Frank ignored the color discrepancy.
Posner ignored the entire issue.
Loyd Jowers
As set out elsewhere and in evidentiary detail in the 1999 civil trial, Loyd Jowers’s role in the assassination is remarkably clear. Jowers himself, near the end of his life, told Dexter King and me, and then separately Dexter and Andrew Young, of what his attorney Lewis Garrison correctly termed the small (though critical) role he played initially at the request of Frank Liberto. In the earlier work I discuss Posner’s attempt to discredit Jowers. Suffice it to say that Jowers did initially lie about his involvement in the assassination and perpetuated the lie until nearly the end of his life when he revealed his role and confirmed the innocence of James Earl Ray.
It is unfortunately true that a couple of investigators working with me along with a television producer developed a money-making orientation to the case and muddied the waters. Their actions were reprehensible and certainly served the purpose of giving a means of distracting people from the truth. At the end of the day, the truth has won out and the official story and its proponents have been swept away.
The Role of the Military
Posner refers to our findings about the role of the military as a “hoax.” My rogue local investigators—who I deliberately kept out of the loop—stressed that I was naïve and would likely believe anything with a conspiratorial ring to it.
In fact, we kept the military aspect of our work very close to the vest and away from the investigative team. The key liaison to the military informants was Steve Tompkins. Steve was not hired by me. He was given expenses and expense money for the ex-special forces officers who had fled to Mexico and whom he extensively interviewed with questions I provided over many months.
I have total confidence that Steve provided me with the best information he could, and I remain profoundly grateful. He is a man of integrity and a true patriot. He did not give me the correct names of the soldiers in order to protect his sources and this is, of course, acceptable practice, but I do wish he had told me that he was following this policy. Nevertheless, I deeply regret the harassment Steve faced as a result of trying to help me. Steve’s frustration and harrassment is reflected in his alleged claim that I embellished his series when, in fact, he was only allowed to have one article and his work for me brought him nothing but grief. In fact, his one article and the reference to the Alpha 184 Sniper Unit, which caught my eye, was stated in only a few lines. It was this reference that caused me to meet with Steve and plead with him to help, which he reluctantly agreed to do. He was not hired as a “consultant” as Posner states, and only paid expenses for himself and the soldiers. Neither was a copy of the cablegram orders obtained by subpoena, as Posner states, but was given to Steve by one of the soldiers. He then gave it to me. Neither of us could imagine one of these grunts living in rural Mexico fabricating an official cable order document with such sophistication.
In the updated chapter on the military, in this work, I consider this issue in some detail, as well as a piece of disinformation contained in an affidavit by Daniel Ellsberg which he gave to Mark Lane in 1978.
I have, to this day, no doubt that there was an Alpha 184 Unit in Memphis at the time of the assassination, but they were a back-up unit which was not used. The cable message that Steve gave to me could never have been fabricated by the grunts with whom Steve was meeting.
I prefer to leave Posner’s work at this point, having, I believe, amply demonstrated the wide range of fatal flaws in his effort to support the official story.
I believe that Judge Arthur Hanes’s experience with Posner best reflects the writer’s real orientation and purpose. Hanes said that when Posner called him, he invited him to come down and he would show him the evidence that proved James Earl Ray was not guilty of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.—in fact, that he was innocent of the crime.
Judge Hanes said he never heard from Posner again.
Enough said about Mr. Posner’s investigation, or lack of one, and the negligent sloppiness at best of his Random House editor and publisher, and the gullibility (if that is what it was) of Tina Brown and Harold Evans, his publishing supporters and sponsors.
More recently, Gerald Posner seems to have put forward another foot wrong that will likely fatally destroy any remaining credibility.
This has resulted from the multiple incidents of plagiarism that are attributed to his pen and which resulted in his being dropped or resigning from writing for the Daily Beast, which had published a piece plagiarized from the Miami Herald.
It appears that this was not the only such incident. Slate writer Jack Shafer reported on February 8, 2010, that he and a colleague uncovered additional examples of Posner’s plagiarism in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a number of other Miami Herald articles, and a healthcare journalism blog.
Then, on May 20, 2010, the Miami New Times alleged that in two books, Why America Slept and Secrets of the Kingdom, Posner lifted a total of thirty-five passages from the works of others. This latest evidence was apparently provided to his publisher, Random House. They are investigating.
