Yes, LBJ Ordered The Hit On Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. For His Anti-Vietnam War Stance

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:

http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html )

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:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

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.

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

"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:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

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.

Scott Aaronson: In Over His Head on JFK Assassination (Part Two - Rebutting His 20 Reasons for 'Oswald Dunnit')

I now examine Scott Aaronson's "20 Reasons" to assert Lee Oswald was the lone gunman in the JFK assassination, based on what he calls "general principles" but which I call out as slacker principles: do as little as possible- avoid any details, attend to the worst possible "investigators" (Gerald Posner), and in general let ignorance trump facts at every turn.  Basically, Aaronson brings to bear a smug laziness that he'd never use if he wanted to publish a paper, say in the Physical Review (one of its fine journals).  He does this because he treats JFK assassination research akin to a kiddie hobby or pastime.


1.   Conspiracy theorizing represents a known bug in the human nervous system. Given that, I think our prior should be overwhelmingly against anything that even looks like a conspiracy theory".

This is not a reason but an assertion, that needs to be proven, demonstrated. Aaronson really ought to know better than to trot such bollocks out for public consumption, as if he's even an expert in the human nervous system.  Where has this been published? (He puts out a link to a cartoon -as if any intelligent person would accept that)  In what peer-reviewed journal of neurobiology?  Further, the fact this is psycho-babble is patently clear by the fact he puts all possible conspiracy  examples under the same umbrella - from faked lunar landings to Joe Klein's example (in the recent TIME - see Part I) of the feds buying up ammo to raise the prices so gun owners can't afford it - to the JFK assassination. In this way, he demeans the event and insults the people who've done serious research including Peter Dale Scott, James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable'), Mark Lane and many others. In this way he actually insults the memory of the 35th President.

2. The shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby created the perfect conditions for conspiracy theorizing to fester. 

In fact, the shooting of Oswald showed most of us at the time, who had the intellect to see it, that whoever was in charge of the assassination made sure the one person who might shed light wouldn't live to say anything. Only much later (30 + years) did the file release from the JFK Records Act confirm out worst fears - that Ruby was commissioned to kill Oswald as part of ZR/Rifle and Staff D, the super secret assassination program run under spook William Harvey- assisted by James Jesus Angleton.  See e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-second-assassination-today-fifty.html

"Fester"? Well, yeah - the Operation Mockingbird disinformationists in the media had festered for years allowing the anti-conspiracy memes to spread far and wide! (Yet Aaronson doesn't seem to have even heard of Mockingbird). It wasn't until actual documents could finally be released (LBJ had originally sealed them until 2039)  under the 1992 JFK Records Act that headway could be made.

3. Other high-profile assassinations to which we might compare this one—for example, those of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Yitzchak Rabin…—appear to have been the work of “lone nuts,” or at most “conspiracies” of small numbers of lowlifes.  So why not this one?

Because the EVIDENCE doesn't indicate it! Moreover, the evidence is now compelling that Martin Luther King was also assassinated in a conspiracy, as well as Robert Kennedy.

In the case of the King assassination, the breakthrough came with William F. Pepper's book Orders to Kill,  Pepper learned  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 on the subject 12 years ago:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

The mechanics and basis  of the conspiracy for Robert Kennedy's assassination and using Sirhan B. Sirhan as another patsy was superbly described in Patrick Nolan's book,  CIA Rogues Killing Kennedys (Chapter 7 - 'Sirhan Bishara Sirhan - An Involuntary Pawn'.) Nolan's breakthrough came via released files and also managing to find security personnel at the Ambassador Hotel at the time and interviewing them. This also conforms with James Douglass' take (op. cit.) that all three were killed as part of the same extended plot masterminded by the national security apparatus.

The meme that all conspiracies are lone nut done is also stupid. For hundred of years - from the time of the Borgias - assassinations have occurred in Europe and few Europeans -whether German, Swiss or Italian, buy the codswallop they were done by lone nuts. As Rolf, a former Spezialdienst in Switzerland put it while we were in St. Gallen:  "Believing lone assassins were responsible for all the assassinations in Europe is to us like a child believing a single man - St. Nicholas- could deliver all presents around the world in a single night before Christmas. It's stupid!"

