Was Jonestown a CIA medical experiment?

[Anthony Thorne]

Meiers offers his thoughts on Lane in a compelling closing section where he (Meiers) runs through all the Jonestown-related literature available to that date, and offers lengthy thoughts on each book. (I'll return to my photocopied copy to list the correct titles but Meiers points out at least one well-written Jonestown study where he suspects the author deduced the CIA connection to the massacre but remained cautious about being explicit on the subject, and another - RAVEN, an acclaimed Jim Jones bio - where Meiers argues the two co-authors sang their best Mockingbird tunes and deliberately steered the study away from a lot of explicit CIA-related evidence). Recounting from memory (I'd hoped to type out the actual section from the book but am sadly short of time) Meiers suggests Lane's retelling of his involvement THE STRONGEST POISON is okay as a literate account of what Lane saw and heard, but ignores (a.) Lane's own personal relationship with a Jonestown-related figure who may have steered ML in various ways, and (b.) doesn't discuss at all what Meiers thinks was the real reason Lane was dragged into the Jonestown saga - to 'set him up' as a figure publically supportive of the cult prior to the tragedy, place him at the scene when the event reached its climax, and then awkwardly/suspiciously leave him as one of the few survivors, diminishing Lane personally and professionally at the very point he was giving testimony and evidence as part of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Meiers offers a timeline and has Lane leaving an HSCA meeting to visit Jonestown, with some later HSCA appointments booked (and then cancelled) for the following week. The section on Lane's book is quite long and probably offers a more subtle argument than the one I've condensed above, but Meiers believes the timing adjacent to Lane's HSCA activities was important, and fits with what was a long history of vicious and cynical machinations on the part of the Jonestown plotters (i.e Jones, his controllers and cohorts) in the years, months and days leading up to the massacre.