In response, Posner claimed that New Times was part of a “coordinated” effort (conspiracy?) to destroy his book, but he did not dispute any of the reports in the story.
I suppose I should consider myself fortunate. Harold Evans, then president of Random House, told my agent at the time, Dick Marek, for Orders to Kill that they would not be interested in seeing that book. Harold Evans’s wife, Tina Brown, was then the editor of the Daily Beast.
Hellbound on His Trail, Hampton Sides
Sides is one of the most recent writers (before Tavis Smiley, whose work I cover at the beginning of this book) who has come on to support the official story. He begins with James’s last days in prison and he immediately puts himself inside James’s head. With full-blown speculation and no evidence, he sets out what he (Sides) believes James must have been thinking. He covers the escape, step-by-step, as though he were there, even describing James’s anxiety as a guard checked the breadbox on the bench leaving the prison. His work is not only pure fiction but despicable to the memory of an innocent man.
The author, of course, does not know what we have learned (covered elsewhere in detail), that James’s escape was blessedly organized and paid for by J. Edgar Hoover, and that his number-two, Clyde Tolson, carried the money to their Dixie Mafia operative, who took it to the warden at the prison.
Incredibly, the author goes from James’s escape to his time in Puerto Vallarta. He omits any discussion of his earning money working on his way to Canada, which was to be his gateway out of North America and where he met Raul. Given author Sides’s disinformation orientation, any discussion of the Canadian experience would not fit. But to leave out this entire period, including his assumption of a new identity and his decision to return to the United States, travel to Birmingham and somehow come up with the money to buy a car, is bizarre.
Also strange is his quick and unreal focus on J. Edgar Hoover. While earlier he took it upon his own self to pronounce Dr. King’s marriage as “crumbling,” something I—who knew him and Coretta during that time—never noticed; he only gives the most peripheral reference to Edgar’s homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson, or his control by the mob. He appears never to have read my friend Tony Summe’s exhaustive treatment, or for that matter any other which dealt honestly with this despicable hypocrite. He, who tried to impose his public morality on the nation while living a totally contradictory life, was, in my view, Mr. Roosevelt’s biggest mistake. It was not, as Sides pretends, that he was archaic, with values out of place. He was a murderer using tax dollars to carry out his killings and the destruction of lives and careers, while he lived a life he publicly condemned. How can such an evil person be excused, as does Sides—as simply being a “living anachronism”?
We subpoenaed Sides for a deposition in order to deal with his contentions. He refused to
appear.
Soledad O’Brien
More recently, in the television documentary arena, we have seen the CNN documentary narrated and put forward by Soledad O’Brien.
The first half of the program was dedicated to James and his background and history. Whilst the program notably failed to provide a motive as to why this escaped convict would even consider such an act, and racism had been excluded by the HSCA investigation, it was hinted at by a reference to his refusal to go to a work farm attached to the Missouri prison because of the number of blacks in that facility. In fact, James was afraid of being tied into drug activity that was going on there and end up having his term extended. He would regularly roll dice with black coworkers when he worked in a shoe factory.
The program went on to allege that he and his brother robbed a bank in Alton, Illinois, on July 12, 1967. This allegedly was the source of his funds, so he did not need the handler he identified as Raul, whom we would eventually identify. As discussed earlier, closer to the time in 1978, I spoke with the president of the bank as well as the chief of police, and both told me that the Ray brothers had never been suspects. In fact, they believed that they knew who committed the robbery, but did not have enough proof to charge them. Further, they confirmed that, despite mainstream published reports, they had never been interviewed by the congressional investigators, the FBI, or the reporting media’s (New York Times) investigative reporter, Wendell Rawls Jr.
In the second half of the program, the disinformation ran rampant; just a few examples illustrate this point. Since this evidence has been discussed in detail elsewhere, the reader’s sufferance is requested as I repeat it in order to contrast the litany of facts with CNN’s disgraceful distortion.
The failure to match the throw-down rifle to the death slug became “inconclusive.” What does that mean? There was no ballistics match. The gun was not and could not be regarded as the murder weapon, and was introduced into evidence as such. Yet it remains mounted in the Civil Rights Museum as precisely that—now with CNN’s blessing.
