Noam Chosmky on MLK - carefully avoiding State-murder evidence

chomsky on martin luther king ... he avoids state-murder evidence

Excerpted from a longer interview for the Rob Kall Bottom-up radio show,
WNJC 1360 AM, recorded Monday, January 18th 1-2 PM EST, to be broadcast
Wednesday, January 20, 2010.

I asked Professor Chomsky about his thoughts on the transition of the
culture and humans from top down to bottom up.

He replied:

Today's a good day to think about that. Today's in memory of Martin
Luther King, who is a a great man and an important figure who played a
major role in the civil rights movement.

I'm sure he would have been the first to say that he was riding the wave
of protest and activism that developed from the bottom, that began
with-- it goes way back-- black kids insisting on going to schools.
Eisenhower had to call in federal troops to support them. Black students
sitting in at lunch counters. Black and white young people joining to
become "freedom riders."

It's not easy. They suffered. A number were killed. They were brutally
beaten and attacked. Things weren't pretty by any means. I saw some of
that.

Finally, enough of a popular movement developed so that Martin Luther
King was able to lead major marches, demonstrations and so on that
developed support in the north as well, as long as it was focused in the
south. Racism in the north was barely addressed. But as long as it was
focused on the atrocities in the south it got substantial support and
finally enough pressure to get Lyndon Johnson to pass significant
legislation and all of that was progress from the bottom-up, as most
changes are.

It's important to remember that Martin Luther King's career did not end
withe "I have a dream" speech. He went on. He went on to extend his
concerns and activism. And as he did, his popularity and reputation
among northern liberal declined. He turned to protest against the Viet
Nam war, correctly. He was assassinated when he was supporting the
sanitary workers strike. And in fact, he was on his way to organize a
poor people's movement. By that time, he was reaching class issues, not
just racist Alabama sherriffs. And, as he turned to those issues, his
reputation declined. I suspect, if you listen to the speeches today,
about Martin Luther King, you won't hear a lot about that aspect.

What we prefer to remember is his quite courageous efforts to carry
forward civil rights legislation and civil rights reforms. And that was,
doubtless, extremely significant. But it didn't end there. He went on
and that was a part of his greatness, in fact, a large part of it.

But with regard to bottom-up versus top-down, his role is a good
example. There was a large scale popular movement created from the
bottom up, which presented the circumstances in which he could be an
effective leader...

William F. Pepper - An Act of State

The Execution of Martin Luther King

Talk given at Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco, CA

4 February 2003

Tonight we have a very special author whose book, An Act of State: The
Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr., has just been published by Verso.
William Pepper is an English barrister and an American lawyer. He
convenes a seminar on International Human Rights at Oxford University.
He maintains a practice in the U.S. and the U.K. He is author of three
other books and numerous articles. This book is the result of a
quarter-century of an investigation. I will let Dr. Pepper give you more
information. Let's give a warm welcome to William Pepper.

Thank you. And good evening. This story actually begins with Vietnam in
1966. As a very much younger person I was there as a journalist and
didn't publish anything whilst I was there, but waited until I got back
to the United States. Then I wrote a number of articles. One of them
appeared in a muckraking magazine called Ramparts, that had its home in
this city, published by Warren Hinckle in those days. It was called "The
Children of Vietnam." That is what started me down the slippery slope of
the saga of Martin Luther King; his work during the last year, and his
death. And then an investigation which has gone on since 1978.

When Martin King saw the Ramparts piece he was at a -- there are
different stories of actually where he was -- but I think he was at
Atlanta Airport on his way to the West Indies and he was traveling with
Bernard Lee, his bodyguard. They were having a meal and he was going
through his mail, according to Bernard, and he came upon this issue of
Ramparts, January 1st, 1967. It had in it the piece that I wrote called
"The Children of Vietnam." Bernard said as he started to thumb through
it he stopped and was visibly moved. He pushed his food away. Bernard
said, "What's the matter Martin, aren't you hungry? Is there something
wrong with the food?" And he said, "No. I've lost my appetite. I may
have lost the ability to appreciate food altogether until we end this
wretched war."

Then he asked to meet with me and asked me to open my files to him that
went well beyond what was published in the Ramparts piece in terms of
photographs. Some of you probably saw, if you're old enough to remember,
a number of those photographs. Portions of them used to appear on
lampposts and windows of burned and deformed children. That was what
gave him pause. He hadn't had a chance to read the text at that point
but it was the photographs that stopped him.

The introduction of the article was by Benjamin Spock. It resulted,
ultimately, in a Committee of Responsibility bringing over a hundred
Vietnamese children, war-injured children to this country and our
placing them in hospitals around the nation. This was so that people
would have a chance to see first-hand what their tax dollars were
purchasing.

He is depicted on King Day as a civil rights leader. And that's the way
you're going to see him probably forever. But he was much more than a
civil rights leader and that's what no one in official capacity wants
you to know. He had moved well beyond the civil rights movement by
1964-65 and he had become effectively a world-figure in terms of human
rights people and particularly the poor of this earth. That's where he
was going. That's the area you don't really get into safely when you
start talking about wealth, redistributing wealth. Taking, diverting
huge sums of money into social welfare programs and health programs and
educational programs at the grass roots. When you start going into that
you begin to tread on toes in this country, in the United Kingdom, and
in most of the western world.

On the way to Cambridge to open Vietnam Summer, an anti-war project, we
rode from Brown University (where he had delivered a sermon at the
chapel there) and I continued the process of showing him these
photographs and anecdotes of what I had seen when I was in the country.
And he wept, he openly wept. He was so visibly shaken by what was
happening that it was difficult for him to retain composure. And of
course that passion came out in his speech on April 4th, 1967 at
Riverside Church [1] where he said that his native land had become the
greatest purveyor of violence on the face of the earth. Quoting Thoreau
he said we have come to a point where we use massively improved means to
accomplish unimproved ends and what we should be doing is focusing on
not just the neighborhood that we have created but making that old white
neighborhood into a brotherhood. And we were going entirely in the
opposite direction and this was what he was pledging to fight against.

We spoke very early in the morning following that Riverside address and
he said, `Now you know they're all going to turn against me. We're going
to lose money. SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] will lose
all of its corporate contributions. All the major civil rights leaders
are going to turn their back on me and all the major media will start to
tarnish and to taint and to attack me. I will be called everything even
up to and including a traitor.' So he said, `We must persevere and build
a new coalition that can be effective in this course of peace and
justice.`

That coalition came to be known as the National Conference for New
Politics. It was an umbrella organization and it held its first -- and
last -- convention in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend of 1967. It had
5,000 delegates, maybe the largest convention of people ever assembled
in the history of this country, at the Palmer House in Chicago. They
came from every walk of life, every socio-economic class, every racial
group, every ethnic group. The purpose was to form this umbrella
coalition that would effectively coordinate a massive third-party
political campaign against the Johnson Administration and Johnson's
re-election; but at the same time develop grassroots organizing
capabilities in the communities across America. It wasn't to be --
although it continued and struggled for the period of a year -- but it
wasn't to be because of government's wiliness and our naïveté. We never
appreciated the extent to which government would go to undermine and
undercut that kind of movement. They were responsible for the formation
of a first black caucus. That black caucus was largely led by agente
provocateurs who came from the Blackstone Rangers, organizations of that
sort in Chicago. And they corraled each black delegate who came in and
brought them into a room and formed this unity of all-black delegates
and this commitment to vote as a block and introduce resolutions as a
block.

We thought, many of us, that this was a good thing because this was
typical and representative of a growing black awareness, particularly
urban awareness. Although in the caucus they of course brought in rural
black leaders as well. We felt this was healthy and there would be then
this block that would vote and introduce the concerns of the black
community across America. We didn't know that it was government-induced
and government-sponsored and government-paid for and that the leaders
were gangsters. Blackstone Rangers would surface again and again in the
course of the movement as capable of disrupting and causing havoc on
behalf of their employers. Martin delivered the keynote address at the
convention. I introduced him and he delivered this address and the
importance of this movement. As he was speaking a note was passed over
my shoulder to me and I read it and it said, `Get him out of here after
he finishes his speech or we will take him hostage and humiliate him
before the world.' They were so afraid that if this man stayed on for
the substantive part of the convention that he, as a unifier, might
bridge the differences and might overcome the provocation that was
designed to disrupt the convention. But I really felt at that point I
had no choice. It was the first tip-off of what was going on. But still
[I thought these were] just angry, hostile urban blacks, disaffected
with non-violence and who had a different way of looking at things and
different tactics that they wanted to follow. I didn't think at all that
it was (of course) officially inspired. So we did get Martin out of the
Palmer House very quickly after his speech and they went on with the
convention. It was all downhill from there. They forced through
resolutions that simply were so antagonistic to sections of the movement
and engendered such hostility that all the money dried up for that noble
cause. They were successful. That being the case, nevertheless we
struggled and worked in that last year of his life. I remember the last
time I saw him alive (I think it was in late February). He had already
started to become involved in the sanitation workers strike. In his own
mind he thought that this was the basis for the encampment of the poor
people in Washington and this was a good launching pad. He sympathized
with all the goals of the sanitation workers in Memphis. We met at John
Bennett's study at Union Theological Chamber in New York. There was just
four of us: Martin, myself, Benjamin Spock and Andrew Young. Most of the
dialogue actually came between Martin and myself in terms of my probing
him about ways of briding the gap between his commitment to peace and
non-violence and that approach of Malcom[ X]'s which was confrontational
and violent in self-defense. We went away, with no resolution to the
issue. And of course, the rest is history. He was assassinated on the
fourth of April 1968, one year to the day (it's interesting) from the
time he delivered the Riverside speech.

