Why the US National Security State Assassinated MLK
Edward Curtin
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Rev. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and officials declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his service.
Imagine if King were alive today as the Israeli/U.S. alliance commits genocide against the Palestinians with the full backing of U.S. leaders and aspiring presidential candidates. Everyone knows he would be denouncing these atrocities, while today’s smiling political jackals with polished faces cheer them on or remain silent.
The voices of the prophets are never silenced, even as the sycophants of empire play word games to cover their savage ruthlessness.
Another assassinated prophet of our broken world, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, soul brother to King, echoed the words that many have heard, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” when, in crossing over to the Christian tradition, he told us: “We dare not think of birth without death on the cross. Living Christ means a Living Cross, without it life is a living death.”[1]
To cross over is to enter Gaza and all the other places where the innocent are slaughtered by the guilty assassins.
So what do we need to know about MLK, and why does it matter?
King’s True Story
Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States’ celebrated civil rights icon. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For more than fifty-five years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth.
And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of one man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial as racial discrimination, poverty, and police violence garner the headlines, and across the oceans in many lands innocent people are killed by American weapons of war.
After more than a decade as America’s best-known and most respected civil rights leader, by 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had increasingly focused on poverty issues and publicly declared his intense opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam in a famous speech – “Beyond Vietnam: The Time To Break the Silence” – at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated.[2]
Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he emerged in the mid-1960s as an international figure, whose opinions on human and economic rights and peaceful coexistence were influential world-wide. Shortly before his assassination, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign that would involve hundreds of thousands of Americans who would encamp in Washington, D.C to demand the end to economic inequality, racism, and war.
At the same time, Reverend King was hated by an array of racists throughout America, especially in the American South. Among his greatest declared enemies was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed convinced that King’s backers were Communists out to damage America’s interests. In the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program created a network of informants and agent provocateurs to undermine the civil rights and anti-war movements with a special focus on King.[3]
After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:
Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.[4]
The FBI, after extensive eavesdropping on King, subsequently sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself or else his extramarital sex life would be exposed. The FBI’s and its Director J Edgar Hoover’s hatred for King was so great that nothing was too low for them.[5]
This history is common knowledge as reported in the Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.
During the Senate Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, a parallel group within the CIA, code-named CHAOS, was uncovered. Despite its charter disallowing it from operating inside the United States, the CIA similarly used illegal means to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements.
Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront his own government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.
The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past thirty-five years. It’s use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message. After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.
But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection.
Educating people about who killed King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.
What exactly is the relationship between King’s saying that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and his murder?
Let’s look at the facts
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade.
The 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. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street.
Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and to have driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car.
From there he fled to Canada and then to England and then to Portugal and back to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the U.S. The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.
When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, as the government also termed Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.
Ray had received erroneous advice from his attorney, Percy Foreman. Foreman had a long history representing government, corporate, intelligence, and mafia figures, including Jack Ruby, in cases where the government wanted to keep people silent. Ray was told that the government would go after Ray’s father and brother, Jerry, and that he’d get the electric chair if he didn’t plead guilty,
Ray initially acquiesced. He entered what is known as an Alford plea before Judge Preston Battle. In making his plea, Ray did not admit to any criminal act and asserted his innocence. The following day, he fired Percy Foreman, who, by offering money to induce a guilty plea, had committed a criminal offense. Foreman had also lied to Judge Battle about his contract with Ray. And, the transcript of Ray’s testimony was doctored to help support the government’s case. Ray was sentenced to life in prison. After three days, Ray tried to retract his plea and maintained his innocence for almost 30 years until his death.
The United State government’s case against James Earl Ray was extremely weak from the start, and in the intervening years has grown so weak that it is no longer believable. A vast body of evidence has accumulated that renders it patently false.
But before examining such evidence, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.[6]
All were considered dangerous because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. None of this had to do with war or foreign policy, but such spying was connected to their religious opposition to racist and economic policies that stretched back to slavery, realities that have been officially acknowledged today. But when MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, especially the Vietnam war, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the inner sanctums of the government. Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.”
The corporate mass media has for more than fifty years echoed the government’s version of the King assassination. Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and also through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced. Through decades of research, a TV trial, a jury trial, and three meticulously researched books, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I., Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures. In his last two books, An Act of State (2003) and later The Plot to Kill King (2016), Pepper presents his comprehensive case.
William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that “we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.” This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.
