Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

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Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

Postby conniption » Fri Jun 07, 2019 5:04 am

strategic culture

As a New Paradigm of East and West Cooperation Emerges, Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

Matthew Ehret
June 2, 2019


A new assassination is now being attempted 51 years after the life of Martin Luther King was cut short by a bullet on the balcony of the Loraine Motel on April 4, 1968. A story has gone viral across the international media in recent days which promises to shed light on the dark perversity of Martin Luther King Jr.

The scandal was featured in the June edition of Standpoint magazine by internationally renowned Martin Luther King “authority” David Garrow and aimed at destroying the myth of King as a moral leader of America by showcasing the ugliness of King’s true self as a an orgy-loving abuser who had over 40 affairs and laughed as a friend raped a parishioner. Garrow states that his expose “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.”

The fact that so many news outlets are jumping on the bandwagon should cause one to wonder why is this happening at this moment in history? Could this strange hysteria over a mediocre slander piece have anything to do with the fact that the polarized cages of left and right are finally breaking down? Could it have anything to do with the fact that as America comes closer to a potential alliance with Russia and China, an era of cooperation and economic justice may awaken something within the collective psyche of Americans which many had thought was long dead?

The timing is especially strange since the supposed “ground breaking evidence” which the heroic Garrow is bringing to light was actually first made public in November 2017, and on closer inspection, it wouldn’t qualify by any lawyer’s standard as “evidence”.

The “Scandal” Being Exposed

In November 2017, a batch of 19,000 formerly classified government documents, and wiretap transcripts relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy were made public as per the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. Although nothing very dramatic was found among that otherwise highly redacted bundle, a strange 20 page FBI report on Martin Luther King Jr did cause some to take notice. In this report published weeks before his murder, an anonymous FBI agent records his assessment that MLK was a paid and loyal member of the Communist Party who had his speeches approved by Communist controllers. Not only that, but the report paints King as a sexual deviant of the highest order.

In the last two pages, the report explains how King engaged in a “two day drunken sex orgy in Washington D.C., Many of those present engaged in sexual acts, natural as well as un-natural, for the entertainment of onlookers. When one of the females shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and other of the males present discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect”.

The conspicuous quality of this FBI report, is that it is so reminiscent of Christopher Steele’s 30 page “dodgy dossier” which justified FBI surveillance on President Trump in the lead up to the 2016 elections. Without ever taking a moment to prove any of its claims, the Steele dossier asserted dozens of instances of Trump’s sexual perversity and his adherence to the nefarious agenda of the Kremlin.

Similarly ignoring all actual evidence, the 1968 FBI report advances an image of King as a degenerate using only hearsay, conjecture, and third hand reports. For example, the FBI, not known for their honesty, are convinced that King fathered a child with a mistress in Los Angeles purely because they were informed by “a very responsible Los Angeles individual in a position to know”. The audio tapes, if they exist at all, have never actually been heard by anyone and we are told will supposedly be made public in 2027.

Garrow’s Sleight of Hand

Before going further, it is worth taking a moment to ask who is this David Garrow who has found the courage to reveal the “true Martin Luther King”?

Garrow is celebrated by the Mainstream Press as an international authority on Martin Luther King due largely to his Pulitzer Prize winning 1986 book “Bearing the Cross” which has somehow given him the authority to be the last word on the narrative of King’s life for the next 33 years. Since that book Garrow has worked as a professor of history at various universities has found himself writing for proven CIA-sponsored mainstream rags such as the Washington Post, NY Times, Financial Times, New Republic and has more recently been stationed in England as a senior research Fellow at Cambridge University from 2005-2011. Today Garrow has become the official biographer of Barack Obama, and also an authority on the fraud of Russia-Gate attracting hordes of Trump supporters to his analysis.

Garrow has also made himself an enemy of the King family by leading slander campaigns against Coretta Scott King and her children who have managed the King Family Estate by labelling them as corrupt conspiracy theorists due to the family’s crazy belief that the government had anything to do with King’s assassination.

