Another voice has raised its witness in the assassination of
Martin King, Jr. by the United States government. Dr. William Pepper, both a
friend to the King family and the final legal counsel for James Ray, the man
wrongfully accused of murdering the civil rights leader on April 4, 1968, has substantiated the
story of James Douglass which we presented some two years ago.
Speaking to an audience at the New Hope Baptist Church in Seattle,
WA on February 27, 2008, Pepper told a tale of evil at the highest levels of
government which had assembled a task force to murder both Dr. King and Andrew
Young.
Pepper begins his narrative by recounting how the government
– and we would add parenthetically that the FBI spearheaded this operation with
advisement of the CIA – infiltrated the civil rights movement in order to
confuse its adherents and ultimately disrupt it. In one particular instance in
1967, Mayor Richard Daily of Chicago, in conjunction with the Department of Labor, used
the Black Stone Rangers of the Windy City to impress attendees at a speaking
engagement of King's at the Palmer House into a false black caucus to sow discord among
the attendees.
The government, under the perpetually paranoid but mobster
friendly Hoover, had identified blacks as highly amenable to Communist
recruitment efforts in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The FBI
began to systematically spy on prominent black leaders, with King being the
prize fish.
In reminiscences of Oswald, Ray had been selected by the
murders, particularly a man named Raoul, to be the patsy in the murder of King.
Like Oswald, Ray was painted as a sociopathic lone nut who was racist, an expert
with weapons, and a drifter. Like Oswald, Ray’s military shooting record was
mediocre if not abysmal. But Ray was a much more vulnerable person than Oswald.
Rather than being a racist, Ray was a painfully shy man who socialized with his black co-workers.
More importantly, Ray was a docile person who readily signed
up for low rent stick-up heists. When he planned them himself, they were of the
utmost incompetence. For example, Ray would get to his robbery site after the
timed safes were locked. He only carried 5 bullets for any revolver because he
needed to keep one of the chambers empty because he shot himself in the foot previously when carrying a full load.
These failings of Ray’s made him an ideal tool for
Raoul’s plots to murder King. Raoul worked alongside Frank Leberto who in turn
worked the murder contract on King for Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss. New
Orleans was a hotbed of CIA activity during the 1960s where staging and logistics activities for the murder of John Kennedy took place.
Leberto enlisted Lloyd Jowers in the assassination because
his sandwich shop abutted a wooded area across from King’s room at the Lorraine
Motel. Jowers was the bagman who ran the assassination rifle back to his shop
for safekeeping. He took the rifle from a Memphis Police Department officer who
worked with the mob through the mediation of the FBI or CIA.
Another witness heard Raoul at a grocery store yelling at
someone on the phone to shoot him when he came out on the balcony, thinking
that Raoul was speaking about the witness who was a prominent civil rights
leader in Memphis.
Many claimed that Raoul was a figment of Ray’s imagination,
but after a television trial broadcast in England, people came out of the wood
work to corroborate much of Ray’s story. At the time of Pepper’s lecture, Raoul
was still living about 40 minutes outside of New York City with government
protection. Incidentally, the jurors in the trial, presided over by Hickman
Ewing of Whitewater fame, found Ray not guilty of the murder of Martin King.
When Ray was arrested he was provided two crooked to
compromised attorneys, the last one being Percy Forman who deceived his client
into pleading guilty at the very last moment prior to trial. Forman would later
admit that his client was innocent, but as a pawn in a larger power game was
quite expendable.
When Jowers came forth to tell his story to Sam Donaldson, a
complete news blackout followed the historic broadcast. Not even ABC News
covered the story.
US government forces of many varieties swarmed throughout
Memphis the day of the murder. In addition to military intelligence units, an
Alpha 184 sniper unit was dispatched from Camp Shelby to murder King and Young.
This unit coordinated with senior Memphis Police Department officers to ensure
that the murder would go smoothly. The entire assassination was photographed by
government employees.
Dr Pepper speculated that the sins of Dr King which found him
in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope were his opposition to the Viet Nam war and
his agitation for social justice for the millions of poor not only in this
country but throughout the world. We also noted previously that the immediate
cause for King’s murder was Hoover’s complete agitation over the impending
500,000 man march on Washington, DC scheduled that spring.
The sophistication of the plot leaves only one organization as
the ring leader – the CIA. Although the mob, FBI, US Army, Memphis Police
Department, and other government agencies assisted in the crime and its
cover-up, only the CIA had the organizational expertise to execute such a plan.
As President Johnson remarked after leaving the White House, “We were running a
Murder, Inc. down there.”
Reference
http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/04/09/video-the-execution-of-martin-luther-king-non-textbook-version/, Dr.William F. Pepper
Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.