This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty-day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK.
In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.[7]
The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King[8], as delusional. Time magazine called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s “lurid fantasies.” The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide.
A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.
The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence. During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed. Pepper proved that that was a lie.
Slowly, however, glimmers of light have been shed on that trial and truth of the assassination.
On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”
While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.
Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth. He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and now deceased U.S. Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said:
I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr. King from the American scene,
and former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, who concurs:
I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.
Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.
“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man.
In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement in the MLK case, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case, such as, Harold Weisberg’s Frame Up in 1971 and Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Name “Zorro” in 1977. While other lonely researchers dug deeper, most of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.
As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of scapegoats to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.
It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s associate, interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination. Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million-dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved. Pepper lists in his book over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past forty-two years.
Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney. He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the New York Times’ Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc. The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.
As with all Pepper’s work on the case, the mainstream media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide. Pepper writes:
Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $100,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized …. The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC …. Here was a confession, on prime-time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.
In the twenty-eight years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up. The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. The foundation of his case proving that was presented at the 1999 trial, while other supporting documentation was subsequently discovered.
Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows.
- Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return from Canada to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald are startling.
- He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn-out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read James W. Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
- Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG), Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the scapegoat, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.
- To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.
- Pepper shows that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers (a nine-and-a-half-hour deposition), the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he joined another person in the bushes, and after the shot was fired to kill King, he brought the rifle back into the Grill through the back door. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
- He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.
- He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.) He uncovers the role of black Memphis Police Department Domestic Intelligence and military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead. McCollough officially joined the CIA in 1974 (see Douglass Valentine’s “Deconstructing Kowalski: The DOJ’s Strange MLK Report”)
- Pepper confirms that all of this, including that the assassin in the bushes was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.
- He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him. And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 were transferred to another station.
- He confirms the presence of “Operation Detachment Alpha 184 team,” a Special Forces sniper team in civilian disguise at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony, and he names one soldier, John D. Hill, as part of Alpha 184 and another military team, Selma Twentieth SFG, that was in Memphis.
- He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
- He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Lloyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
- So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.
There is such a mass of evidence through depositions, documents, interviews, photographs, etc. in Pepper’s An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King that makes it abundantly clear that the official explanation that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King is false and that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him that involved the FBI and other government agencies. Only those inoculated against the truth can ignore such evidence and continue to believe the official version.
Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him.
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty-seven years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.
They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed.
For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.
But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness.
The time is now.
NOTES:
[1] As quoted in James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, New York, 1968, p. 57
[2] See “50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth,” David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 4 April 2017
A significant moment in Dr. King’s odyssey occurred on 14 January 1967 when he first saw a photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. Bernard Lee, who was present at the time, never forgot Martin King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims: “Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” The truth force in these photographs led directly to Dr. King’s Riverside Church exhortation in April.
See “The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation – How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?, David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 30 November 2017
[3] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study, US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”), Final Report – Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976, pp. 79-184
[4] “MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention,” Tony Capaccio, Washington Post, 27 August 2013
[5] “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” Beverly Gage, New York Times, 11 November 2014
[6] “Army feared King, secretly watched him, Spying on blacks started 75 years ago,” Stephen G. Tompkins, The Commercial Appeal, 21 March 1993
[7] An overview of the trial with links back into the court transcript is “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass, Probe Magazine, Spring 2000. Apart from the courtroom participants, Douglass was one of only two people who attended the entire thirty-day trial.
[8] See Transcript of the King Family Press Conference on the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial Verdict, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 1999
Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
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The 2 most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement were King and Malcolm X.
The initials MLK, for Martin Luther King, contain the consonants for the Hebrew word for king – ‘melek‘ (or ‘melech‘); Hebrew being written without vowels.
Writing without vowels can lead to ambiguities. For example ‘lmmlk‘ could be ‘lammelek‘ (to the king) or it could be ‘lammolek‘ (to Molech) cf Isa. 57:9. Context helping to determine the appropriate rendering. As do oral traditions.
Molech or Moloch was the god of the Ammonites; a ‘god’ noted for its sacrifices of the young, involving rituals of fire. It appears in the Hebrew as ‘Milkom’ (1 Kings 11:5 KJV) and also as ‘malkam’ (Zeph 1:5 KJV). The Molech sequence of letters seems to appear more as part of derived forms such as ‘lammolek‘ (to Molech’). The NIV and NLT renders it as ‘Molech’ in all contexts.
