As thousands gather in Memphis to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. we still contend with a corporate media that keeps churning out the B.S. that King's. assassin was James Earl Ray. Of course, as in the case of a prior "lone nut" narrative, Ray's personality traits have been thoroughly brewed then distilled by the "authorities" yielding a: "career criminal, bitter racist... and loner" in the words of author William Pepper.
In his riveting 2003 talk An Act of State - The Execution of Martin Luther King - Pepper described his in -depth interview (along with Ralph Abernathy) of the alleged King assassin, James Earl Ray:
"He had a virtually non-existent marksmanship score when he took his test in the Army. He didn’t know much about guns. When he was instructed to buy a weapon that became the throw-down gun in the assassination he bought a .243 Winchester rather than a thirty-ought-six [.30-06] that he was told to get. He didn’t know the difference between them. When he showed the weapon he had bought to Raul, who was controlling him, he sent him back to exchange it. It was a matter of record. He went back and exchanged this one rifle for another the next day. That’s not something he thought of himself. It just was the wrong gun. The guy wanted a .30-06 caliber rifle so they had a .30-06 rifle as the throw-down gun. So he had to go back and exchange it. After the interview we became convinced, Abernathy and I became convinced that he was not the shooter. We didn’t know what other role he might have played. But it was clear he was not the assassin of Martin Luther King."
This "Ray did it" twaddle could be accepted - more or less - up until the Jan. 1998 Baltimore Sun revelations which referenced the U.S. Army's admission that its intelligence agents had monitored the public appearances of Rev. King in Memphis. These disclosures then could be seen to dovetail with earlier revelations (from William Pepper's 1995 book, Orders to Kill) that an Alpha 184 unit had been in Memphis and the purpose was not at all benign. They were to serve as backup to a hired contract killer (via New Orleans' crime boss, Carlos Marcello) - but more on this later. For the moment readers can refer to the image of the attached orders issued to the 20th AFG Alpha 184 team members. Let me note before moving on, that such orders could not have come from any old government lackey or official, not even J. Edgar Hoover or then Attorney General, Ramsey Clark. No, they could only have come from the top dog himself, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
For those who've been involved in deep politics research, and especially got their "baptism" with the Kennedy assassination, it's abundantly clear the lone nut assassin in the King case is another cover story. In fact, all the evidence - including from LBJ's role in the Kennedy assassination - masterminding the plan from Big D- we know he is the one who also engineered the King assassination. And why not? He'd already gotten away with the first assassination via the cover fraud "investigation" known as the Warren Commission, which even 54 years later has gullible twits buying it lock, stock, and barrel. Emboldened by that, why not take down Rev. King too - who'd become a gadfly over the Vietnam War?
The incredulity of too many in the face of these facts traces to how King has mainly been erected as a civil rights totem in the last 50 years. This hyper emphasis has minimized his fierce pacifism - especially against the Vietnam War- which brought him into direct conflict with Johnson. An April, 1998 Baltimore Sun piece by Colman McCarthy ('A Fierce Advocate of Pacifism') summarized how King had been turned into a one-dimensional Milquetoast by the media:
"All the textbooks, for sure, carry excerpts from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. After three decades of being sentimentalized into an historical relic mummified by the formaldehyde of nostalgia, King has been marginalized in ways never thought possible while he was around to defend himself."
McCarthy, like Pepper, cites the powerful moral voice against Johnson's war - and yes, it was his war, given he signed the original NSAM (273) formalizing it, and then confected the Tonkin Gulf incident to justify a massive troop commitment. (Again, for more on the backstory of LBJ's NSAM -273 check out the information in the link below:
Among the more visceral words of Dr. King (ibid.):
"We have destroyed Vietnam's two most treasured institutions - the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops... We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men."
As McCarthy points out, no textbook quotes Dr. King in this respect. Which is exactly why - in order to grasp why Johnson would have him killed - people need to grasp the severity of MLK's anti-war stance and the rage it stoked in LBJ. As King's unswerving opposition to the War increased Johnson became enraged at the prospect of its threatening his precious civil rights and "Great Society" legacy. He also worried about King's promise to bring hundreds of thousands to the Capitol for a poor people's march that summer. McCarthy recalls how the media at the time tried to back King away from his anti-War mission, e.g.:
"The corporate media's reporters and editorial writers dismissed King as being far out of his depth with his anti-military views. The New York Times and Washington Post instructed King to stick to racial issues and leave weighty foreign policy matters to sophisticated people - like the pro-Vietnam War editorial writers at the Times and the Post. To King critics Carl Rowan and J. Edgar Hoover, anti-war equaled anti-American. Rowan, a courtier to the warmonger Johnson, accused King of being duped by people 'more interested in embarrassing the U.S. than anything else."
