get around to confirming or disconfirming all of the key material.

The biggest point for me concerned Judge'ss claim about the British Black Watch troops he alleged were on hand to murder the survivors that fled into the jungle. I asked him if he could point me to the source for the claim he makes that the British troops. He told me the BBC contacted him about a special they were planning on Jonestown for the 20th anniversary. Their investigators, according to Judge, followed up on his leads and interviewed some of the Black Watch troops who revealed in a documentary that they were ordered to shoot to kill anyone attempting to escape the area through the woods, armed or not, and did kill people.

Did this documentary ever air? I don't know. It would have been in 1998, and I have never seen it. MinM?

I also asked Judge if there was any corroboration in either in the British press or elsewhere regarding the Black Watch unit.

He again referenced the BBC documentary, but said it was also reported in something called Soldier magazine, in an article called "Jocks in the Jungle".

Is anyone familiar with the that magazine, or seen that article? I could never track it down.