The rendering ‘Malcham’ (KJV) bears similarity to the name Malcolm [X].
King (MLK) took the path of non-violence (influenced by Gandhi, Christ). whereas Malcolm X (influenced by Islam), took a path that incorporated violence; consider Hamas with its modern-day sacrifice of the youth of Gaza to fire[power].
King, like Gandhi, chose the better approach to further the rights of an oppressed people
Eymologies and roots is a fascinating subject; it reflects also the contacts of peoples with each others through History; their relationship of dominant and dominated, cultural, political, religious borrowings, …
Notice that “King” is also remotely connected to the Near-Eastern root KHN meaning priest, or magician; we can find traces of it in a number of words such as King, Khan, Kahn, Kuhn, König,…
Yes, KHN also meaning priest in Hebrew – ‘Kohen’ (Caph-Holem-He-Sere-Nun).
Etymology is indeed fascinating. A vast topic. As you say, language can reveal much of the history of a people and their interactions with others eg the Polonisms in Ukrainian
Weak words by a weakened mind. Real divinity does not shame, reward or punish- these are human conceits!!
The crucifix is an instrument of torture and murder, revered by a death cult, wolves in sheep’s clothing… As their own book says : “By their fruit you shall know them” indeed. One of the few truths in a book of nonsense and lies.
It appears that among other consultants J.Edgar Hoovered, Allan Dullness, JayJay Angleton and the others retained a coterie of astrologers (Jeanne Dixon), chiromancers, shamans, crystal ball experts, and satanists.
The consensus was that, unless terminated, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr would become the first African-American president in 1976.
The best option was to act in 1968 when their machine was at full throttle.
No matter what you conspiracy theorists say I still believe Lee Harvey Oswald did the JFK thing, and I will continue to believe in my government!
This is my opinion and you have your opinion, and I have the right to have my voice being heard here too, if free speech and truth with reason and facts still should have any meaning for you conspiracy guys.
The Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Sam Cooke and Fred Hampton, to name just the best known. If you don’t know or don’t believe that the CIA and FBI were shooting them all then you are an idiot.
The unusual thing is that the Zionist Entity and Mossad do not seem to be involved in this one unless they were called in as consultants.
and in this week’s edition of It’s Edgy to Believe in.a Different Story..
Somewhere I read . . .
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!
—
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm
All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.
What have we been told by the establishment that is completely true?
Erik Nielsen thinks so.
I’m sure I seen recently RFK jnr, say something along the lines ‘that he was happy with the spying that his dad/JFK did on MLK’?
I remeber his assasination well – I was only a youngster but I knew the official narrative was a lie along with that of JFK and RFK. I was amazed that no one seemed to see the obvious
Joseph Stalin: ‘Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
Mao Zedong: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’
FBI / CBI due to operation “Paperclip” in 1945: aye, aye both of you. CCP in lockstep too.
The bipolar WEF world post 1984 – they wish!
Ideas and strong convictions! That’s what got Gramsci a 20-year prison sentence. That’s what pushed Stalin have Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.
But some of us are like weathervanes; we turn with the wind; we align with the strongest mouvement. It’s like not to personally feel strongly about any view in particular, perhaps not feeling the need to, but follow the view of the strongest or largest group.
And I’m not talking about a strategy to help thrive in a hostile context, like for instance some persons of Jewish faith who had to outwardly convert to Christianity or Islam to escape persecution or to enjoy the same rights as the rest of the citizens, while privately still practicing their original faith, perhaps with more devotion.
I’m talking about really not having a personal view or faith with which one feels strongly identified and for which one might go to large extents to passionately defend with arguments, even suffer for it. The weathervane person just scrutinises his or her surroundings and, much like a chameleon, adopts the view of the strongest or more influential group; and if his or her view happened to oppose the prevailing view, he or she doesn’t think nothing in changing course.
When the sh*t hits the vane, a conflict or war for instance, weathervane people may become a hazard as they may just desert their former group and join the strongest one just for the sake of being the dominant group, or in power; they might even sell their old comrades just to keep safe. I wouldn’t trust a weathervane person farther than I can throw them.
What you say is too obvious. Maybe you could understand the situation civilian communities are in when they stand in the middle of a war.
