Plausible Denial (copyright 1991, published by Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, NY, ISBN 1-56025-000-3) is a book by American lawyer, Mark Lane that chronicles his legal defense of Victor Marchetti, a former-CIA agent who wrote an article for The Spotlight about the JFK assassination and was sued for defamation by E. Howard Hunt.
The drama of this book intensifies when E. Howard Hunt is subjected to cross-examination by Mark Lane. It intensifies further when the sworn testimony of Marita Lorenz is offered as evidence for the defense. 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.
Although his 1963 book, Rush to Judgment, was a best-seller, this book did not enjoy the same popular success. However, among JFK assassination researchers, this book was a key event that led to 1992 and 1998 legislation regarding the Freedom of Information Act as it applies to the JFK assassination.
Famous quotes containing the words plausible and/or denial:
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)