The Forgotten 1999 Civil Court Case

Garrow was first deployed to attack the family in the wake of the Memphis Civil Court trial in December 1999 wherein a four week long hearing of 70 witnesses ended with a Jury unanimously concluding not only that James Earl Ray (who had died in prison the year earlier) was innocent of the murder of Dr. King, but that the FBI and highest echelons of government conspired in the assassination.

During a press conference Coretta Scott King said: “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation.”

Coretta’s son Dexter (who is now the president of the King Center) spoke after his mother saying: “We can say that because of the evidence and information obtained in Memphis we believe that this case is over. This is a period in the chapter. We constantly hear reports, which trouble me, that this verdict creates more questions than answers. That is totally false. Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimony, with over seventy witnesses, credible witnesses I might add, from several judges to other very credible witnesses, would know that the truth is here.”

While a fuller expose of the FBI/Anglo-Canadian intelligence behind the King assassination will be documented elsewhere (which cannot be fully appreciated outside of the context of ALL of the major assassinations of the 1960s), it is sufficient to note for now that during this period of constant O.J. Simpson trial coverage across all press agencies, hardly a word on these hearings was covered by the media.

David Garrow stepped into the mud early on to slander the family and the court case as a whole saying of the family “The King youngsters are part of a larger population of American people who need to believe that the assassination of a King or a Kennedy must be the work of mightier forces… Individuals need to see something of a harmony amongst impact and cause. That if something has a large evil effect, it ought to be the result of a huge evil cause”.

By denying the existence of causality, or conspiracy in regards to historical processes, this “world renowned historian and MLK expert” essentially admitted that he is either extremely dumb or a part of the conspiracy himself.

Exhibiting the height of hypocrisy, Garrow said of King’s children in 2009 “I fear we are at the point where the behaviour of the children is doing lasting, indelible damage to King’s reputation”.

Philip Madison Jones, a Hollywood producer and best friend of Dexter King has stated that Garrow’s anti-King family malice is due to the fact that King’s late wife Coretta Scott King refused to put Garrow in charge of a project involving King’s papers. Apparently, Garrow wished to do to King what Edgar Poe’s “official” biographer Rufus Griswold did in 1850 (1).

Obama as a Superior Role Model

It was while working in Cambridge in 2008 that Garrow became obsessed with Barack Obama and with the idea of writing an untouchable biography that would render all other biographies obsolete for all time. This work was so magnificent and all-encompassing that it would require 9 years to write and would finally put an end to all speculation about Obama’s birth and shady life before politics. The effect of this work was a 1500 page fluff piece called “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”.

Describing his motive for writing his book Garrow said: “my very purposeful intent with this book has been to produce a book of record that folks will still be using and relying upon 25, 35 years from now. All throughout 2008, I was disappointed by the quality and depth of journalism about his earlier life. I thought the mainstream media was being insufficiently curious about him and on the other hand, we simultaneously had all of these whacky oppositional actions out there regarding where was he born was wee really a Muslim? And so I came to this really with a professional belief that someone with my background and experience should really tackle this.”

When asked in an interview how he managed to have so many long meetings with Obama in the White House (who took apparently took the time out of his busy schedule to read the entire opus), Garrow stated that it was arranged by his personal friend Bob Bauer who just so happened to be Obama’s personal attorney. Amongst other crimes, Bauer had been known for providing the “legal justification” for Obama’s unconstitutional bombing of Libya in 2011. Both Bauer and Garrow are currently playing two sides of the anti-Trump operation with Bauer acting as a loud voice for impeachment and advocate of the Russia-Gate narrative and Garrow playing an anti-Russia-Gate liberal socialist who now appears on Fox News regularly as he is a rare case of a liberal intellectual attacking Russia-Gate. While promoting neo-liberal order embodied by Barack Obama on the one hand, Garrow has somehow managed to walk the fine line of convincing both left and right ideologues that he is trustworthy whose lofty intellect transcends partisanship.