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/germans-tom-hanks-wasting-his-time-with.html

Further point: Aaronson attempts to show that Clay Shaw, the subject of the Jim Garrison case, was innocent and his reputation was slandered by conspiracy freaks. He is totally wrong. Years later, with release of files under the JFK Records Act, it would become evident that Shaw was indeed a CIA Contract Agent. As CIA Doc. (JFK 1993: 6.28.16.07.26.560280) notes (Why couldn't Aaronson obtain this?) :

"A memorandum marked for files says that J. Monroe Sullivan, #280201, was granted a covert security  approval as of 10 December 1962 so he could be used in Project QKENCHANT [Clay L. Shaw has #402897]"

Under the CIA  banner QKENCHANT one is cleared for intelligence procurement. Such clearance meant you were a safe contact  for the Agency and hence could be used as a "cut out" , with the CIA giving you only a certain amount of information. Clay Shaw then, had the ability to recruit other agents, thereby granting them security approvals. From the available files disclosed long after Garrison's efforts ended, Shaw used his QKENCHANT clearance to "plan or coordinate CIA activities" as well as "initiate relationships with non-Agency persons or institutions." In this guise, Shaw was effectively part of the CIA's clandestine services with Covert Security Approval, working under cover. 

Again, why didn't Aaronson try to obtain the file instead of shooting from the hip with a red herring? The answer - as with his other questions - is he wasn't prepared to do the grunt work! It's easy to spin off nonsense from one's keyboard and not bother with niggling details!

4. Oswald seems to have perfectly fit the profile of a psychopathic killer (see, for example, Case Closed by Gerald Posner).

Citation of Posner's idiocy is one of the first markers the serious researcher uses to confirm a person writing about the assassination is on the wrong track. Assorted investigators have been able to  assess just how closely Posner adhered to the known facts in his book. One of the earliest scrutinizing efforts was The Posner Report- A Study in Propaganda: One Hundred Errors in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed – Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by David Starks. Starks draws on the published reports and documents of true experts like Peter Dale Scott, Dr. Gary Aguilar and Martin Shackelford. The Report skewers Posner’s claims and effectively discloses a hack who made “hundreds of errors” in his pell-mell rush to judgment- likely part of the mandate first elucidated in CIA document 1035-960 * (which I doubt Aaronson even knows about).

The Electronic Assassination Newsletter which collates the research from most JFK Assassination experts documents twelve of the most serious “Posnerisms” here:

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

Those who take the time to examine, study the examples in the link will become aware of an unnerving lack of attention to detail and a penchant for what appears to be deliberate misrepresentation. Indeed, Posner’s entire case appears to be erected on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations, gross distortions and shoddy methodology

Meanwhile, Prof. David R. Wrone, whose review of Case Closed appeared in The Journal of Southern History, notes:

"Posner often presents the opposite of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture of Oswald’s background- for example – he states that, under the name of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones Printing Company and that a ‘receptionist’ identified him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as the source that Posner cites indicates. “

He adds:   "No credible evidence connects Oswald to the murder. All the data that Posner presented to do so is either shorn of context, corrupted, the opposite of what the sources actually say, or non-sourced."

And further:

"Posner crowns his theory with the certainty of science by using one side of the computer-enhanced studies by Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park that his text implies he commissioned. The firm, however, lambastes his use as a distortion of the technology that it developed for the American Bar Association’s mock trial of Oswald where both sides used it.”

Not surprisingly, many ordinary researchers as well as professionals (e.g. Harold Weisberg) contend Posner is likely a disinformation hack, possibly for the CIA, and perhaps even part of its notorious “Operation Mockingbird” propaganda machine which infected the U.S. Media from the 1970s.

More to Come!

* CIA Document 1035-960

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report:

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.

Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. 

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms. 