We went to the memorials, Spock and I, and the funeral and then I walked
away from political activity. I had had my fill of it. Ben and Julian
Bond and others went up to see Bobby Kennedy who had asked, invited us
all to come. I didn't know him in '68. I knew him as a much younger
person when I handled the campaign of his as a citizen's chairmen in
Westchester County in New York when he ran for the Senate. And I didn't
like him at all. I thought he was opportunistic and all those things
that you have heard about Bobby Kennedy I thought were true. I saw them,
confronted them, directly. But the Bob Kennedy who was killed in '68, I
think was a very different person. I regard it as one of my sadnesses
that I did not see him at the end. Because he had made an overture to
Martin to run as a Vice-Presidential candidate with him. It was not
generally known. But when he made his announcement, March I guess it was
15th or 16th, he made contact with Martin and I'm sure that contact was
known. Eight, nine years later [Ralph] Abernathy called me and asked me
to go up to the prison with him. Actually [it was] ten [years], it was
in late '77, he asked me to go to the prison with him and interrogate
James Earl Ray. I said, `This is a funny request Ralph. Ten years after
the fact. Why would you want to do that? Do you have some questions
about it? Isn't Ray guilty?' I didn't know anything about the case. I
didn't want to know about it at that point. He said, `I just have some
questions. Will you come along with me?' I still don't fully understand
why he did that. He said, `But I want you to interrogate him and I want
to watch him when you do that.' So I said, `Well, it's going to take me
some while to get up to speed on this case. Because I don't know
anything about it.'

For the first time under oath in any assassination's case in the history
of this country, or perhaps any other, there is the complete picture of
how Martin Luther King was killed. There is every answer to every
question. There is why the bushes were cut down the next morning. Who
cut them down. Who asked to have them cut down. There is every piece of
information there. For history more than anything else.

It did take some time. In August of '78, finally, we went and we went
through this session of five hours intensive interrogation of James Earl
Ray. His lawyer at the time, Mark Lane, was there. A body language
specialist from Harvard, [Dr.] Howie Berens came and he sat in a corner,
just watched James' movements as I put him really through a rather
rigorous, painful time.

He was very different than we expected to find. He was shy, docile,
soft-spoken, thoughtful and not at all the kind of racist figure that
had been depicted in the media. Not at all. He knew very little about
weapons, very clearly had virtually no skill at all with them. He was a
petty thief and burglar, hold-up man. But he was totally incompetent in
that. He was known for showing up too late in supermarkets he wanted to
stick up, the time-lock would already have been fixed on the safe
[laughs]. The staff would say, `Look, there's nothing we can do about
this.' [laughing throughout remainder of paragraph] And they said,
`We'll give you our money.' He said, `I don't want your money. I don't
want to rob working people. I want the money from this corporation.'
That type of thing. He kept five bullets, typically, in his pistol. When
he was arrested at Heathrow Airport he had five bullets in his pistol.
He always kept the firing pin chamber empty. When I pressed him on that,
a long time, he wouldn't answer that question. Finally he admitted, with
some embarrassment, that he kept the firing pin chamber empty because he
shot himself in the foot once [laughs]. And he just didn't want to do
that again. He was incompetent when it came to rifles. 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-ott-six [.3006] 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 .3006 caliber
rifle so they had a .3006 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 guy couldn't have done that. But he
raised so many questions that I had never heard raised before, that had
never been answered, that I decided I would begin to go into Memphis and
talk to some people, become familiar with the terrain and the crime
scene and see if I could get some answers to those questions. And I did.
The more I began to probe around the more concerned I got about new
questions that were unanswered. I had hoped that the Select Committee on
Assassinations would solve that problem. Because they were in session at
the time and I hoped they would solve it.

Their report came out in 1979 [2] and they didn't solve it. All they did
was to continue the official history of the state's case which was that
James Earl Ray was the lone assassin and that he was guilty. I kept
going back-and-forth visiting him and asking him questions and then
going off-and-on into Memphis and then occasionally into New Orleans.

Slowly things started to come together to the point where ten years on
in this process I became convinced that not only was Ray was not the
shooter but that he was an unknowing patsy. It was at that point in 1988
that I agreed to represent him. So I became his lawyer and was his
lawyer for the last ten years of his life, trying very hard to get him a
trial. He never had a trial. It's amazing -- of course most people in
the United States if not the world never understood that James Earl Ray
never had a trial; that he was coerced into copping a guilty plea by
Percy Foreman who was his second lawyer. People would say, `Well why
would he plead guilty? Goodness me.' When you put that question to James
his answer was always the same: "Look, he told me all kinds of things. I
always wanted this trial. Right down to the end I was trying to get this
trial. But Percy said to me, `You know, your Dad's a parole violator.
He's going to be sent back to jail fifty years after violating that
parole. They'll make sure he's locked up. Your whole family will be
harassed forever. They convicted you anyway because the media has got
you wiped out as the killer. You haven't got a chance. They're going to
fry you Jimmy.'" But the thing that really convinced him to get rid of
Foreman by pleading, was Percy's statement that "I'm not in good health,
James. I cannot give you the best defense because I'm not in good
health." And he said to me, "That was it. When my lawyer said to me `I'm
not in good health and I can't give you the best defense,' that really
started to worry me. Foreman said `What you should do is plead guilty,
then make a motion for a new trial, get a new lawyer and you overturn
the guilty plea and then you're off and away.'" James said, `But I don't
have any money for a new lawyer.' So Foreman said, `Don't worry about
that James. I'll give your brother Jerry $500 and he can go hire you a
new lawyer. But you have got to make an agreement that you will not
cause any problems at the guilty plea hearing. You'll just take that
guilty plea.'

Percy not only said that. He put it in writing. We got a copy of Percy's
letter to James where he said, `Dear James, I'm going to give this $500
to your brother on the condition that you plead guilty and you do not
cause any undue disturbances at this guilty plea hearing.' He actually
put that in writing. A remarkable admission. So James certainly, he
plead. He did cause a little problem at the guilty plea hearing, but
nevertheless he plead. And Jerry got the $500 and James didn't wait for
a lawyer to be retained but he filed himself pro se (by himself) a
petition for a new trial. He plead on March 10th, that was when he was
guilty and convicted and sentenced to 99 years. And on March 13th, three
days later, he filed. From March 13th until the day that he died, James
Earl Ray was trying to get a trial.

On March 31st the Judge, who had sentenced him and who had overseen the
guilty plea hearings was reviewing the petition for a new trial, had
told some people that he was concerned about certain aspects of the case
(whether that is serious or not one doesn't know) and he was found in
his office dead of a heart attack, with his head on James' motion
papers. You can speculate what that means. It may mean nothing. It just
may mean that man was under a lot of stress for a lot of different
reasons, he had a heart attack and he happened to be reviewing those
papers and when he collapsed and the head down it was on James' papers.
But there is a law in Tennessee that says if a judge dies and you make a
motion for a new trial and in the course of that motion before ruling on
it the judge dies, you get a new trial automatically. There were two
people who had filed those motions before [Judge] Preston Battle. One
was James Earl Ray and the other person was the one who got the trial.
James didn't, of course. So he went on, all of those years, trying to
get that trial and was unsuccessful. Meanwhile the state's case was
articulated in a number of books, by Gerold Frank, a chap called
[George] McMillan, eventually commentaries by David Garrow and
ultimately a fellow called Gerald Posner. Always the same line, always
the same story, unyieldingly: lone assassin, no conspiracy, no deviation
at all. That's been the case from beginning to end. I tried to get James
a trial for many years. But in the initial stages we lost all the way up
through the Supreme Court. We were denied. I guess we finished that
process around 1990, . . . '89, '90, '91 it was certainly completed. In
1992 I got the idea: Why don't we try to do this trial on television? So
HBO in this country and Thames Television in the U.K. sponsored a
television trial called "The Trial of James Earl Ray." The trial was
prepared in 1992 and it began and was tried in 1993, the 25th
anniversary of the assassination of Martin King.

The Judge was a former federal Judge, Marvin Frankel out of New York, a
very tough judge. We fought all the time, particularly in chambers.
Eventually we became friends. But it was very hostile during the trial.
The Prosecutor was Hickman Ewing Jr., a former U.S. attorney who had won
200 straight prosecution cases as a U.S. attorney. Some of you may know
him and know the name. He was Ken Starr's Number 2 in the Whitewater
investigations for a number of months if not years. The jury came from
all over the country and very strictly adhered to were the rules,
Criminal Procedure of the State of Tennessee. It was a serious trial.
Even though it had no script or anything. The witnesses were not
scripted in any way.

