{"id":177402,"date":"2021-01-18T12:02:32","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T12:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=177402"},"modified":"2021-01-18T05:53:40","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T05:53:40","slug":"orders-to-kill-dr-martin-luther-king-the-government-that-honors-mlk-with-a-national-holiday-killed-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/01\/orders-to-kill-dr-martin-luther-king-the-government-that-honors-mlk-with-a-national-holiday-killed-him\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cOrders to Kill\u201d Dr. Martin Luther King: The Government That Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Review of <\/em>The Plot to Kill King by William Pepper<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Memphis, Tennessee, APRIL 4, 1968<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK\u2019s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the United States.\u00a0 Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.<\/em><\/p>\n

In order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page.<\/p>\n

To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that.\u00a0 A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on violence, racism, and economic exploitation.\u00a0 He was a very dangerous man.<\/p>\n

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels\u2019 efforts to transform society.\u00a0 If they can\u2019t buy them off, they knock them off.\u00a0 Forty-eight years after King\u2019s assassination, the causes he fought for \u2013 civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression , and economic justice for all \u2013 remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.\u00a0 And King\u2019s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and urging Americans to make it \u201ca day of service.\u201d\u00a0 Needless to say, such service does not include non-violent war resistance or protesting a decadent system of economic injustice.<\/p>\n

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the \u201cgreatest purveyor of violence on earth,\u201d he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later \u2013 once he was long and safely dead \u2013 praised him to the heavens.\u00a0 This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.<\/p>\n

But William Pepper resurrects the revolutionary MLK, and in doing so shows in striking detail why elements within the U.S. government executed him.\u00a0 After reading this book, no fair-minded reader can reach any other conclusion.\u00a0 The Plot to Kill King<\/em>, the culminating volume of a trilogy that Pepper has written on the assassination, consists of slightly less text than supporting documentation in its appendices, which include numerous depositions and interviews that buttress Pepper\u2019s thesis on the why and how of this horrible murder.\u00a0 It demands a close reading that should put to rest any pseudo-debates about the essentials of the case.<\/p>\n

Pepper, an attorney who represented the King family in the 1999 trial that found U.S. officials of the federal (in particular, the FBI and Army Intelligence), state, and local governments responsible for King\u2019s assassination, has worked on the King case since 1977.\u00a0 He met MLK in 1967, after King had read his Ramparts\u2019 magazine article, \u201cThe Children of Vietnam,\u201d that exposed the hideous effects of U.S. napalm and white phosphorous bombing on young and old Vietnamese innocents.\u00a0 The text and photos of that article reduced King to tears and were instrumental in his increased opposition to the war against Vietnam as articulated in his dramatic Riverside Church speech (\u201cBeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence\u201d) on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his execution in Memphis.\u00a0 That speech, in which King so powerfully and publically linked the war with racism and economic exploitation, foretold his death at the hands of the perpetrators of those abominations.<\/p>\n

Devastated by King\u2019s death, and assuming the alleged assassin James Earl Ray was responsible, Pepper retreated from the fray until a 1977 conversation with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King\u2019s associate, who raised the specter of Ray\u2019s innocence. \u00a0After a five hour interrogation of the imprisoned Ray in 1978, Pepper was convinced that Ray did not shoot King and set out on a forty year quest to uncover the truth.<\/p>\n

Before examining the essentials of Pepper\u2019s discovery, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta\u2019s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917<\/strong>.\u00a0 All were considered communist sympathizers and dangerous to the reigning hegemony because of their espousal of racial and economic equality.\u00a0 When MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, and announced his Poor People\u2019s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the bowels of government spies and their masters.\u00a0 Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate \u201cjustification.\u201d\u00a0 As Stokely Carmichael, co-chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said to King in a conversation secretly recorded by Army Intelligence, \u201cThe man don\u2019t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers, you got trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is against this \u201ctrouble\u201d that Pepper\u2019s investigation must be set, as that \u201ctrouble\u201d is also the background for the linked assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, and RFK.\u00a0 Understanding the forces behind the military, the spies, and the gunmen who, while operating in the shadows, are actually the second layer of the onion skin, is essential.\u00a0 The government and mainstream corporate media form the outer layer with their collusion in disinformation, lying, and truth suppression, but Pepper correctly identifies the core as follows.<\/p>\n

Bombastic, chauvinistic, corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always and ever been about money.\u00a0 Corporate and financial leaders trusted with the keys to the Republic\u2019s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government positions and back again.\u00a0 Construction, oil and gas, defense industry, and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive in a war economy.\u00a0 Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are \u2026.Vietnam was his [King\u2019s] Rubicon \u2026. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MLK was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The U.S. government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967.\u00a0 Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim\u2019s Grill across the street.\u00a0 Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car.\u00a0 From there he fled to Canada and then to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and extradited to the U.S.\u00a0 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\u2019s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Another hate-filled lone assassin, shades of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.<\/p>\n

In the years leading up to Pepper\u2019s 1978 involvement, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government\u2019s case \u2013 Harold Weisberg in 1971 and Mark Lane and Dick Gregory in 1977.\u00a0 The rest of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.\u00a0 They are still sleeping, but Pepper is trying with this last book to wake them up.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the disinformation specialists continue with their lies.<\/p>\n

While a review is not the place to go into every detail of Pepper\u2019s rebuttal of the government\u2019s shabby claims, let me say at the outset that he emphatically does so, and adds in the process some tentative claims of which he is not certain but which, if true, are stunning.<\/p>\n

As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of patsies to take the blame for government executions.\u00a0 Ray, Oswald, and 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.<\/p>\n

It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Abernathy interviewed Ray in prison in 1978.\u00a0 The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations\u2019 report on the King assassination.\u00a0 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, \u201cthis multi-million dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,\u201d and that government forces might be involved.\u00a0 Pepper lists over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template \u201cfor all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case\u201d for the past thirty-seven years.<\/p>\n

Pepper\u2019s decades-long investigation, not only refutes the government\u2019s case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that \u201cwe have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.\u201d\u00a0 This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.\u00a0 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 and over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK.\u00a0 The King family had brought the suit and William Pepper represented them.\u00a0 They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried once again by a media in cahoots with the government.<\/p>\n

The civil trial was the King family\u2019s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination.\u00a0 They and Pepper knew 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 (shades of Sirhan Sirhan who still languishes in prison).\u00a0 During all those 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\u2019s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination.\u00a0 The government has always denied that Raul existed.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Jurors were selected from a pool of U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney.\u00a0 He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state\u2019s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper\u2019s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the NY 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.\u00a0 The prosecution\u2019s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.<\/p>\n

As with all Pepper\u2019s work on the case (including book reviews), the mainstream media responded with silence.\u00a0 And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim\u2019s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination.\u00a0 Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC\u2019s Primetime Live <\/em>that aired nationwide.\u00a0 Pepper writes, \u201cLoyd 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 $1,000,000 to facilitate the assassination.\u00a0 He also said that he had been visited by a man names Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized \u2026. The morning after the Primetime Live <\/em>broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night\u2019s program, not even on ABC \u2026. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the twenty-three years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government\u2019s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up.\u00a0 The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in The Plot to<\/em> Kill King<\/em>, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government.\u00a0 Much of his evidence was presented at the 1999 trial, while other was subsequently discovered.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A reader should read the book to understand the full scope of the plot, its execution, and the cover-up.<\/p>\n