The Afghan people villages for example. One week they are invaded by Taliban telling them what to do, next week US troops invade them and tell them to do the opposite, third week they are alone back to their own traditions, fourth week UN and Red Cross arrive with more bs.
Some people have very good survival reasons to become weathervanes, others maybe only out of cowardice and convenience.
The objection is covered in the 3rd paragraph above. I’m really talking about people who have no strong convictions about any subject to begin with and change views like they would change clothes because of that lack of attachment, regardless of the situation.
Any strong beliefs Afghans, or today Gazans, chased from one place to another and trying to save their lives may have held (and they must have if only because of their history and long-standing traditions) are not abandoned because of the war, even when they betray themselves outwardly to save their lives.
I’m talking about real chameleons.
Pretty obvious way to proceed: target all those non-journalists that used their bylines to print ‘The King Family is delusional’ after the 1999 verdict.
Make them confess, under ‘enhanced interrogation’, who told them to write those stories. Do the same to all the Editors.
These people willingly connive to sentence an innocent man to 30 years in prison as well as conniving to murder a black leader. They should not be treated with respect, nor with due process.
I’m thinking our best hope Rhys is if someone can just come up with a nice inexpensive 3-D printable guillotine. We place one in every town and village square, and in every park in every city neighborhood. Not a working model mind you, just one that “looks” realistic, you know, like it “could do the job” if we needed it to. Think of it as a form of – “not so subliminal” – “suggestion” – which might just help encourage our global elites to think twice and perhaps in a moment of reflection decide to – “do the right thing.”
Gbossa, I’ve thought the same thing …. however, the guillotine must be fully functional. Indeed, the functionally needs to be proved by means of a few exemplary executions.
After that, all that will be necessary is to erect these reminders at the entrance of the important administrative buildings with the motto “Remember Who You Work For” printed on a big placard.
Global elites? I think not they are imbeciles and scum… Now you know.
“You can fool most of the people most of the time –
the rest believe it’s a conspiracy.”…(anon)…
‘You can fool all of the people, some of the time,
You can fool all of the people most of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwlhh-Y5Vto
‘Operation MockingBird.’
I actually sort of met Coretta King at Heathrow Airport not long after. I just looked at her. I didn’t think I could say ANYTHING USEFUL or HELPFUL, I just prayed for her instead.
Totally excellent slam dunk. Thank you. And eternal thank yous to the folks who relentlessly pursue the truth in these and all such situations.
Being a rabble rouser back in the 1960s was one thing.
Being a BLACK rabble rousers would not be tolerated.
Especially if Reverend King was something much worse than a “Negro rabble rouser”: he was a “Communist” rabble rouser (according to the FBI & CIA).
Remember the Cultural Genocide of Communists under Truman & Macarthy. Then Kennedy and Dulles initiated a human Genocide of Communists in the Far East: 3 Million victims in Vietnam alone. Followed later by 1 million Communists genocided in Indonesia.
Somebody needs to get this information to the Biden administration’s Secretary of Education so that all the incorrect history books are made accurate… (Dark Sarcasm)
He was also trying to bring people, following children, to some prefabricated promise land that was not going to take very long to get too.
When in fact the place he was referring to takes much longer than the imagination can create. It looks as if it was his false beliefs that lead to his demise.
That’s poetic, all right.
Hate to correct a poet but the word you want is “to”.
Contemporaneous to MLK Jr. some were singing, “We want the World and we want it NOW!”
Maybe you were too young. Or maybe you were too underground. Maybe you don’t remember.
Sadly there were Black members of King’s entourage who helped set him up to be murdered. Rev. Samuel “Billie” Kyles a Memphis pastor is often mentioned as one of the people who betrayed King.
The King assassination was a broad based conspiracy to eliminate a well known and vocal opponent to the war in Indochina and specifically to stop the mobilization of his Poor People’s Campaign which was uniting Whites, Blacks and Indigenous people to confront the US government and attempt major structural changes within the socio-economic system. King posed an enormous threat to TPTB which is why they have reduced him to an idle dreamer/orator and made his natal day a harmless “Day of Service” that in no way shape or form challenges the status quo. With King gone and several months later RFK eliminated, it was back to business as usual.
Add to that list and Andrew Young. As per Pepper, both men (and several others) conspicuously and uncharacteristically did not wear ties, a signal to the shooter. Jackson was directly involved with cash payments from the FBI.
Sorry Jesse Jackson was the other man without a tie.