It took the jury about seven hours after that television trial to come
back with a verdict of Not Guilty, James Earl Ray. You probably never
heard of that. Because it was not reported anywhere and if it was it was
mentioned once or twice in a couple of media entities. It was called
"entertainment." It wasn't really serious you see. It was a form of
entertainment. But what it did do was to bring to the fore, witnesses
and information that had not been possible to get before that. So in
that way it was very helpful. And in one instance, we had four witnesses
whose testimony would have caused the indictment of a man called Lyod
Jowers who owned Jim's Grill which was a café on the ground floor of the
rooming house from which the shot supposedly was fired from the bathroom
window. Behind Jim's Grill there's a big vacant lot, bushy area, heavily
overgrown at the time and it backed onto the Lorraine Motel where Martin
King stayed. These people gave me enough evidence as a result of the
trial and my discovering them and the investigation (we had over 22
investigators working for me in the course of that preparation) to
indict Jowers. Jowers knew about it. I'd known Loyd Jowers since 1978.
He's one of the first people I'd talked to. I'd known this guy for 14
years already and he (of course) never admitted anything and he lied
about everything. But as these witnesses now started to assemble, it was
powerful testimony against him.

HBO in this country and Thames Television in the U.K. sponsored a
television trial called "The Trial of James Earl Ray." The trial was
prepared in 1992 and it began and was tried in 1993, the 25th
anniversary of the assassination of Martin King. . . .
        It took the jury about seven hours after that television trial
to come back with a verdict of Not Guilty, James Earl Ray. You probably
never heard of that. Because it was not reported anywhere and if it was
it was mentioned once or twice in a couple of media entities. It was
called "entertainment." It wasn't really serious you see. It was a form
of entertainment. . . .
        The consolidation of the control of the media is a major problem
in this democracy as it is in most democracies today. I don't know how
democracy can function when people are not allowed information that's
essential for the decision-making process. But rather they get
propaganda continually.

One of them was his former -- and she was still active as his girl
friend and lover at the time -- she became former by 1992, but back in
'68 she and Loyd had a thing going. Her story was that she came into the
Grill on the afternoon of April 4th. She didn't see Loyd around
anywhere. He was the manager and the short order cook and he helped do
everything. And she saw the kitchen door closed which was unusual so she
opened the kitchen door thinking that `Well maybe he's out in the back
fooling around with some of those local ladies.' Because she never
trusted him really.

As she got into the kitchen she saw the kitchen door was open leading to
the outside. As she approached that open kitchen door she heard a
gunshot. She was startled but she still went on. As she got into the
doorway, here comes Loyd running through the bushes carrying a
still-smoking rifle. He brushes past her quickly, comes inside, bends
down to take the shell out and break it down and says to her
plaintively, `Betty, you wouldn't do anything to hurt me would you?' And
she said, `No Loyd of course not. Of course I wouldn't.' So he throws
the shell down the commode, the toilet back of the kitchen and stuffed
it up in doing it. Then he covered the rifle with cloth and brought it
down and put it under a shelf. Betty [Jean Spates] had known about this
(of course) since 1968. It was only in 1992, I think December of 1992
where she finally agreed to tell me this story. I'd known her for a lot
of years. Loyd tried to keep me from even finding out where she lived
but she told me this story then. There were three others with similar
incriminating pieces of information -- a taxi driver who saw the murder
weapon, whom Loyd asked to get rid of the murder weapon, or hold onto it
-- a whole series of different witnesses. So Loyd was in trouble and he
knew it. He said to his lawyer, `You go and get me immunity from
prosecution and I'll tell everything I know about this killing.' So his
lawyer, Lewis Garrison goes off to meet with the District Attorney
General and tries to get immunity for Loyd. He said, `Loyd will tell you
everything. This is the case of the century. You can be the most famous
prosecutor in America. You can break this case.' Not only does Loyd not
get immunity from prosecution. But the District Attorney General never
interviewed him. Never even spoke to him. Nobody wanted to prosecute
Loyd. But he still was worried because I sat a colleague of mine outside
of the Grand Jury room for two weeks trying to get the foreman of the
Grand Jury to let him in (he was a lawyer) to give evidence and provide
the foundation for the giving of evidence of these witnesses so that the
Grand Jury independently of the Prosecutor (if we could get them to run
away) would issue an indictment. He never got in. But Loyd didn't know
that. So Loyd conjures up with his lawyer and some others the idea that
he'll try to get this story out publically. They contact Sam Donaldson.
(I don't know if you know who he is.) He was an ABC journalist who ran a
program called Prime Time Live. Donaldson agreed to put Jowers on and
let him tell this story. So Jowers goes on television and tells his
story on Prime Time Live and it seems like it's a big news story.

I actually got it covered in The Observer in England. I had been living
all this time (by the way) in England. Not in the United States. I had
moved to England in 1980-81. I had moved my family there and I was a
visiting scholar at Cambridge at the time. And that was a much nicer
place to raise children considering some of the things I was getting
myself in to. But I had to come back and forth continually to commute on
this, to do this work.

The next morning, after the Prime Time Live program, there is no
coverage at all of this. Not even ABC News treated their own program as
a news-worthy event. There was no coverage at all and no mention in the
press. It just goes by-the-by.

So the investigation continues. In March, about March 20th or 21st,
after the trial was over, a journalist named Steve Tompkins wrote an
article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. It was to have been the first
of eight installments. It became the only piece, but it was a very
lengthy piece. It dealt with the infiltration of the civil rights
movement and black leaders throughout America by military intelligence
going back to the second decade of the 20th century.

He traced the history of military intelligence's concern and
surveillance of black community leaders and brought it all the way down
(of course) to the COINTELPRO operations [3] in the '50s and '60s,
particularly against Martin King. [4]

But the article showed that what happened in the '50s and '60s was just
a continuation of what had been going on since around the time of the
Russian Revolution. Because blacks were regarded as prime candidates for
recruitment to the Communist Party after the Russian Revolution. So they
had to be watched and surveilled. Hoover's Number 2 of course, [Clyde]
Tolson was an officer of military intelligence and Hoover himself was
given a rank of Colonel which he only discarded after the Second World
War. In this article there was one little paragraph that caught my eye.
It said, in Memphis on the day of the assassination of Martin King there
was an [Special Forces] Alpha 184 Team there. And nobody understood why
that team was there. Alpha 184 six-man unit was a sniper team. No one
understood why they were there. I was curious about that and I went to
see Steve and I said, `This is a whole other dimension to the case.' I
was beginning to form the opinion pretty clearly that Martin King had
been killed as the result of a Mafia contract. There were any number of
bounties on him in those periods of time and a fair amount of money had
been raised to try to get him killed. None of the occurrences were
successful and I figured ultimately one was and this was a Mafia hit.
And that was it. But now, all of a sudden, into this picture comes one
of the most secretive aspects of the government of the United States:
the role of the Army and the Army and military intelligence on American
soil. That bounded and intrigued me so I said to Steve, `Will you
arrange for these guys' -- whom he knew, he knew two members of this
sniper team -- `will you ask them if they'll answer questions for me?'
It took awhile and he said No, he wouldn't. He refused for the longest
time. He didn't want anything to do with these people again because he
said they were nasty, they'd kill you where you stand, they'd kill your
family, your kids, anyone else. These are just trained killers and that
was the way it was. He didn't want anything more to do with them. So I
kept going back and again [saying] `Look, we got this guy in jail and we
believe he is innocent. Any information I can get I need to have.'
Finally he said he would help. They would not however meet with me. They
would trust him because he had never betrayed them. He was a former
Naval Intelligence officer himself. So he agreed to take questions from
me and they agreed to take those questions and answer them. For a long,
extended period of time I would give Steve questions. He would go and he
would come back with answers. He'd go again, come back. This was all in
his spare time and only his expenses were paid. As he got the answers to
the questions -- he knew nothing really about the details of the
assassination -- he didn't even know why I was asking certain things.
But as he got those answers back to me -- these people were in Mexico by
the way; they fled the United States in the '70s because they thought
there was a clean-up operation underway so he had to make the trip to
Mexico -- the picture started to become clearer and clearer to me as I
got the answers to these questions. It became evident that the military
did not kill Martin King but that they were there in Memphis as what
I've come to believe was a backup operation. Because King was never
going to be allowed to leave Memphis. If the contract that was given
didn't work these guys were going to do it. The story they told was that
the six of them were briefed at 4:30 in the morning at Camp Shelby. The
started out around 5 o'clock. They came to Memphis. They were briefed
there. They took up their positions. At the briefing at 4:30 they were
shown two photographs who were their targets. One was Martin King and
the other was Andrew Young. That was the first time I'd heard that
Andrew Young might even conceivably be a target. But that's what he was.
The main informant who told us most of the information in fact was the
sniper who had Young in his crosshairs. Now as far as they knew they
were going to kill these people. They had no regrets about it at all
because they considered them as traitors and they used very unkind words
about them. So they were going to kill them and they were prepared to do
that. But they never got the order. Instead they heard a shot. And each
thought the other one had fired too quickly. Then they had an order to
disengage. It was only later that they learned that, as they call it,
`some wacko civilian' had actually shot King and that their services
were not required. But that's how they worked. This was not a one-off
for these guys. They were trained snipers. You remember a hundred cities
burned in America in 1967. These guys were sent around the country,
teams of them, into different cities. These particular fellows had been
in Detroit, Newark and Tampa and possibly L.A. They were given mugbooks.
Those mugbooks were the photographs of community leaders and people who
were to be their targets. And they would be put in positions and they
would take out community leaders who would somehow be killed in the
course of the rioting that was going on in various cities. The
assassination of Martin King was a part of what amounted to an on-going
covert program in which they tried to suppress dissent and disruption in
America. He was shot from the bushes behind Jim's Grill, not from the
bathroom window. And he was shot as a result of a conspiracy that
brought a man called Frank Liberto -- who was a [Carlos] Marcello
operative in Memphis, he ran a wholesale food place -- in to see Loyd
Jowers whom he knew. Jowers owed him a very big favor. And in addition
to that he paid Jowers $100,000 and that was to take complete use of
that Grill facility for planning and staging of the assassination and
the room upstairs that Raul (who was controlling James Earl Ray) would
have James rent and then keep out of most of the afternoon. The final
stages of the assassination logistically were planned in Jim's Grill
itself and there were a number of Memphis Police Department officers --
some of them were senior officers -- who were there. One of them was a
black officer called Marrell McCollough. Marrell McCollough is still
alive and well today in Memphis, Tennessee. He went from the Memphis
Police Department to the Central Intelligence Agency where he worked for
a number of years [in the 1970s]. Before he became an undercover Memphis
Police Officer, he was brought back to active duty by the [Army] 111th
Military Intelligence Group [MIG] on June 16 1967. So he was seconded
from military intelligence to become a policeman to go undercover with a
black group called the Invaders, a local group. So McCollough was very
much in the frame, in terms of all of these that were happening. He
participated in the planning. And Jowers named the other people who were
involved in the planning as well.