Where do we go from Here?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI became recognized as just one branch of the Deep State/5 Eyes international intelligence apparatus which had made every effort to undermine America and bring the republic back under firm control of the British Empire as outlined by Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 will.

Just as the FBI often controlled the most reactionary and violent elements of anti-establishment movements during COINTELPRO, recent reports have proven that the vast majority of those “prevented” terrorist attempts which have occurred in America since 1993 have actually first been instigated by the FBI demonstrating conclusively that the bureau never reformed.

We stand at a moment which is shaped by a great hope for a new set of relationships based on the potential alliance between western cultures increasingly purged of the Deep State and Eastern nations led by Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative, let us remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr in his August 1967 speech titled “Where do we go from Here?”

“I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society…

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated…

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future….

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In his closing remarks to the 1999 jury trial that found King to be a victim of a vast conspiracy, Martin’s son Dexter King left a challenge to all who would come into contact with this news:

“The question now is, “What will you do with that?” We as a family have done our part. We have carried this mantle for as long as we can carry it. We know what happened. It is on public record. The transcripts will be available; we will make them available on the Web at some point. Any serious researcher who wants to know what happened can find out.”

___________

(1) The idea that Poe was a deviant, alcoholic and opium addict was entirely generated by the pen of Poe’s enemy Rufus Griswold who managed to purchase the entire body of Poe’s personal writings from the poet’s financially strained aunt and then proceeded to “lose everything” while publishing a biography that became the authoritative book on Poe for the next 170 years.

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Re: Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

Postby Grizzly » Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:35 am

Obomber, already did that...'but, thanks.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

Postby chump » Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:42 am

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Re: Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

Postby conniption » Sun Apr 04, 2021 11:05 am

Off Guardian
(embedded links)

The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King


Edward Curtin
Apr 4, 2021

Image

“I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorian people…”

Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred, 24 March 1980


Whether we are aware of it or not, we live by stories. We live by others’ stories while we tell our lives by how we live. Our actions tell our stories. Then when we die, others tell our stories as they wish.

This is the spiritual thread that links the meanings of our lives. It is the way we pass over to other lives and return to our own. But without truth, we end up in the wrong place, living the wrong stories.

And don’t the stories of certain special people inspire us to carry on their legacies because their spirits are far stronger than death? Their courage contagious? Their witness the triumph of life over death? Love over hate?

Don’t they challenge us to imitate them, to kindle in us the fire of their resurrected spirits?

For Christians, Holy Week is the time for deep reflection on the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus and what they mean for us today.

This year, the anniversary of the murder of the Christian prophet and martyr, Martin Luther King Jr, falls on Easter Sunday, April 4, which gives rise to doubly deeper thoughts that cross religious boundaries where people of all faiths or none can unite in the spirit of non-violent resistance to the forces of war, poverty, racism, and materialism – violence in all its forms.

Everything that stands in the way of what King called “the Beloved Community.”

That Jesus met violence with non-violent love and voluntarily entered the darkness of death and abandonment is at the heart of the Christian faith. So too his Resurrection.

If the Jewish radical Jesus had not been executed by the Roman state occupiers of Palestine, if all hope for his followers had not seemingly been lost, then his Resurrection could not have given birth to hope in his followers to carry on his spirit of love for the poor, the downtrodden, and the outcasts – his resistance to violence.

Like Oscar Romero in El Salvador, gunned down by U.S. trained death squads at the altar while offering Mass and subsequently named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther King Jr’s witness and the truth about his death should be a central meditative focus this year.

For the convergence of King’s death on April 4, 1968 with Easter this April 4th and the last day of Passover offers us a way to contemplate what is now demanded of all people who yearn for the end to hatred, violence, and injustice, and the creation of a beloved world community where love and kindness reign.

The spirit of all the prophets and martyrs is about now, not then; about us, not them; it confronts us with the challenge to interrogate ourselves.

Shall we turn away from their witness? What truly animates our souls? Where do we stand? Do we support the state’s power to kill and wage war, to deny people freedom, to discriminate, to oppress the poor?

