The Strongest Poison

This is a book which the New York Times tried to suppress (see page 395). In a campaign of misinformation against Mark Lane, its author, and Terri Buford, a principal source of information, the New York Times in essence alleged that they were both international bank thieves, asserting that it relied upon the Department of Justice for that conclusion. Shortly after that false charge was published, the Department of Justice, in a letter to the chairman and president of the New York Times, denied that it had ever made that charge. The New York Times refused to publish the letter from the Department of Justice. It is published here, in its entirety, for the first time. When approximately one thousand Americans died in a massacre on 18 November 1978 in a South American jungle thousands of miles from home, most of us wanted to know not only the causes of their deaths but also the circumstances that led these people to leave their native land. According to most government and media reports, an odd assortment of mesmerized sycophants followed their leader across land and sea, an, when told by him to do so, willingly laid down their lives in an act of eternal devotion. This was indeed the line that the United States government and the nation's leading newspapers and television networks offered. The facts, however, reject this fanciful and self-serving notion. Now, for the first time, in a powerful, incisive account, Mark Lane carefully and seriously addresses the questions that the State Department and intelligence agencies hoped would never be asked: Was there a government conspiracy against the People's Temple and its leader the Reverand Jim Jones? Could the United States have prevented the mass murder at Jonestown? Was Congressman Leo Ryan, who died at the Port Kaituma airstrip, deliberately misled by the State Department? ...

Mark Lane is an author, lawyer and activist. His was the first voice to publicly question the top secret investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and his bestselling book, Rush to Judgment, was one of the first to question the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. A Citizen’s Dissent recounts the vast efforts of our government and the establishment media to suppress his investigation into the assassination of JFK and to silence and destroy him for his work. His later works on the JFK assassination detailed the involvement of the CIA through an actual trial in which Lane cross-examined multiple agents [Plausible Denial] and the role played by the CIA and Secret Service [Last Word]. He crossed the country speaking at countless colleges and other institutions about the murder of the president sparking the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which looked into the assassinations of Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A Freedom Rider while he served in the New York Legislature in 1961, he has defended the rights of the voiceless from his beginnings in East Harlem to Wounded Knee, where he successfully defended the leaders of the American Indian Movement. He freed James Joseph Richardson, a black man framed in rural Florida for the murder of his own seven children, from prison after serving over 20 years, many of them on death row [Arcadia]. He is a survivor of Jonestown [The Strongest Poison] and was a leader of the anti war movement during the Viet Nam era [Chicago Eyewitness; Conversations with Americans], Lane's autobiography, Citizen Lane, was published in 2012.