Talk:Plausible Denial

Simple factual error (in a stub?) and possible extreme Tendenz (POV)
I'm not going to edit this myself; I wouldn't have time for an edit war, should one erupt. However somebody needs to correct a couple of items in this tiny stub, one just a detail, and the other rather substantial.

Details First: The publication date is wrong for Rush to Judg(e)ment. (Note: Wikipedia has Judgment as per the American preference, but Amazon indicates Judgement.) At present this is given as 1963, which is mistaken. Lane did publish a newspaper opinion piece, styled as a "defense brief" for Lee Oswald, very shortly after the two assassinations (i.e., of President Kennedy as well as Oswald); and indeed, that might have been in 1963. Rush to Judgement, however, involved a lot of legwork and all the usual editing and pre-publication activity. A quick search (and at time of this notation, the Wikipedia article on that book) would seem to establish 1966 as the correct date; though I had thought it was published perhaps earlier than that, it was absolutely no earlier than 1964.

More puzzling is the POV-sounding statement that the present book, Plausible Denial, "suggests that Mark Lane convinced the jury that sworn testimony provided by certain high-ranking CIA witnesses could not be verified, and must be doubted based on the very nature of their business". As to whether this may be inferred from some clever reading of what the book actually says, or whether perhaps such an inference may be based on some obscure, marginal statement in the book, ... -- Well, I guess that's a way of making the case sound technical and trivial; almost anything can be extracted from anything if you use the right filter. As to the clear intent of Plausible Denial, however, there can be little doubt: According to the book, when Lane assumed his role as defense attorney for the second trial, first of all he fundamentally changed the significance of the entire proceeding by abandoning the original "absence of malice" defense and arguing instead that the Defendant, Liberty Lobby, was not guilty because its newspaper, The Spotlight, had published no false report: E. Howard Hunt had in fact been in Dallas on 22 November 1963, and had played some role in the Assassination of President Kennedy. Furthermore, Lane reports in Plausible Denial that when the jury decided in Liberty Lobby's favor, the jury foreman told a local TV reporter, to the latter's apparent consternation, that the evidence had convinced the jury that the CIA, with Hunt's participation, had killed President Kennedy. -- Now I'm just asking, Why is the book's so very simple, and obviously sensational and climactic, denouement -- even if one finds it preposterous -- lacking from this article, while someone has gone to the trouble, instead, of formulating and inserting the above-quoted excruciatingly obfuscatory if not blatantly false description?

As I've said, I'm not going to chance getting into an edit war. But here I've set out the issue for some other more determined soul to take on. This isn't an issue of "What really happened to JFK"; rather, it's "What is Plausible Denial really about?", which will be abundantly clear to anyone who spends a few minutes with the book. HuWants2No (talk) 04:13, 14 July 2010 (UTC)