Johnson himself just wanted King to STFU and cease criticizing the War. Each King moral censure struck Johnson and his Texas Pride like a body blow. According to Pepper (p. 350) , it was Hoover who intimated (to oil baron H.L. Hunt) the only way possible to stop King was to "completely silence him" , i.e. a kill, an assassination. Hunt, at the time, wanted to discredit King by repeated personal attacks via his 'Life Line' program which aired in 398 cities. No doubt LBJ - who was a close friend of Hoover's - was also informed this was his only way to escape the latter day, anti-War "Jeremiah".
That LBJ was fully capable of masterminding the earlier JFK hit we pretty well know, at least those who have been prepared to follow the leads, evidence and indicators. Credit here to Steve Kornacki who first reported (with documents) on the peril Johnson faced in the tightening Bobby Baker scandal. This was in his ‘UP’ journal on MSNBC, the morning of Nov. 23, 2013. Using tapes and media documents, Kornacki showed that Johnson was about to be exposed as an influence peddler in conjunction with the Bobby Baker scandal by LIFE magazine in its upcoming issue. He faced not only being knocked from the 1964 ticket but severe prosecution and ultimate disgrace- with the money trail to be published. Hence HE stood to gain the most, at just the right instant of time, with JFK killed. Getting JFK to travel to Dallas, where LBJ had control at multiple points (including the motorcade route) , was half the effort.
We know now (in retrospect) a feral rat like Johnson wouldn't have taken this lying down or passively, given some 21 years later his role in the murder of a Texas agricultural official (Henry Harvey Marshall) was exposed e.g.
So we have a damned good idea of what LBJ was capable of. and we know the motive: LBJ felt he was screwed out of the Presidency at the 1960 LA convention, where the Kennedy campaign team did a neat end run about him and JFK already had the nomination sewed up at the first roll call – unbeknownst to the hot-headed Texan. LBJ accepted JFK’s offer for VP – but only grudgingly. Meanwhile, he stewed over time, entering the Oval office almost at will in the mornings – according to Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln, as she described in her book: Kennedy and Johnson, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968, pp. 149-151 ). He felt he was entitled to be top dog or at least be co-president and even proposed on one occasion a “shared presidency” – at which point Jack kicked him out of his office and gave him some more scut work to do.
Those who wish to examine the document basis in more detail are advised to get hold of Philip Nelson's, 'LBJ - The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination' which makes a profoundly credible case for Johnson's involvement - again noting Kennedy's removal cleared the way for Johnson to accede to the Presidency and escape a long prison sentence. The Warren Commission was his vehicle for clearing any culpability - using his pal Hoover as the "cleanup man". (E.g. ensuring that no controverting evidence -i.e. to that painting Oswald as the lone nut assassin- found its way before the Commissioners.)
Now, what put Rev. King in LBJ's sights? Basically, it was King's ever increasing willingnss to condemn and criticize the Vietnam War. LBJ felt especially betrayed by Martin, given what he (LBJ) thought were his contributions to advancing civil rights. So 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.
Pepper- in his 2003 speech- observed 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."
Pepper also noted that what incepted his further 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.
"One paragraph" from the Tompkins article in particular caught his eye. It noted that on the day of Rev. King's assassination a Special Forces Alpha 184 team was in place, and no one understood at the time why this 6-man sniper unit was present in Memphis. Pepper then approached Tompkins, who conceded this introduced a whole other dimension to the case - which was now not nearly as closed as the media would have had us believe. Once a copy of the (original) Top Secret order was obtained, it was game on.
Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book 'Orders to Kill')) 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, including any vehicles passing in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. One of the recording 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, thereby catching the actual assassin - a lone white man - not James Earl Ray.
As described by Pepper (pp. 484-85) "it clearly appears the hit was to be carried out by a civilian contract killer with the Army snipers there as backup shooters if the contract killer cold not make the shot or he failed to kill Dr. King".
Pepper conjectured the contract killer was likely arranged by New Orleans' Mob boss Carlos Marcello, whose territory would have included Memphis and the southwest. Meanwhile, two members of the Alpha 184 team (Capt. Billy Eidson and Lt. Robert Worley) "either died or were killed in the years following the events of April 4, 1968" . Two other members of the Alpha 184 team, a "Warren" and "Murphy" (pseudonyms - from the file records), realized a clean up operation was underway and "left the country". Another member - the central communications operator "went into hiding in Canada" and another member "J.D." was killed some years later. In many ways, the cleanup operation followed the witness elimination template after the JFK assassination - and this has been shown to be mathematically substantiated by Richard Charnin in his book, Reclaiming Science- The JFK Conspiracy, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-jfk-assassination-book-all-serious.html
For those interested in the details of Pepper's investigation into the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination I suggest getting hold of the book Orders to Kill, or at least availing themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the transcript of the 2003 speech he gave:
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, all orchestrated for the end of silencing powerful voices. Also, each killing, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset pushed by the Operation Mockingbird -compromised media. Too many thereby became enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media's apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable"
But in all of this, there is a clear path showing LBJ was instrumental in at least two of the killings -whether his hagiographers and sometime fans - wish to admit that or not. That is what is truly unspeakable.
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