It became evident that the military did not kill Martin King but that
they were there in Memphis as what I've come to believe was a backup
operation. Because King was never going to be allowed to leave Memphis.
If the contract that was given didn't work these guys were going to do
it. . . .
        This was not a one-off for these guys. They were trained
snipers. You remember a hundred cities burned in America in 1967. These
guys were sent around the country, teams of them, into different cities.
These particular fellows had been in Detroit, Newark and Tampa and
possibly L.A. They were given mugbooks. Those mugbooks were the
photographs of community leaders and people who were to be their
targets. And they would be put in positions and they would take out
community leaders who would somehow be killed in the course of the
rioting that was going on in various cities. The assassination of Martin
King was a part of what amounted to an on-going covert program in which
they tried to suppress dissent and disruption in America.

Each of these groups of people only knew what they had to know about
this overall assassination scenario. There were two photographers on the
roof of the Fire Station and they filmed everything. They were still
cameramen and they filmed the balcony, the shot hitting Martin King, the
parking lot, up into the bushes and they got the sniper just lowering
his rifle.

So the whole assassination of Martin King is on film. We negotiated for
a year-and-a-half with those guys -- who were psychological operations
Army officers -- to try to get it. They didn't know there was going to
be an assassination. They were there to take photographs of everybody
and everything around the Lorraine Motel at that point in time. The guy
just happened, when he heard the shot, to spin his camera up into the
bushes. That's why they got the photographs that they did. We came close
to getting an agreement with them. Then my contact made a mistake and
used his own name on a flight into Miami. The FBI field office sent a
team to track him. When he was meeting with them in an open park area
one of the FBI guys put a big long lens camera out the passenger side of
the car and the Army officer saw it and spooked him. He thought we were
trying to set him up and he split. That broke down the negotiations. But
they didn't know what was going on. The guy who shot King was a police
officer and he would only be told what he needed to know. The Alpha 184
team knew nothing about the Mafia operation that preceded them. The
Memphis Police Department knew of the Mafia contract and they covered
that up. The FBI's role was to take control of the total investigation
and to cover it up. There isn't enough time to go into the details of
the evidence. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. I try
to cover all of the evidence that we have -- and that we eventually put
before the court -- in the book. Needless to say all of this started to
flesh out in 1993 and '94. I did a work-in-progress up to that time
called Orders To Kill. That book was never reviewed in America. This
book will never be reviewed in America. Most masses of people here will
never know anything about this story because the book will receive no
attention whatsoever.

I have friends in a lot of media organizations, sometimes fairly senior
journalists and reporters and they say, `Bill it's just not worth our
jobs. Don't expect us to have you on in terms of this book. It's not
worth our jobs.' The consolidation of the control of the media is a
major problem in this democracy as it is in most democracies today. I
don't know how democracy can function when people are not allowed
information that's essential for the decision-making process. But rather
they get propaganda continually. Orders To Kill came out. It was
unnoticed except by the King family whom I kept in touch with over time
and they knew about the work. At one point it became evident that James
Earl Ray was dying and he needed a trial, desperately or he would be
dead and there would be no possibility. He was dying of hepatitis, a
liver disease.

We put extra pressure to try to get this trial based upon a lot of the
evidence we had. We had a sympathetic judge, Judge Joe Brown. Joe was
very much inclined to give us a trial. Then at the midnight hour, I
think just within the week before I think he would have ruled in our
favor, he was removed from the case. The state made a motion that he was
prejudicial, he was behaving improperly as a judge, and he was removed.
There went the possibility of that trial. The family came very strongly
in support of a trial for James and the family suffered as a result of
that. They lost millions of dollars of contributions to The King Center
and they knew it would happen. I didn't have to tell them but I did. I
said, `Remember what happened to Martin when he opposed the war. You
know what is going to happen to you. Once you take this one on, and you
align yourself now with the accused assassin of your loved one, you know
what's going to happen to you. You know you're going to be called fools.
They're going to start finding reasons to attack you. You're going to
lose corporate contributions.' And all of that happened. But they
struggled on.

We had an arrangement for James to get a liver transplant at University
of Pittsburgh Hospital. Dr. John Fung agreed to do that, put him on the
list and he had the criteria to move forward. I made a motion to the
court for that permission to have him taken to Pittsburgh for that
operation. We had him evaluated in Tennessee. And we were denied, the
motion was denied. Even though it wasn't going to cost the state
anything it was denied. He died in 1998. I always wondered if there was
anything more that I could have done and was I not attentive enough. Any
lawyer would go through that when you have a person who has spent most
of his life in prison and you know he's innocent. You want to get him
out. I'm not a criminal lawyer by trade. It's not what I do. But
nevertheless I wasn't hardened to it, I guess you could say, and I took
it pretty badly that this guy eventually died without a trial. The
family and I met and made a decision. Or rather, Mrs. King made the
decision. I just laid out what options were left in terms of getting the
truth out. And the one option that was left was a civil suit, a civil
action. It was a wrongful death civil action that I proposed against
Loyd Jowers and other known and unknown conspirators. There were members
of the family that wondered if it was worthwhile. `We'd been hit and
beaten down so much,' they said, `is this really worth it? Why are we
doing this? We're just going to get hit more. Nobody is even going to
hear about this.' This debate went around for a long time. Finally Mrs.
King stopped the debate and she said, `I always have to think about two
things when we have these difficult decisions to make. One is, what
would Martin have done in these circumstances? And two, what would he
want us, his heirs, to do in these circumstances?' Then she looked at me
and she said, `Bill, we're going to trial.' So we filed that lawsuit in
1998 against Mr. Jowers in the Circuit Court in Tennessee and we waited
a year until we were sure we were going to get the judge we wanted to
get who was a black judge named [James] Swearingen. He had a reputation
of being an independent guy. He'd been on the bench for a long time.
He'd been involved in the movement in his youth. He was also going to
retire. He didn't have much longer to go. As it turned out this was his
last case. So we got this case before Judge Swearingen, who was not in
good health. We tried the case in 1999 for 30 days: 70 witnesses, 4,000
pages of transcript that today is up on the website of the King Center
-- thekingcenter.com has all of the testimony of this. [5] And for the
first time under oath in any assassination's case in the history of this
country, or perhaps any other, there is the complete picture of how
Martin Luther King was killed. There is every answer to every question.
There is why the bushes were cut down the next morning. Who cut them
down. Who asked to have them cut down. There is every piece of
information there. For history more than anything else.

It took this jury 59 minutes to come back with an award and with a
verdict on behalf of the family against Jowers and known and unknown
conspirators in the government of the United States, the state of
Tennessee, and the city of Memphis. The family felt and feels
vindicated. They feel comfortable that they know now how it happened and
why it happened. The reasons were all laid out. Martin King was killed
because he had become intolerable. It's not just that he opposed the war
and now was going to the bottom line of a number of the major
corporations in the United States; those forces that effectively rule
the world at this point in time, the transnational entities. But more
importantly, I think the reason was because he was going to bring a mass
of people to Washington in the spring of '68. And that was very
troubling. He wanted to cap the numbers. But the military knew that once
he started bringing the wretched of America to camp there in the shadow
of the Washington Memorial, and go every day up to see their Senators
and Congressman and try to get social program monies put back in that
were taken out because of the war -- and once they did that, and they
got rebuffed again and again they would increasingly get angry. It was
the assessment of the Army that he would lose control of that group. And
the more violent and radical amongst the forces would take control and
they would have a revolution on their hands in the nation's capital. And
they couldn't put down that revolution. They didn't have enough troops.
Westmoreland wanted 200,000 for Vietnam. They didn't have those. They
simply didn't have enough troops to put down what they thought was going
to be the revolution that would result from that encampment. [6]

So because of that I think, more than anything else, Martin King was
never going to be allowed to bring that mass of angry, disaffected
humanity to Washington. He was never going to leave Memphis. And that
was the reason for the elaborate preparations that they had. That trial
(of course) was not covered, with very few exceptions. You probably
never even heard of the trial. General Counsel of Court TV is a friend
of mine. He said, `Bill we're going to cover this live because this is
the most important trial in terms of the history of democracy in this
country; these issues that are being raised of any I can think of.'
Court TV's camera stayed in the hallway with the rest of them except
when Mrs. King testified or Andrew Young or Dexter [King] or somebody.
They never came in and they certainly didn't cover it live. All the
other media people came and stayed in the hallway and came in at
selected points and came and went. None of this was ever reported. There
was one ABC local anchorman [Wendell Stacey] who came in, very cynical
in his outlook, and he started to film for his local station. As he
started to listen to the evidence he was fascinated and intrigued. He
decided he was going to stay and he was going to film this thing. He was
told by his producer, `Don't do that. Get yourself out of there.' He
ignored that, under threat of being fired and eventually he was fired.
But he tried -- and he did film it -- and finally got his job back,
ultimately through wrongful dismissal. But it was a chastening event for
him to sit there and to listen to this evidence and to realize that he
was being told to suppress it. To his credit he tried to hang on.