It is always about now; the living truth is now.

To contemplate the lives of the prophets takes us very deep into the darkness where we encounter the murders of Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality. But only if we go into the darkest truths will we be able to see the light that leads us to accept the resurrected spirit of their resistance to evil.

Another prophet of our broken world, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, soul brother to King, echoed the words that many have heard, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” when, in crossing over to the Christian tradition, he told us: “We dare not think of birth without death on the cross. Living Christ means a Living Cross, without it life is a living death.”[1]

So what do we need to know about MLK, and why does it matter?

King’s True Story

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the United States’ celebrated civil rights icon. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For more than fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth.

And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of one man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States.

Today we are eating the fruit of our denial as racial discrimination, poverty, and police violence garner the headlines.

After more than a decade as America’s best-known and most respected civil rights leader, by 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr had increasingly focused on poverty issues and publicly declared his intense opposition to the US war against Vietnam in a famous speech – Beyond Vietnam: The Time To Break the Silence – at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated.[2]

Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he emerged in the mid-1960s as an international figure, whose opinions on human and economic rights and peaceful coexistence were influential world-wide. Shortly before his assassination, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign that would involve hundreds of thousands of Americans who would encamp in Washington, D.C to demand the end to economic inequality, racism, and war.

At the same time, Reverend King was hated by an array of racists throughout America, especially in the American South. Among his greatest declared enemies was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed convinced that King’s backers were Communists out to damage America’s interests. In the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program created a network of informants and agent provocateurs to undermine the civil rights and anti-war movements with a special focus on King.[3]

After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:

Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.[4]


The FBI, after extensive eavesdropping on King, subsequently sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself or else his extramarital sex life would be exposed. The FBI’s and its Director J Edgar Hoover’s hatred for King was so great that nothing was too low for them.[5]

This history is common knowledge as reported in the Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.

During the Senate Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, a parallel group within the CIA, code-named CHAOS, was uncovered. Despite its charter disallowing it from operating inside the United States, the CIA similarly used illegal means to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront his own government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave).

Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government-sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.

The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past thirty-five years.

Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message.

After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.

But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection.

Educating people about who killed King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.

What exactly is the relationship between King’s saying that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and his murder?

Let’s look at the facts

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade.

The US government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street.

Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and to have driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car.

From there he fled to Canada and then to England and then to Portugal and back to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the US.

The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.

When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, as the government also termed Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.

Ray had received erroneous advice from his attorney, Percy Foreman. Foreman had a long history representing government, corporate, intelligence, and mafia figures, including Jack Ruby, in cases where the government wanted to keep people silent. Ray was told that the government would go after Ray’s father and brother, Jerry, and that he’d get the electric chair if he didn’t plead guilty,

Ray initially acquiesced. He entered what is known as an Alford plea before Judge Preston Battle. In making his plea, Ray did not admit to any criminal act and asserted his innocence. The following day, he fired Percy Foreman, who, by offering money to induce a guilty plea, had committed a criminal offense.

Foreman had also lied to Judge Battle about his contract with Ray. And, the transcript of Ray’s testimony was doctored to help support the government’s case. Ray was sentenced to life in prison. After three days, Ray tried to retract his plea and maintained his innocence for almost 30 years until his death.

The United State government’s case against James Earl Ray was extremely weak from the start, and in the intervening years has grown so weak that it is no longer believable. A vast body of evidence has accumulated that renders it patently false.

But before examining such evidence, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. ML King Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. AD Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.[6]

All were considered dangerous because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. None of this had to do with war or foreign policy, but such spying was connected to their religious opposition to racist and economic policies that stretched back to slavery, realities that have been officially acknowledged today.

But when MLK Jr forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, especially the Vietnam war, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the inner sanctums of the government.

Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.”

The corporate mass media has for more than fifty years echoed the government’s version of the King assassination. Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and also through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced.

Through decades of research, a TV trial, a jury trial, and three meticulously researched books, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures. In his last two books, An Act of State (2003) and later The Plot to Kill King (2016), Pepper presents his comprehensive case.