Thank you for this account!
Annoying, anyway, one more try.
You say, “They will not be resolved until this nation … ” etc.
I admire your idealism but I fear things will only be resolved when your nation ceases to exist.
You say, “They will not be resolved until this nation … “
Thank you, Edward Curtin. This is a very fine piece.
You say, “They will not be resolved until this nation … “
Prominent people advocating for peace cannot be allowed to exist in a state bent on full-time war.
The government wasn’t found “guilty.” It was a civil trial, so they were found “liable.” Civil trials are about liability, not guilt or innocence.
Excellent! You’re hired!
Was looking for something else, found this.
Matthew 23:31
“So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.”
Guess we all are.
Not all; a few followed the same prophets — to the death, if necessary.
“The Kingdom is like a tiny grain of seed. … Some of the seeds fall on barren soil. Some sprout but are shriveled by the heat. Some grow and give us our daily bread” — New Testament.
I guess by “few” you must mean what is referred to as a “remnant.”
The psyop showed the true meaning of “remnant.’
It seemed like a Biblical exaggeration to me — as always, for emphasis.
Now I see it means what it says.
Exactly, and I am one of those few whose forefathers fathers fathers and his grandpa’s grandpa’s fathers father didnt give a damn about the prophets and therefore didnt do nothing and followed them to the death = not guilty!
Leave me and my family out of this leftist’s “we are all guilty and we do all take sick leaves” bs.
Communism is alive and well especially in the fevered minds of the health freedom movement. Maybe two years ago, I was at a health freedom event chatting with man in his 30’s (who actually had a degree in theology from conservative Christian university) who pointed to articles that claimed that MLK plagiarized parts of his PhD dissertation. I thought at the time, even if true, what does this have to do with MLK’s well-documented life or assassination? Obviously, the claim was a smear campaign. Anti-communism was (and apparently still is) a powerful ideological weapon in the State’s (or ruling class’) arsenal. Very, very few people on the receiving end of this accusation were actual communists (and this goes as well for the numerous governments overthrown by the CIA). They were simply people who wanted to chart their own path and future, in other words, people for whom democracy meant something real.
His plagiarism is well-documented, but just because he was a flawed human doesn’t mean he wasn’t also an important leader. If you speak out against the government, be prepared to have anything you’ve done wrong in the past brought to the attention of the public.
Also, accusations of ‘plagiarism’ are one of the favoured smears against great creative people that the government doesn’t like. It is often hard or impossible to prove.
Usually pretty easy to prove.
Currently a Harvard president is being forced out of office on a flimsy case of plagiarism. I don’t follow the gritty details but she must have been doing something right somewhere else because the plagiarism case is absurdly flimsy.
But if you are the gvt whos creating the trouble, sweep it under the rug as all’s fair in love and war.
Communism? Talkin’ smack again. What communism?
Precisely.
Quoting myself (with emphasis): …in the fevered minds of the health freedom movement.
Young man, the literature is vast, I admit, but try reading some of the fundamental texts of Communism. It will help you argue more persuasively.
Then again, maybe you think private ownership of the means of production is a capital idea?
On the contrary the communist threat in the US was very real and they were equally aware of the communist threat causing revolutions and civil war in European countries such as was seen in the Spanish Civil war. The Rosa Luxemburgs et al were well organised and funded and seeded from their spiritual brethren in the Soviet Union.
Anyone in any doubt of the threat and latterly the success of the communist plan only has to look at the state of the US today where almost to a man the various ism’s currently wreaking havoc and destruction across American public life all began as ‘ideas’ formed from within the Frankfurt group, their communist and ethnic bedfellows.
That isn’t to justify the fascist murders of the likes of King but to at least put in context what was happening in contemporary America in the 60’s.
The communist plan was not to seek overt confrontation but to bring revolution within the soul of America itself. Thus began the takeover of the institutions and the planting of revolutionary ideas per Saul Alinsky – the Clintons mentor.
All this was explained in the books of Anatoliy Golitsyn.
The USSR lost some 27 million people in WWII, the country was in ruins in 1945. It was they that defeated Nazi Germany. Yet, one year later, Churchill gives his (in)famous “Iron Curtain” speech warning of a communist plot to take over the world. The Soviets were still burying their dead. Before the end of the war the CIA via Operation Paperclip was spiriting many of the Nazi leadership away to safety from Soviet war crime investigators, many ending up in the USA. The first two shots of Cold War were the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The US, unscathed from WWII, decided it was to be the global hegemon. Any country who was not willing to submit to US economic exploitation, was deemed a communist threat; any American who threatened the profits of US Big Business was considered a communist threat as well. The Cold War was a scam, just like Covid.