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

The Time Has Come For An Automatic Base Income for 80% of Americans

                                                                                                          "Food is the most fundamental of all human needs. Hungry children can't learn, hungry adults can't work, create or think or be functioning members of their communities"- Abby Leibman, MAZON, 'Bread for the World'

The statistics have been so often repeated that they should be ensconced in nearly every reading American's brain by now.  But to repeat some of them: The past ten years have seen 80% of Americans lose in income, many falling out of the middle class, meanwhile the other twenty percent have ratcheted up gains - especially the top 10%.

The inequality in the U.S. has never been higher, now rivaling Mexico and the Philippines  - with a Gini coefficient approaching 0.5. (A Gini of 1.0 denotes total income-economic inequality, while 0.0 denotes complete economic equality.)

15.6 million kids go to bed hungry every night because of cuts to food stamps, most recently as part of a Farm Bill which delivers huge subsidies to rich, corpora-farms.  Economist Jared Bernstein has put it this way:

"It's like don't look at all the ways in which the economy is underperforming, and the benefits are flowing right to the top. Look at the people getting $4.50 a day for food stamps. It's an old trick but it continues to be used."

The "trick" is also used against people getting "entitlements" (the egregious term used by Neoliberals) such as Social Security and Medicare. Look at Abby Huntsman's rant on the Cycle last week, e.g. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-abby-huntsman-20140314,0,489874.story#axzz2w9RuRdqG

Then there was the biased, nonsensical column by George Will last Sunday in which this pinhead bitched that:

"Nearly two-thirds of households receive food stamps under 'categorical eligibility ...and we still spend $1 trillion on federal welfare programs."  

Adding, idiotically:

"The welfare state, primarily devoted to pensions and medical care for the elderly, aggravates inequality"

He then insists this is because "young people just starting up the ladder must subsidize the elderly"

But in typical  S'Will' fashion doesn't say WHY.  If the young ones knew that the gov't had taken $1.79 trillion out of Social Security since 2000, they'd also understand they wouldn't be the ones having to shoulder much of the theft. (Given they are the ones mainly still working).  Or, if they knew the government spent that money instead on 'wars' in Afghanistan and Iraq they would be hopping mad and be able to blame the right culprits, unlike their dimwit peer, Abby Huntsman.

The 'welfare state' Will describes is also a myth. People on 'welfare' - thanks to Neolib Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" law in 1996-  now have to work for their benefits, usually below minimum wage. (In Maryland it has been $3.30 for a long time).  Medicare and Social Security are NOT "welfare" - though morons like Will might like to believe it - because people have paid in taxes to receive those benefits (which those earning over $113,000 don't have to!) They also must pay added medical costs for Medicare, which doesn't cover dental, or all of treatment-surgical expenses. It is estimated that a typical couple retiring at 65 will need $220,000 to cover added medical costs over their retired lives. How the hell is that "welfare"?

The low -wage "bottleneck" described in the Business Section of the Sunday Denver Post also shows why all the above problems aren't going away any time soon. ('Low Wage Bottleneck Traps Many', p. 3C). The article describes a jobs "bottleneck" since the recession in 2007-08, such that mid-level jobs have essentially vanished. These were generally the next step jobs after minimum wage or "entry level" - but  no more.  As the article puts it:

"This means lower wage workers have to stay put.  The resulting bottleneck is widening the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else. "

The article goes on to note that these low wage jobs, once seen as only 'steppingstone' - not permanent- are now being held for long periods by better-educated, more experiences workers. In other words, the young are generally even shut out in this niche.  The article continues:

"The trend extends well beyond Walmart ...and is reverberating across the U.S. economy. It's partly why average adjusted income has declined 9 percent for the bottom 40 percent of households since 2007, even as incomes for the top 5 percent exceed what they were before the recession."

Research also shows that ninety percent of the occupations that "once helped elevate people from the minimum wage" have gone the way of the Dodo since 1991.  These include: bookkeepers and executive secretaries which occupations used to command $16.54 an hour on average. In addition, the associate professor at university level is becoming  thing of the past. The percentage of teaching positions occupied by non-tenure-track faculty has more than tripled in the past four decades. According to the Adjunct Project, “Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day aren’t full-time or permanent professors.” 