William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that :

we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.”


This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.

This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty-day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the US government guilty in the killing of MLK.

In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.[7]

The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King[8], as delusional.

Time magazine called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s “lurid fantasies.” The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide. A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.

The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence.

During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed. Pepper proved that that was a lie.

Slowly, however, glimmers of light have been shed on that trial and truth of the assassination.

On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”

While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.

Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth. He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and now deceased US Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said:

I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr King from the American scene,


and former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, who concurs:

I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.


Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.

“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man.

In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement in the MLK case, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case, such as, Harold Weisberg’s Frame Up in 1971 and Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Name “Zorro” in 1977. While other lonely researchers dug deeper, most of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.

As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of scapegoats to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.

It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr King’s associate, interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination.

Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million-dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved.

Pepper lists in his book over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past forty-two years.

Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of US citizens, a former US Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney.

He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the New York Times’ Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc.

The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.

As with all Pepper’s work on the case, the mainstream media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide.

Pepper writes:

Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $100,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized…The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC… Here was a confession, on prime-time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.


In the twenty-eight years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up.

The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. The foundation of his case proving that was presented at the 1999 trial, while other supporting documentation was subsequently discovered.

Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows.

>>> Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return from Canada to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald are startling.

>>> He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn-out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read James W. Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)

>>> Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG), Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the scapegoat, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.

>>> To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.

>>> Pepper shows that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers (a nine-and-a-half-hour deposition), the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he joined another person in the bushes, and after the shot was fired to kill King, he brought the rifle back into the Grill through the back door. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.

>>> He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.

>>> He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.) He uncovers the role of black Memphis Police Department Domestic Intelligence and military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead. McCollough officially joined the CIA in 1974 (see Douglass Valentine’s “Deconstructing Kowalski: The DOJ’s Strange MLK Report”)

>>> Pepper confirms that all of this, including that the assassin in the bushes was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.

>>> He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him. And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 were transferred to another station.

>>> He confirms the presence of “Operation Detachment Alpha 184 team,” a Special Forces sniper team in civilian disguise at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony, and he names one soldier, John D. Hill, as part of Alpha 184 and another military team, Selma Twentieth SFG, that was in Memphis.

>>> He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.

>>> He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Lloyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.

>>> So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.


There is such a mass of evidence through depositions, documents, interviews, photographs, etc. in Pepper’s An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King that makes it abundantly clear that the official explanation that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King is false and that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him that involved the FBI and other government agencies. Only those inoculated against the truth can ignore such evidence and continue to believe the official version.

Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him.

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off.

Fifty-three years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to US wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.

They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed.

For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.

But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness.

The time is now.
_______
Many thanks to my good friends Dave Ratcliffe and Jim Douglass for all their help.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

Notes

[1] As quoted in James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, New York, 1968, p. 57. [back]

[2][2] See “50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth,” David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 4 April 2017.

A significant moment in Dr. King’s odyssey occurred on 14 January 1967 when he first saw a photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. Bernard Lee, who was present at the time, never forgot Martin King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims:

“Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.”

The truth force in these photographs led directly to Dr. King’s Riverside Church exhortation in April.
See “The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation – How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?, David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 30 November 2017.[back]

[3]Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Case Study, US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”), Final Report – Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976, pp. 79-184.[back]

[4] “MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention,” Tony Capaccio, Washington Post, 27 August 2013.[back]

[5] “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” Beverly Gage, New York Times, 11 November 2014.[back]

[6] “Army feared King, secretly watched him, Spying on blacks started 75 years ago,” Stephen G. Tompkins, The Commercial Appeal, 21 March 1993.[back]

[7] An overview of the trial with links back into the court transcript is “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass, Probe Magazine, Spring 2000. Apart from the courtroom participants, Douglass was one of only two people who attended the entire thirty-day trial.[back]

[8] See Transcript of the King Family Press Conference on the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial Verdict, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 1999.[back]


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