I couldn’t give a shit about the Clintons, but to suggest that they were communists, when their consistent MO was to ingratiate themselves to richest and most powerful capitalists is pretty rich.
They lost 27 million people in a war they were largely responsible for instigating. They invaded Poland at almost the same time as Germany.
The soviets were also responsible for the death of nearly 10M Ukrainians 10 years earlier when there was no war.
Equally the same Wall Street Bankers funded both sides the plan of which was to enable communism which despite the ‘ruination of the country’ occupied half of Europe for the next 60 years. The other piece of that puzzle was Zionism would see the creation of Israel.
Churchill knew the threat of the communism and those behind it and warned of the threat they carried. Much earlier he had warned of the Bolsheviks and wrote about the ethnic group behind it so seeing them rule Eastern Europe at the end of ’45 his feelings were justified.
Both the Soviets as well as the CIA had the pick of the crop of the German elite scientists etc and the CIA incorporated wholesale the Eastern Europe intelligence networks in that organisation. Only those of no value were sacrificed later.
There is no argument regarding the failure of the US business model which was well developed by writers such as Michael Hudson and John Perkins.
Equally they understood that the viability of any economic system can only have real value if it has tangible assets to back it. The UK/US model has sacrificed its manufacturing and any real assets and the model is now on its last legs.
Why else are Westminster/ City of London / Wall Street Washington looking to war against Russian and/or China? They are countries with real resources and manufacturing.
Your point regarding the cold war seems confused.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima cannot be both the first shots in a cold war that was a ‘scam’ as its questionable about what ‘scam’ can be called that sees the incineration of 100K people in one go. To those like the Ukrainians it was very real but behind the scenes I agree you will find the same players.
No one said the Clintons were communists – I said the Clintons were mentored by Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radicals was a defining work for them as documented in their biographies.
But it cannot be argued the real damage that these ism’s have done to western society and social cohesion. As I said that was the whole purpose of them and they come from the communist think tanks.
Ah yes, is this the whole ‘nazis and communists were the same stooges at the mercy of our fnancial overlords’ argument? What always gets me is Nazis are usually allowed to be double agents in this scenario, perhaps because many see them as scoring a bit of an own goal by persecuting lots of Jews (because most often it has ‘Jews’ as the central bad guys)? In this scenario, these Jewish bad guys are so vile they willingly sacrifce their ‘own kind’ to achieve their evilness, and Hitler, although clearly a puppet, was essentially a good puppet nonetheless.
It does bring into question whether Jewishness is a relevant identifying trait for these bad guys, since they were so quick to screw over their fellow Jews, and especially since not all the financial elites were indeed Jewish, many argue, but were in fact mostly old world aristocracies.
I notice you allow Churchill honourable intentions. Many would find that a pretty outrageous idea, I feel.
As an analysis, though, I’ve always found this notion that ‘elites’ of any sort can hold the human zeitgeist so captive problematical and simplistic. If elites have such sway then they really are our overlords, aren’t they? However, crediting them as such instinctively feels quite lame and defeatist. I find it hard to believe, honestly.
I can see elites as opportunists, early at the ‘crime scene’ and mistaken for the perpetrator as the zeitgeist ebbs and flows in its seemingly chaotic and unfathomable way, but elites as architects and engineers of humanity on such a level? Again, it just feels pat.
Do you know what I mean? A2
A2
Thank you, Sam. I know what you mean.
Yes, those two shots fired at Nagasaki and Hiroshima seemed to be sending the same message as the shots fired during the sixties.
You play the game or else.
Yup. It is not even controversial among historians that the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. They had been in surrender negotiations for at least 6 months prior. No, the atomic bombings were not to “stop the war and save American lives”, it was a demonstration of raw power.
‘When consciousness rots ideology oozes out’ !
Situationist International…
King was a pervert…just like his handlers!
I guess this excellent Edward Curtin piece was just posted.
Funny the way the trolls are the first to comment … or maybe not.
Curtin is just another mainstream hack…if he was telling the truth it wouldn’t get posted on here!
Probably a low IQ imbecile as well.