70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts — part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security. Many indeed, have to go on food stamps along with the minimum wage workers at Mickey D's or Walmart. This has only come to the fore recently with a widely circulated article, 'The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps', published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. See:

http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/

All of which brings us to the idea of an automatic income for all, with no strings attached. This minimum income, or 'min-come' would assure that no matter the vicissitudes of life, the citizen and his children will never have to go hungry or submit to the vagaries of "food stamp" politics. He or she will receive an automatic income of at least $1,000 a month to cover all basic needs - irrespective of whether having another job or not. There will be NO "offsets", so long as the person or family is below the level of those whose incomes aren't falling over time. (I.e. the upper 20 percent).


This is not some new idea, btw, so no need for anyone to get hysterical.  All over the world, sensible and intelligent people are talking guaranteeing basic incomes for citizens as a viable policy.Half of all Canadians want it. The Swiss have had a referendum on it. The American media is all over it: The New York Times’ Annie Lowrey considered basic income as an answer to an economy that leaves too many people behind, while Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker of The Atlantic wrote about it as a way to reduce poverty.

In his final book, Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in exchange was a good way for Americans to share in prosperity. In the 1960s and early 1970s, many in the U.S. gave the idea serious consideration. Even Richard Nixon supported a version of it. But by 1980, the political tide shifted to the right and politicians moved their talking points to unfettered markets and individual gain. In other words, the odious Neoliberal idiom had taken hold like a plague, polluting brains and polluting economics - as all and sundry became hostage to the "market god".

Advocates say it’s an idea whose time has finally come, and I concur with that - though doubtless our home bred Puritans and Calvinists will demand some kind of output to receive it - but why? The rich, according to Michael Parenti ('The Dirty Truth') , get 95% of their money from inheritance. They don't have to do a damned thing!  Besides, in  a world of chronic job insecurity, stagnant wages, boom-and-bust cycles that wipe out ordinary people through no fault of their own, and shredded social safety nets, proponents warn that we have to come up with a way.

Look at the benefits!

1) It would help fight poverty: America is the richest country in the world, yet widespread poverty continues to afflict us. (See above for the low -wage bottleneck reasons for this!)

Matt Bruenig calculated that by giving everybody a mere $3,000 a year, including children (who would receive the money through their parents), we could potentially cut poverty in half.

2)  It would be good for the economy: A basic guaranteed income has the potential to positively impact the economy in several ways, which is why economists from John Kenneth Galbraith to Milton Friedman have advocated it. The basic problem solved would be low aggregate demand.

3) It would be more efficient than present hodge podge of systems: In the current patchwork of systems confronting poverty, like welfare, food stamps and vouchers, people can fall through the cracks. A guaranteed income could help solve problems caused by rules and restrictions that leave some without subsistence income when they need it. It's automatic nature - merely by having a birth certificate or S.S. number ensures receipt.


4) It supports  basic human dignity: Why is living in dignity not a right? These days, even Americans who get up in the morning every day and report to full-time jobs may not earn enough for a decent standard of living. People like fast-food workers, big-box store employees, caregivers (paid and unpaid, i.e. in families), beauty salon workers, and farm hands often can’t earn enough to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. Millions have seen no real increase in earnings in decades. Material security, as well as the intangible things that come along with it, like self-esteem and peace of mind, are often out of reach.  A guaranteed basic income is one way to help people to survive with dignity and free them from the humiliation of having to participate in criminal activity.

Of course, the knuckle draggers will howl like stuck pigs and banshees at all of this:

"Get money for nuthin'? Are you nuts? Where's the money gonna come from to support it?"

Easy, Sparky! We stop acting like a World Empire - projecting our self-interest hither, thither and yon -  spending trillions a year on 'occupations', military toys (like the F 35) and adventures, and start taking care of our people at home, and of course, tending to our crumbling infrastructure. 

 We do not need 4,400 military bases all over the world, nor can we be the permanent cops of the world. It is madness to believe so.  It is now time to take care of business at home and an automatic income would go a long way in that regard.