David Talbot has an interesting piece on Salon today (subscription or ad-watching required). He opens with a brief recap of recent "official reports"--9/11, Senate Committee on Intelligence, Abu Ghraib--then launches into a long discussion of the Warren Commission, saying
it is only appropriate, in this stormy season of the official version and its discontents, that we observe the 40th anniversary of the Warren Report -- the mother of all such controversies.
His take is interesting, and pulls together many sources and opinions that I had never heard before (though I've never looked at anything more detailed about the Kennedy assassination than Oliver Stone's oeuvre, so that's not saying much). But what I found particularly striking, especially for inclusion here on DailyKos, is his closing paragraph:
For decades the only public critics of the Warren Report were a heroic and indomitable band of citizen-investigators -- including a crusading New York attorney, a small-town Texas newspaperman, a retired Washington civil servant, a Berkeley literature professor, a Los Angeles sign salesman, a Pittsburgh coroner -- all of whom refused to accept the fraud that was perpetrated on the American people. Undaunted by the media scorn that was heaped upon them, they devoted their lives to what powerful government officials and high-paid media mandarins should have been doing -- solving the most shocking crime against American democracy in the 20th century. Their names -- Mark Lane, Ray Marcus, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, Vincent Salandria, Mary Ferrell, Penn Jones Jr., Cyril Wecht, Peter Dale Scott, Jim Lesar and Gaeton Fonzi, among others -- will find their honored place in American history. It is these everyday heroes, and their successors, whose best work will some day come to replace the heavy, counterfeit tomes of the Warren Report.
With the recent self-administered pats on the back we've had in these parts (the thorough investigation of 70s-era typewriters, the Lynne Gobbell story, etc...), and with the apparent success of blogs such as blogactive in influencing real-life events, I was struck by Talbot's championing of "citizen-investigators." It would be wonderful to be able to claim that community sites such as this one, with enough focus and elbow-grease, can be a counter-balance to "The Mighty Wurlitzer," perhaps eventually being able to prevent those official reports from passing fiction off as fact to this country's citizenry. Is that where we're headed? Or am I just being optimistic?