Friday, September 11, 2015

Why Rachel Maddow Is Wrong on James Earl Ray - Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King

Image result for brane space, Rachel Maddow images
"Rachel may be smart, but she needs an editor to keep her from repeating each notion five times before she ever quite gets to the point, and she could also lose that cutesy bullshit she does about mixing cocktails and other nonsense designed to make her seem hip to her coeval."
- Jaime O'Neill, writing on the liberal pretensions of MSNBC

No less an esteemed author than James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable')  has held all of us to account for not seeing that all the 1960s assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) were interconnected and done by the National Security State. Also, each one, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset and thereby enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable" - a term first coined by Thomas Merton meaning incomprehensible evil. Douglass' implication was that the Deep State factored into each assassination and it required deep politics to get beyond the hand waving, and BS stories confabulated by media - most of which was infected by national security trolls (please Google "Operation Mockingbird'.) It was the responsibility of each of us to rip the veneer of lies and deceptions away and probe the document base to the truth.


In an earlier blog post (March 8, 2014), I noted that deep politics is usually too much for network commentators (including the so-called "liberals" on MSNBC) to handle.  In a way this is understandable because  many Americans, as I've often observed, are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics (the dark underbelly that surface politics barely touches)  which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". Thus, network sensitivities will be oriented toward not pissing off that Middle Mind too much, or forcing it too far from its comfort  zone and belief system.

Maddow, while a sometime incisive narrator, often blows it on key issues. For example, numerous times in 2013-14 one beheld Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's chained CPI proposal for cutting Social Security. She didn't wish to "go there" because she didn't want to be seen as an Obama basher.  Then there were other Maddow shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html

By hewing to the "Oswald did it" faction of the Middle Mind, she chose to play it safe in her narrative, rather than risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" or tin foil hat wearer. But by doing so she showed: a) she didn't truly grasp the lying nature of the deep state to use cover stories and b) preferred to bamboozle her audience rather than inform them.

In two earlier episodes of her show this year, around the time of the Confederate flag brouhaha, she interjected Jack Kershaw, supposedly one of the lawyers for alleged Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray. She then presented - to emphasize her point Kershaw was a racist (and by extension his client - hence the assassin with a motive) graphic images of a garish and ghoulish statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the Ku Klux Klan). Maddow's intent was clear:

Jack Kershaw was a brazen racist who idolized the founder of the KKK

James Earl Ray originally hired Kershaw as his lawyer.

Ergo, James Earl Ray had to be guilty of killing King - for racist motives.


However, as with Lee Oswald, Maddow is also in the dark on Kershaw's shady background and how he actually played Ray. As reported in Wikipedia:

"Kershaw convinced Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy. The magazine said that the test results showed "that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Ray fired Kershaw after discovering that the attorney had been paid $11,000 by the magazine in exchange for the interview and hired Mark Lane".

Playboy, in fact, did not have the expertise (at least its designated interviewer) to make that determination  and in any case it was conducted inappropriately without Ray or a genuine lawyer present for counsel - as opposed to an exploitative bloodsucker.

Kershaw's racism and role is also what a former black FBI agent (Donald Wilson) would have called a "red herring" as it had nothing to do with the actual case. Wilson, let us recall, was the agent who discovered James Earl Ray's abandoned white Mustang a week after King's killing -in an Atlanta parking lot. Inside the car he also discovered a set of papers, one of which had the name "Raul" written on it, and on another paper the phone number of the Atlanta FBI office.  Wilson withheld the papers and ten years later resigned from the Bureau ('The Assassinations', p. 479). In 1997, he copied portions of the uncovered papers and delivered them to the King family.

According to Wilson (p. 491, op. cit.):

"In my opinion King's assassination was not a black-white issue. It had nothing to do with racism.  The stories you read about whether Ray was or wasn't a racist are immaterial. That's a red herring. King wanted to redistribute the wealth of this country. That was a big turnaround for him. Now that got the attention of the shadow government people. A decision was made, he had to be eliminated"

Factoring into King's campaign for economic equity was his campaign against the Vietnam War which put him into Johnson's sights.  Johnson, ultimate architect of the war (via his National Security Action Memorandum 273 - then concocting the Tonkin Gulf pretext), could not have Martin Luther King 'crossing' him on Vietnam and fomenting protests against his policies. He also regarded it as 'backstabbing' after giving (grudging) support to King's Civil Rights program.

Further, Jack Kershaw was only one of dozens of Ray lawyers, and the more important counsel for him was William F. Pepper. It was he who finally brought the case  before a court- 32 years after King's murder- that "extended the responsibility for the assassination beyond the scapegoat James Early Ray to the United States government" according to James Douglass (Op. cit., 'The King Conspiracy in Memphis', p. 497)

Pepper, author of Orders to Kill, in a speech he gave on Feb. 4, 2003,  noted that what incepted his investigation into the King killing was an article  by journalist Steve Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.  It dealt with the infiltration of the civil rights movement and black leaders by U.S. military intelligence.

The article showed that what transpired in the 50s, and 60s was a continuation of what had seized the American security state zeitgeist since the Russian Revolution. That is, that blacks were regarded as the prime candidates for being recruited as communists because they had the most motivation for revolution against the imperious white -controlling state.  Hoover suspected Rev. King was in this category as well, and used that to justify hounding him.

Pepper noted that "one paragraph" in particular caught his eye. It noted that on the day of Rev. King's  assassination there was in place a Special Forces Alpha 184 team, and no one understood at the time why this 6-man  sniper unit was present in Memphis. Pepper then approached Tompkins, observing this introduced a whole other dimension to the case - which was now not nearly as closed as the media would have had us believe.

Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:


In the preceding, Pepper observes that:
"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling.
The military knew that once he started out bringing the wretched of America to camp out in the shadow of the Washington Memorial - and go every day to see their Senators and Congressmen - to try to get social program monies put back that were taken out because of the war- and they got rebuffed again and again they'd become increasingly angry. It was the assessment of the Army that he would lose control of that group."
Pepper goes on to indicate that had the event spiraled out of control there would not have been enough troops available to quell the violent (they suspected) results. Hence, taking out King removed the threat of instability.
My additional take is that LBJ wanted King's voice silenced once and for all. He'd gotten too much attention on the Vietnam issue, and it undermined LBJ's "great legacy" - having already taken control of all of Kennedy's ideas and programs and pushed them through. Let's also bear in mind the Army itself would have done nothing without the go ahead from the "commander- in-chief".

Sadly, all Maddow's good work (such as her documentary, 'Why We Did It' on the shady origin of the Iraq war) is overshadowed and undermined by her reluctance to delve into the deep politics of our history. Because without that deep politics understanding, including that Oswald was a pawn used by the national security state to gain power, her work echoes a shallow grasp of the political dynamics at work and the hidden forces subverting those dynamics, i.e. buried within the 'Deep state', see e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-c-koehler/54637/outing-the-deep-state


This is perhaps the most deceitful deep politics abuse of all, given the deep state and in particularly its national security operatives,  were responsible for carrying it out. The  cover-up of the facts by nominal liberals like Maddow.  is  perhaps understandable given that LBJ was the plausible architect of the hit, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/lbj-was-reluctant-warrior-it-doesnt.html

And Libs, desperate for would-be "canonized" heroes, are often prepared to latch on to anyone - given all the columns and pages Ronnie Raygun has managed to suck up. But LBJ,  given his venomous background in TX, is absolutely the wrong choice for any exaltation.

That he would extend his treachery to eliminating Martin Luther King. Jr. for his anti-Vietnam War and economics crusade, is therefore not beyond the pale.

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