But there was a narrow window of about 12 hours where there was some
minor reporting. And then it just all went away and has never been heard
of again. [A member of the audience interjects: "Page 15 of the
Washington Post, five paragraphs."] Yeah. The New York Times did a bit
of it too. But then it just disappeared and it was never again reported
or commented upon.

Except wherever it was raised, critics would start attacking. None of
them had ever been there [laughs] at the trial. They started attacking
the Judge. They attacked the defense counsel. They attacked the jury.
They attacked the King family. There were various shots of that sort to
try to say that this trial was a farce, it didn't make any sense, and
made no difference anyway.

It was the assessment of the Army that [King] would lose control of [the
Poor People's Campaign in Washington D.C.]. And the more violent and
radical amongst the forces would take control and they would have a
revolution on their hands in the nation's capital. And they couldn't put
down that revolution. They didn't have enough troops. Westmoreland
wanted 200,000 for Vietnam. They didn't have those. They simply didn't
have enough troops to put down what they thought was going to be the
revolution that would result from that encampment.

The family decided that was basically it for them. They had the answers.
The answers were on the record. But at least they would take it one step
further and see if on the basis of all of that evidence now, there could
be an independent evaluation. So they asked for a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. They visited with President Clinton and asked
for that. He refused that request. Instead he turned it over to Janet
Reno and she appointed her Civil Rights division to put together a task
force to do the investigation. They did and they came away with a
whitewash which was predictable and which was the reason why we had
wanted an independent commission to look at this that had subpoena power
and the power to grant immunity from prosecution to get at the truth.
But nobody was going to go that route.

I deal in detail in the book, almost line-by-line, with the report of
the Department of Justice in terms of the investigation and deal also
with the state's case as it has been articulated by various writers over
the years. Because I think it is important that people have a look at
what the state has said and what the facts are about that and also what
the Attorney General's report said. To see that in the context of the
evidence that came out at the trial. That I suppose really is the end of
the story at this point in time. This work is probably the last that can
be done in terms of bringing everything out. Although, twenty-five years
later people still come forward. And there are a couple of loose ends
that just have to be tied up (and I'll probably try to do that for the
paperback version). But I don't think we really have much hope of going
anywhere legally with it. James is dead. The family has won a civil
action against one of the few people who could be sued. There are still
some others. But I don't think we can go very much further with the
case. It is important for Americans to look at this case history in
terms of the health of democracy. Particularly during these times which
are more troubling than ever before. One chapter of the book deals with
Martin King. That's why it's a little different kind of assassination
book because I think in many ways that's the most important chapter. Yes
it's important to have the details and the evidence of how this whole
thing took place and how he was taken from us. But what's more important
is to understand how such a leader comes forward. What his roots are.
What makes him so special in terms of all of the co-opting pressures
that are on people who emerge in leadership capacities? Why has there
been no one to replace him ever since? And why is there a strange
inaction in terms of the involvement of people in leadership and
organizations with respect to the major problems of the economic
situations of vast numbers of Americans in terms of the unequal
distribution of wealth in America and the quality of life of at least 30
million Americans and their children? These movement issues are as much
with us today as ever before and yet there is silence. What was there
about King and his roots? I trace Martin King back to John Ruskin. Not
to Gandhi but to Ruskin. John Ruskin is the true father political
economist in Victorian times in England, the true father of Martin
King's political and economic philosophy and commitment to the poor of
this world. He is depicted on King Day as a civil rights leader. And
that's the way you're going to see him probably forever. But he was much
more than a civil rights leader and that's what no one in official
capacity wants you to know. He had moved well beyond the civil rights
movement by 1964-65 and he had become effectively a world-figure in
terms of human rights people and particularly the poor of this earth.
That's where he was going. That's the area you don't really get into
safely when you start talking about wealth, redistributing wealth.
Taking, diverting huge sums of money into social welfare programs and
health programs and educational programs at the grass roots.

It's important to have the details and the evidence of how this whole
thing took place and how he was taken from us. But what's more important
is to understand how such a leader comes forward. What his roots are.
What makes him so special in terms of all of the co-opting pressures
that are on people who emerge in leadership capacities? Why has there
been no one to replace him ever since? And why is there a strange
inaction in terms of the involvement of people in leadership and
organizations with respect to the major problems of the economic
situations of vast numbers of Americans in terms of the unequal
distribution of wealth in America and the quality of life of at least 30
million Americans and their children.

When you start going into that you begin to tread on toes in this
country, in the United Kingdom, and in most of the western world. When
you start associating with the poor of this planet and the exploitation
of what's happened to whole cultures and tribal cultures in Africa in
particular, and you see the results of the exploitation of western
colonial powers and when you want to see a movement to not only arrest
that process which still goes forward today under different guises but
to actually reverse it and to give an opportunity for people to control
their destinies and their own natural wealth, that's dangerous ground to
get on. So you have to deal with that another way.

King was committed, increasingly, to that kind of political view which
you will not hear about in terms of the `I have a dream' speech which is
typically what he is associated with. He wept in India as early as '60,
'61 when he was there. He had never seen such poverty in such a massive
scale. `How can people live like this?' I sympathize with that because
when I was a 12-year-old I couldn't get my middle-class kids in my
neighborhood to play baseball with me in the summer heat. So the only
way I could do it was to go across to the ghetto which was quite a
distance from where I lived, with a little brown bag, and played ball
with black kids all day. I did that all summer long just because I loved
the game. But it taught me a valuable lesson of how people were forced
to live. Because I would be a guest in their homes and I'd see the rats
running across the floor, Herbie Fields throwing his shoe at the rats.
Things like that. There's a lot of people live that like this. Why do
people live like this? Most of America doesn't see that. We are
residentially segregated society forever. King saw that, wanted to
bridge it and the solutions were too radical, too potentially dangerous.
Jefferson was an idol of his. With all of Jefferson's foibles, remember
he said, `You need a revolution every 20 years. You need to sweep the
room clean every 20 years,' said Mr. Jefferson. You need that
revolution. King believed that as well. How wise was Jefferson? Jack
Kennedy once said, when he had a dinner for all the living nobel prize
winners of the United States and they were all gathered around the
table, he lifted a toast and said `I'm going to toast you this evening
because never before has so much brilliance, so much wisdom, eaten in
this room, except when Mr. Jefferson dined alone.' That's the impact of
that perception, that political perception that Kennedy appreciated so
much. That's the background and the overview, I suppose, the summary of
the case as it is contained in the book and of my history of involvement
with it. In many ways I had put it behind me when this book was finished
and now I've had to come around and it's a pleasure to come and see
folks like you and talk to you. But there's a whole part of me that's
now in a whole other world. I convene a seminar on International Human
Rights at Oxford with the motto of our seminars being Non nobis solum
nati sumas, which means We exist not for ourselves alone. That's in
honor of Martin Luther King, whose son, Martin the 3rd opened the series
last year. So I've gone away from this and I spend a lot of time in
Caracas with Hugo Chavez who was at Oxford as a guest of my seminar [7]
and whose Bolivarian revolution I've come to believe in very much as a
continuation of the legacy of Martin King.

But I'm back in the throes of this as a result of the book tour. I'm
happy to be with you. Thank you for coming and I hope it has been useful
for you. I'll try to answer any questions that you have.

Question: I don't know if I heard correctly. Did you say that a police
officer shot Martin King?

William Pepper:Yes.

Q: And where does Loyd Jowers come in?

WP: He was out there in the brush area with him. When Betty saw him
coming in she said he was white as a sheet and his knees were all
covered in mud. He had obviously been kneeling. It had rained the night
before and it was pretty muddy out there. Which is why they cleaned the
area up thoroughly the next morning.

Q: What is it thought that he did? Did he fire too?

WP: No he didn't. He just was there to retrieve the gun and bring it
inside. That was his only role. At that point in time. He didn't do it.

Q: Is the policeman known? Who he is?

WP: I know who the policeman is, yes.

Q: It's mentioned in the book isn't it?

WP: Sorry -

Q: His name is mentioned in Orders To Kill . . . Earl -

WP: That's a very interesting story. I thought that Earl Clark was the
killer of Martin Luther King. He was a sharp-shooter, brilliant shooter,
hated King, racist guy who ran the rifle range for the Memphis Police
Department. I thought as early as 1988-89 that Clark was the killer, the
shooter. He died in, I believe it was '82, '83. I visited with his first
wife and interviewed her for a period of several hours with his son
sitting there, a young boy, I think he was about 15.

She gave him an alibi. She said `He came home that afternoon and he was
tired. He'd been on duty around-the-clock. He went to sleep. He asked me
to listen to the radio. If they called him, wake him up, and then run
and get his uniform from the cleaners and he would take a shower and get
ready to go back in.' She said that's what happened. She got this call
right after the assassination. She'd heard it on the radio, on the
dining room table. She went and she woke him up. He was asleep on the
sofa. He went to take his shower and she went off to get his uniform.
And she gave him that alibi. I thought, Why would she do this? There was
a lot of animosity. He divorced her. Why would she protect him? I
believed her and went away from Earl Clark for quite a period of time.
Then when Jowers came on the scene and he decided he would tell the
whole truth in pre-trial interviews and depositions; when he, to Andy
Young and Dexter King, separately, and then to Dexter and myself, told
the whole story, he implicated Earl Clark. And he said, `Clark was out
there in the bushes.' I remember saying to him, `Are you sure that Clark
was the shooter? Clark was the one that gave you gun?' He said, `Yeah
I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.' I wondered why he would even say it
that way. And Clark was in on all the planning sessions. So I came back
to believe that that was the case and put Mrs. Clark on the stand in the
trial and she told the same story and she stuck to it. She held up well
under cross-examination. And then I found the young man who was the son
of the owner of the cleaning establishment. He was, and is, on the
island of Guam, a school teacher. I found this guy (his name is [Thomas]
Dent) and I said to him, `Let me ask you a question: Where were you on
the 4th of April when Martin King was killed?' He said, `I was working
in the store.' `How late were you opened?' He said, `Dad shut the store
at about 6:15 or 6:20, shortly after the killing. I had gone about ten
to or five to six. It took about 20 minutes to get home, something like
that. Dad was home for dinner at about 6:35, 6:40.' I said, `Did you see
Mrs. Clark come in and get Earl Clark's uniform? Did you know who Earl
Clark is?' `Oh yes, of course I know who Earl Clark is. He was a buddy
of my father's. We knew him well.' I said, `Did you see Mrs. Clark?' He
said, `Well I never saw Mrs. Clark. In fact I don't think I ever even
seen her at all.' `You mean she didn't come into the shop that
afternoon?' He said, `On no, no.' And then I tried to put two and two
together. King was killed at 6:01. She woke him up and then she went to
the store. We drove the route and even asked her how long does it take
to get there? She said about 20-25 minutes. So she clearly could not
have gotten there when the store was open anyway. It was already shut on
the basis of what young Mr. Dent said. I questioned him further and
finally he said to me, `She definitely didn't come in to pick up his
uniform and I don't even remember that she ever did that. He used to
pick up his own uniforms and drop by and have a word with my father. And
in fact, that afternoon he came into the store at about ten past five,
quarter past five. He went in the back with my father and he was there
for about fifteen or twenty minutes.' I asked, `You're sure of that?' He
said, `I'm sure of that.' So Clark was in the store, talking to the
father. I said `So why would he talk to your father?' He said `They were
hunting buddies. Dad used to provide him with specially packed
cartridges. I don't know if that's what they did that day but he went
back there.' So that broke her alibi entirely. She was clearly lying. He
was not there. That doesn't mean he was the shooter. But the alibi was
gone, he was somewhere else. So I went back to him and came away with
the conclusion, based on what Jowers had said that he probably was the
killer. Then there have been some developments since then which lead me
to believe that yes he was out in the back there with Jowers. But there
was another man there as well. And the other man was the actual killer
of Martin Luther King.

I convene a seminar on International Human Rights at Oxford with the
motto of our seminars being Non nobis solum nati sumas, which means We
exist not for ourselves alone. That's in honor of Martin Luther King,
whose son, Martin the 3rd opened the series last year. So I've gone away
from this and I spend a lot of time in Caracas with Hugo Chavez who was
at Oxford as a guest of my seminar and whose Bolivarian revolution I've
come to believe in very much as a continuation of the legacy of Martin
King.

Q: The government has so much power and resources on their hands. How
can we effectively organize now, grassroots organizing against war or
civil rights and even justice?

WP: If you look around -- I see the building of a movement now that I
haven't seen in a long time because of the threatened assault on Iraq. I
think that there is a developing movement in terms of the anti-Iraqi war
effort that is coming on. But also over the last several years the
anti-globalization campaigners have brought a tremendous amount of force
to building a coalition around the world. It's not just (of course) an
American threat anymore. There is that movement.

It's a question of linking up, it's a question of networking and linking
up and finding out who -- in this community, for example, there is a
strong anti-war movement from what I understand -- who is a part of
that? It's a question of linking up, developing the synergy and being
concerned to move it not just in terms of these major international
issues which people bind together in solidarity over but local community
issues as well. You have to relate the many ways of what's happening to
you in the local community, in terms of jobs, in terms of
discrimination, in terms of police problems -- you have to relate that
to what's going on all over the world. The number of prisons that are
being built in a state like California. Why are prisons being
increasingly built? Who are the prisoners? Who is the prison population?
What percentage of young blacks in this country have not served some
time in prison? What happens to disruptive community leaders? What is
going on in terms of that? Is that a government policy? What has been
the result of the amount of drugs that have been brought into
communities, urban communities, black, hispanic communities across this
country now? For many years -- 30, 40 years -- there have been drug
problems sapping, destroying the strength of local leadership by getting
people hooked on this stuff. Where does that come from? If you look at
how LSD was developed (for example) and if you look at the whole history
of the importation of cocaine from Columbia through Mena Airport in
Arkansas when Clinton was Governor of Arkansas and how that was spread
by gangs throughout the country and sold and what happened to the
profits. [8] It's a devastating situation in terms of controlling a
population. But it shouldn't shock people. This is what's going on.

The Northwoods plan -- anybody hear the Northwoods plan? Anybody know
what the Northwoods plan was? You know, you know. That tells you
something about this government that shouldn't shock you but should make
you aware. Northwoods was a plan that was developed by General Lemnitzer
when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That plan called for
the killing of American citizens on the streets of a number of cities in
this country under the guise of having those killings be done by Cubans
in order to justify an American invasion of Cuba. That was Lemnitzer's
plan back in 1962. When Jack Kennedy saw it he was absolutely horrified.
That they would kill Americans and use that as a means for then invading
Cuba. [9]

When you see these things there is nothing you should put past the
capability of government to do, either in propagandizing its people and
killing its people, enslaving its people, imprisoning its people;
whatever it has to do to maintain power, it does. We were so naïve back
in the `old days' as I like to say, and we had to learn, I'm afraid, the
hard way.

Martin King was naïve, totally naïve. He never stayed overnight at the
Lorraine Motel. He came there for day meetings but never stayed
overnight. I know this because I know the black detectives who used to
guard him and where they were. I know where he stayed every time he was
in Memphis. He never stayed at the Lorraine. But he came to the Lorraine
on the third of April because he was told This is where you have to go
to show your solidarity with the poor people and stay overnight Martin,
don't go to the Rivermont or one of those other hotels. He was supposed
to be in a court room, 202, down below where he was safe, protected. And
somehow, mysteriously he got moved to room 306. Because there was a
`request' that he be moved to room 306 so he could have a better view.
He was manipulated. He didn't have proper security. Of course he paid
the ultimate price.

But if they want to kill anybody I suppose they can anyway. Every day
I'd go into court in Memphis, I'd get a phone call the night before or
early in the morning about how I was never going to make it through the
day. If I managed to get into the Courthouse alive, I certainly wouldn't
get back to my hotel alive [laughs] -- they'd get me going in or coming
out. But that was just to unnerve me I think. They missed their chance a
long time. Q: The Mafia in Memphis: where did they get their orders, was
their control from Chicago, New York, New Orleans? --

WP: New Orleans, [Carlos] Marcello. There was a Marcello contract.
Marcello was involved in a joint venture with the 902nd Military
Intelligence Group who coordinated this overall effort. Marcello would
receive stolen weapons from arsenals and camps and forts. They would be
trucked in to him. He would then put them on a flatboat, they'd go
around into the Gulf and be taken off in Houston, repackaged and sold
into Latin/South America and they'd split the profits 50-50. Glenda
Grabow who came forward, ultimately was one of our witnesses who
identified Raul -- who was the first one to really do that -- used to go
down with Raul and some of these people to pick up these weapons. So she
came to know about that. This was a Marcello contract.

Q: In terms of those four assassinations: both Kennedys and Malcom X and
Martin Luther King, you have done work in this area that no one else has
done. We know that there were two sniper teams from Army intelligence
that had King and Young in their scopes at the time that he was shot.
They didn't do the shooting but they were prepared to do the shooting if
the contracted killer didn't do the job. So we have those identities, we
have those shooters, we have a direct connection with the state
apparatus. We have this country that has a national holiday; the same
country that killed King is the country that has a national holiday.
This stuff is suppressed but the fact of the matter is you've done an
incredible job. People know there are other shooters in the Kennedy
case. But they haven't been taken to court, there hasn't been a jury
trial, it hasn't been identified who the killers were. In all of these
cases you've done a breakthrough job and I want to acknowledge and thank
you for that.

WP: It's been a long haul, a long expensive haul.

Q: [same person] The one thing I did want to ask, I don't know if you
want to go into this. Given that we now know that governments are
capable of killing their own citizens and given the experience of 9-11
where, just to mention two items: the stock trading on the day
before [10] and the fact that the normal intercept procedures for planes
in U.S. airspace off course for upwards of 15 minutes -- and they were
off course for an hour or more -- were not followed [11]; if you think
it's possible given these four assassinations -- Gore Vidal has argued
this point [12] but no other single, famous American intellectual is
prepared to go to the point . . . of saying the government let it [9-11]
happen [unintelligible -- indicated in the following with ". . ."] . . .

WP: I would say you can't put anything past this government or any other
government of this sort. Because the people who are in power,
officially, are really only foot soldiers for the people who run things
from the shadows. 9-11 has personally given me a lot of difficulty. But
this is not just something that is unique to the United States.

Lord Salisbury planned the assassination of Queen Victoria. He had his
guys go get two IRA shooters to kill Queen Victoria, put them on the
route, and as the Queen was going down the route and the shooters were
getting ready -- boom! -- out come the Special Branch guys and they
arrested them. They took them away and that was the basis for offensive
action against the IRA. This is what governments do and have always
done. The Brits have taught the Americans over the years and taught them
well. 9-11 is a problem that you have to look at carefully. You have to
analyze what's going on. I can tell you just one anecdote because I
haven't done any work on it. I represent the government of Pakistan on
asset search-and-recovery work. It has to do with recovering money
that's been stolen from the government by previous Prime Ministers.
That's what I do for them but because of that I had established
relationships with some people who were there, very thoughtful people, a
couple of whom are on the General Staff. They asked me to draw up a
proposal with respect to what the government's policy should be in terms
of cooperating or not with the United States. I opposed strongly the
collaboration with the United States in terms of the Afghanistan
adventure because of a whole variety of reasons I can't go into right
now.

You can't put anything past this government or any other government of
this sort. Because the people who are in power, officially, are really
only foot soldiers for the people who run things from the shadows. 9-11
has personally given me a lot of difficulty. But this is not just
something that is unique to the United States.

One of the things I learned in the course of the discussions was that
the head of ISI, that's Pakistani Intelligence, is a fellow called
General Mahmoud Ahmad. General Mahmoud had instructed Sheikh Umar who
was an undercover operative for them -- a covert liaison operative with
Muslim groups: the Taliban as well as Kashmiris -- he had instructed and
authorized Umar to send $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in Florida. That's not
even denied anymore. When that became public Mahmoud was immediately
removed from his position as head of ISI and put under house arrest so
no one could interview him.

That one little fact is very troubling to me because it means that
somehow, the head of Pakistani intelligence through Sheikh Umar, one of
his operatives, sent $100,000 here to the United States to a Florida
bank account of one of the hijackers, a leader of one of the hijacking
operations, Mohammed Atta. Now how did that happen? What is that all
about? [13]

There are only two options: (1) either this was a rogue operation and
ISI has a number of fundamentalists, even in the General Staff, who were
involved with them; or (2) that it was programmed by a foreign
intelligence agency that had been running ISI in the anti-Soviet
activities in Afghanistan for a long time. The Brits had an MI6-guy (for
example) in residence all the time there. I don't know the answer to
that. And when I ask friends of mine about that they don't know. Q: He
was in Washington --

WP: Mahmoud was in Washington at the time on September 11th. But I don't
honestly have the answer. All I can do is raise that question which is
troubling. And you might know that Umar is the fellow who's been
convicted of killing Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist.
The President of Pakistan has said quietly but publically he would never
allow Sheikh Umar to be extradited to the United States. That he would
hang him himself first. I think that's probably because of things that
he knows. [14]

Q: I have a couple of comments. I haven't read your book yet so I don't
know if you cover these or not. One is about the mysterious death of the
Judge who supposedly died of the heart attack. I saw a play many years
ago . . . the CIA has a poison gas they use to assassinate people with,
they spray in people's faces that simulates a heart attack that
supposedly is undetectable. The other comment, many years ago I saw a
couple of . . . quotations attributed to . . . One was that he wasn't
interested in really finding out who killed King (I'm not sure what his
reason was) and the other is he was saying something about how he
thought that somehow King was better off dead. Do you know anything
about that?

WP: Andy Young often said he thinks that the movement itself, somehow,
initially anyway, benefitted from the martyrdom of Martin King. When I
met with Andy for several hours for the first time after I learned about
him being a target, and it was actually well after it was published in
Orders To Kill, he was shocked and I think his perspective changed.
Because he then became involved with us. He met with Loyd Jowers and he
has become convinced that this was an official conspiracy. I think he
has sobered up now. He's quite a different guy with respect to the
assassination.

Q: . . . It just always strikes me it that the work you did was a very a
dangerous enterprise . . .

WP: . . . That was always a possibility and we had to confront those
problems of various types of setups that even went beyond killing. But I
think they missed their chance. For a long time I worked very quietly.
No one paid any attention, shrugged their shoulders, and I didn't
attract much attention. Then all of a sudden after the television trial
[in Spring 1993] things started to heat up a bit and it started to get a
bit worrying. But they suppressed anything having to do with Jowers. So
I think they still thought they were safe and they could just beat us
down.

When the King family then became formally and publically involved it was
too late. I don't think at that point in time they could do anything to
me. I think they missed their chance. I've just time for one more -- Q:
Does Hoover have any involvement with MLK's death?

WP: He knew everything that was going on, he was aware of it. He didn't
participate in the assassination but he ran the cover-up. It was his job
to take control of the investigation which he did and he ran the
cover-up. That's what he did.

          The ability of the net energy plus people in the US to
understand what is happening and how and why has been surprisingly poor.
This general ignorance has been helped along by corporate control of the
media (which, for this reason, I call the `corporate media,' to
distinguish it from the independent media), `info-warfare' and covert
operations. The more public form of information warfare promotes
divide-and-conquer tactics and incentives (men vs. women, rich vs. poor,
black vs. white, Christian vs. non-Christian, Republican vs. Democrat
and so forth). The more private form of covert operations includes
targeting by tax and regulatory authorities, blackmail, financial and
sexual bribery that support `control file' systems, assassination and
the use various other forms of covert operations that diminish a more
general communication about what is happening and why.
          A review of the economics helps us understand why and how. If
we can presume that 10% of revenues is a reasonable advertising and
marketing budget for a high-margin industry, then organized crime in
America as measured by the Department of Justice's estimate of $500
billion to $1 trillion in annual money laundering through the US
financial system has about $50 billion to spend annually on `marketing'
in ways more subtle than explicit Madison Avenue T.V. and magazine ads.
Add that amount to the government budgets that can be used to police
franchises, and the amount of money spent on controlling and influencing
the `official reality' is stupefying. When an understanding of the
amount spent to mislead is combined with an understanding of our
intentional failure of disclosure regarding government investment and
performance, particularly place-based disclosure, the intentional and
increasing centralization of economic and political power by unlawful
means can be much better understood.
          The advantage of such a system to current US leadership is
clear. By centralizing the holding of equity in local institutions or in
outside institutions that affect local matters (whether through
McDonalds franchises or national telecommunications companies) and
denying equity to those who do not support the centralization process,
the few at the top can amass the political base of operations and
resources they and their global investors need to dominate global
political and economic power. It is fair to say that that if we could
eliminate narcotics trafficking and the so-called `War on Drugs', the US
political and business leadership would be more likely to resemble a
representative sampling of the US population than a G-7 gathering of
global financial elites.
          As new technology promotes meaner and far more subtle and
invisible forms of economic warfare and social control, the
centralization of political and economic power in the US continues with
the latest transformation from the War on Drugs to the War on Terrorism.
The latter moves the targeting of continuous `clamp down' supported by
sophisticated relational database technology and digital surveillance to
whiter, wealthier and better-educated populations at the same time that
this population's economic and political power and resources are
diminishing.
          The Solari challenge is to create a transformation out of the
current win-lose situation in which we find ourselves. The key is to
provide a trustworthy flow of information locally that -- when combined
with equity incentive systems -- promotes and incentivizes high
standards of responsibility and accountability going forward. Only a
system that creates significantly greater amounts of wealth can do so.
The fundamental principle that all humans want more energy -- not less-
along with the mysteries of freedom and intelligence tell us that it is
possible.
          Making it possible starts with increasing the flow of energy
to the net energy plus people and moving them back into leadership
positions locally. This can happen in a model in which a portion of the
resulting capital gains flows to the capital that was amassed through
organized crime and government corruption. In exchange for offering the
leadership of organized crime a `double' on their ill-gotten gains, the
local `net energy plus' people can buy back control of their local
areas. This alignment is necessary to achieve breakthroughs in
reengineering place-based government investment. Without it, the risks
to both sides are significant.
          This is why the Solari Stock Plan is at the very core of the
solari model. The economic productivity that can be unleashed when the
high performance people are in control subject to traditional conditions
of fiduciary accountability and performance are so extraordinary that
`buying' our way into such a system turns out to be surprisingly
economic for all concerned.

In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of
Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff code-named OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This
document, titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba"
was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March
13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a
request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the
Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various
pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals --
part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose --
included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United
States, developing a fake "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami
area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," including
"sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)," faking a
Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a "Remember
the Maine" incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then
blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that
Operation Northwoods "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the
U.S. government."

When you start associating with the poor of this planet and the
exploitation of what's happened to whole cultures and tribal cultures in
Africa in particular, and you see the results of the exploitation of
western colonial powers and when you want to see a movement to not only
arrest that process which still goes forward today under different
guises but to actually reverse it and to give an opportunity for people
to control their destinies and their own natural wealth, that's
dangerous ground to get on. . . .
        King was committed, increasingly, to that kind of political view
which you will not hear about in terms of the `I have a dream' speech
which is typically what he is associated with. He wept in India as early
as '60, '61 when he was there. He had never seen such poverty in such a
massive scale. `How can people live like this?' . . . King saw that,
wanted to bridge it and the solutions were too radical, too potentially
dangerous. Jefferson was an idol of his. With all of Jefferson's
foibles, remember he said, `You need a revolution every 20 years. You
need to sweep the room clean every 20 years,' said Mr. Jefferson. You
need that revolution. King believed that as well.

Martin Luther King Assassination

Interview with Dr. William Pepper - February 14, 1997

by Paul DeRienzo

The world was shocked on April 4, 1968 when a sniper's bullet put an end
to the life of the nation's best known advocate of non-violent
resistance to injustice. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was planning a
massive poor people's march in Washington DC, scheduled for the summer
of 1968, and the civil rights leader had already come to oppose the
United States deepening involvement in Vietnam. King was already a
target of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered his agents to
"neutralize" anyone who might rise to be what Hoover called a "black
messiah," as part of Hoover's COINTELPRO operation of illegal spying and
dirty tricks aimed at destroying the Black liberation movement.

King had come to Memphis, Tennessee to support a sanitation workers
strike. He was shot and killed as stood on the porch of his room in the
Lorraine Motel. James Earl Ray, who confessed to the crime, was arrested
in London after a still unexplained world wide jaunt to allude
authorities. Not long after confessing, Ray tried to recant his story,
but he's been denied a new trial on seven different occasions.Ray's
lawyer is Dr. William Pepper, who is also the author of "Orders to Kill,
The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King". Pepper says new
investigative techniques could prove once and for all that Ray did not
shoot King. Pepper spoke with Paul DeRienzo, an investigative reporter
for radio station WBAI in New York City

Dr. William Pepper: James Earl Ray should get a trial precisely because
he's never had a trial and because he was coerced into pleading guilty
back in 1969, and because a considerable amount of new evidence has been
uncovered that shows that he is actually innocent of the crime. James of
course has been trying to get this trial since three days after the
guilty plea on March 10, 1969.

Paul DeRienzo: Who advised Ray to plead guilty?

Pepper: Percy Foreman coerced him into pleading guilty. Percy came in
two months after they'd been negotiating a plea behind Ray's back and
told him he had to plead guilty because Ray was already deemed guilty in
public opinion and he'd be convicted by a Memphis jury. Foreman told Ray
his family would be harassed, his father, a probation violator, would be
sent back to prison and they'd fry Ray in the electric chair. Foreman
added that his own health was so bad he wouldn't be able to give Ray an
adequate defense anyway.

Foreman told Ray to plead guilty and he'd then give his brother $500, if
Ray didn't cause any problems at the guilty plea hearing, and he could
take that $500 and hire a lawyer to set aside the plea. Foreman actually
put that in writing.

DeRienzo: Did Foreman have had connections to a man known as Raoul, a
person that James Earl Ray says was part of the conspiracy?

Pepper: Raoul was the chap who controlled Ray and I've uncovered a
witness who knew Foreman very well and said that Foreman told her at one
point in 1978 that Ray was innocent but that he had to be sacrificed.
Foreman also told this woman, who had known Raoul for many years, that
he knew Raoul and that he would try to intervene with him to protect
her.

DeRienzo: Is there evidence Raoul exists?

Pepper: He exists and we have four people who identified him and I know
who he is, where he is, what his phone number is, everything about him
that one needs. All I need is a criminal trial so I can have him
subpoenaed.

DeRienzo: Who is Raoul? Is he a government informant, Mafia informant,
what was his role in this?

Pepper: He was associated with the Marcello organized crime group out of
New Orleans and he also had intelligence ties.

DeRienzo: Are you saying that Martin Luther King was assassinated by
some conspiracy involving the Mafia and United States government?

Pepper: Yes.

DeRienzo: Could you briefly describe the nature of such a conspiracy and
why it would arise?

Pepper: It arose because they were committed to not letting Martin
Luther King bring half a million people to Washington in 1968, and
because his growing opposition to the Vietnam war was becoming such a
problem at home that he was no longer tolerable. The descent into
Washington of 500,000 or so people who were going to camp there was
unacceptable because they believed it was going to turn into a
rebellion, they didn't have the troops to put it down and General
Westmorland wanted another 200,000 troops in Vietnam. So at all costs
Martin Luther King was not going to be allowed to lead that group to
Washington and he was going to be stopped.

DeRienzo: Looking at you book "Orders to Kill", I see among the
photographs a picture of a number of military officer, the Special
Forces officers at Fort Bragg. Why is their picture included in your
book?

Pepper: Because the 20th Special Forces Group was a backup unit in
Memphis if the civilian contractor failed. If the contractor was unable
to carry out the contract and kill Martin Luther King then there was an
eight man team, the Alpha 184 team, in Memphis that would make sure the
job was done. I know all the members of the team, their names, rank,
serial numbers, where they came from, the details of their briefing at
4:30 AM on the 4th of April and where they were located in Memphis at
the time of the killing. They did not kill Dr. King, but they were there
as a back-up to do the job.

DeRienzo: Dr. William Pepper, describe yourself, only because I want to
assure the readers that you're not a conspiracy nut, or a conspiracy
theorist, but a person with a lot of experience. Tell us about yourself?

Pepper: I practice International law primarily, I'm a Barrister in
England and an attorney in the United States. I was a friend of Martin
Luther King in 1967 and 68, the last year of his life, after I got back
from Vietnam where I was a journalist. He asked to meet with me and I
came to know him and work with him. He asked me to lead a group called
the National Conference on New Politics, an umbrella organization
designed to remove the Johnson administration from office.

DeRienzo: So, you're not a conspiracy nut or theorist?

Pepper: I've not been involved in conspiracies. I've been involved in
this case because in 1977 Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Martin's friend,
asked me to interview James Early Ray who I thought was the killer. When
they killed Martin I went with Benjamin Spock to the memorial march in
Memphis and then I walked away from politics. Nine years later Rev.
Abernathy came back and said he wanted me to interrogate Ray. That
started this for me on October 17, 1978 and I've been involved in the
case ever since. It was 10 years after that when I eventually agreed to
represent Ray. I agreed to represent Ray only when I became totally
convinced that he was a patsy and was used by forces well beyond his
comprehension to carry out this murder. But I have not been involved in
investigating the other assassinations.

I handled Robert Kennedy's Senate campaign as a citizen chairman in
Westchester county, New York when he ran in 1964. I was quite a young
person when they killed Kennedy in 1968 and I looked at that as most
people did and assumed they had the right guy. But I have not
investigated that case. I don't dwell on these things, but I've been
involved in this one and its been difficult to let go.

DeRienzo: It's mind-boggling to me as a reporter to have someone so
coolly. so rationally, describe such a monstrous crime. What happened in
the initial investigation and how was it that a conspiracy of such
monstrous proportions could get past so many people for so long?

Pepper: It didn't get past them, they were part of it. The conspiracy to
kill Martin Luther King went to the highest levels of the American
government. It's been covered-up all this time to the present and I'm
not optimistic that we're ever going to break through because the forces
behind the assassination are formidable. It's not a question of "getting
by" people, the assassination was the result of covert efforts, and not
so covert efforts, to make sure the truth doesn't get to the American
people. The media have been a part of the cover-up and they have been
controlled and influenced each step of the way.

My book "Orders to Kill" has never been reviewed or even considered in
the United States, yet "USA Today" prints an article this past week that
asserts the book was "dismissed." It's not been dismissed, it's never
been considered.

The truth will be, at the end of the day, whether we can put our
witnesses on the stand, and they can put their evidence out there for
the world to see, and the state can do its best by cross-examining them
to break down there credibility, but I want that done in front of a
jury. We want Ray to have an opportunity to have that trial, to have
that evidence out there and let a jury decide. It's my belief that in a
New York minute the jury will decide that James Earl Ray is not guilty,
just as a television jury decided he was not guilty after they heard a
fraction of this evidence back in 1993 when we tried this case for
television over a ten day period.

DeRienzo: Do you think they're going to give James Earl Ray a trial
before he passes?

Pepper: I don't know. I hope they will, the King family coming forward
has been a great assistance, I'm very grateful to them and admire their
courage, but the powers that have kept this truth suppressed so long,
denied them the truth so long, even denied the defense the right to
testify or examine the murder weapon for so long, these powers have an
arrogance that knows no bounds. All we can do is keep going up against
then as long as Ray is alive because when he dies it will not be
possible to establish the truth of his innocence in a court of law.

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