We had four witnesses who saw figures in the bushes (one a New York Times reporter, Earl Caldwell), two observed the shooter coming down over the wall, another (Reverend James Orange) saw smoke kicked up and rising from the bushes, and another who saw the owner of the Grill which backed onto the Lorraine Motel, rush from the bushes past her into his kitchen, still carrying the smoking gun he took from the shooter. CNN convened all of this evidence into one “unreliable” witness.
The next morning that crime scene was cut down and cleaned. The CNN report supported the official story that the shot came from the bathroom window, so whatever happened to the bushes was deemed unimportant. It was well-known that we had a reliable witness who saw the bathroom door open with the light on, minutes before the shooting, and no one inside. It was empty, of course, because the shot came from the bushes. A clip from a CBS interview with a roomer who saw someone running down the hall was cut off just before the reporter showed him a photo of James and he said that was not the man he saw. The man carrying the throw-down bundle of items that James was told to leave in the room (which also contained the throw-down gun) dropped them in a doorway and got into the second Mustang and drove away.
We had a witness who identified that Mustang as having Arkansas plates. It was parked south of James’s Mustang. We had two witnesses (one from the Corps of Engineers) and signed statements, evidencing that James drove away from the rooming house about twenty minutes before the shooting. All of this was known and put under oath, and ignored by CNN.
Perhaps the most egregious action involved the use of the aged captain of the fire station, diagonally opposite the motel. When I learned from the military source that a Psy-Ops unit of two photographers was on the roof of the station, and one of my investigators interviewed both army photographers, I sought out the captain of the fire station, ten years before the documentary. At that earlier time he testified under oath that he put them on the roof, watched them unpack their still cameras, and then left them there. He never saw them again. Then nine years later, CNN puts on this old man who is clearly confused about what he did back then and may not even have remembered his courtroom testimony. They use that interview along with a photograph of the roof taken at a time when the soldiers would have had ample time to disappear to assert that they were never there.
It gets worse. When, during my interview, I suggested to the CNN reporter that they interview the captain about the presence of these Psy-Ops photographers, I was told that he had died. They obviously did not want me to speak with him. He was still alive. There was more of the same, but surely, this is enough to constitute an insult to the memory and legacy of Dr. King, an injustice to James Earl Ray, and a violation of every tenet of fair and objective reporting.
At this point, it appears entirely reasonable, in light of this sordid history, of disinformation with collaboration between mainstream media and the government, to conclude that the more we learn about contemporary publishing and news reporting in the United States, the more accurate does it appear was Carl Bernstein’s conclusion in Rolling Stone in October 1977 about the extraordinary degree of influence and control over—and actual working presence in all aspects of print, audio, and visual media by the intelligence community and its assigned agents. The willingness of corporate media to collaborate and the consolidation of that collaboration has, for the most part, made it impossible for a free and independent press to operate in this Republic.
The remaining, missing point of this picture of disinformation and information control is the cooperative activity of a number of seemingly progressive, investigative journalists and researchers. These are a coterie of establishment liberal professionals who come on to assist the government’s position in cases and extremely sensitive issues like political assassination. These individuals have usually developed respect and credibility within the progressive community over a period of time as activist opponents of official government positions and actions. They have this developed credibility; thus, when they elect to support—or just ignore—the official government position on a particular issue or action, they have the ability to undercut dissent.
Specifically, how does a new untold history ignore the evidence of official involvement in a wide range of political assassinations at home and abroad, along with a wide range of corporate domination of the public life of the Republic, and governmental involvement in crimes against humanity across the globe?
A well-known and respected Boston–area professor, who is highly regarded for his well-informed criticism of US government foreign policy, has always minimized the significance of our history of political assassinations. He told me that he had no idea that anyone had done the work I had undertaken on the Dr. King assassination. By that time, I had published two books on the case, setting out the evidence of Ray’s innocence and the existence of a conspiracy.
And he said he was not aware.
Another investigative journalist well up on the ladder of credibility in the progressive community, also commented, factually incorrectly, on why and how Dr. King decided to oppose the war.
Another, a patron saint of opposition to the Vietnam War, took it upon himself to issue a misleading affidavit in the case and, subsequently, to question the authenticity of the cable given to Steve Tompkins by the grunt members of the Alpha 184 Unit. In this last instance I was warned long ago by Colonel Fletcher Prouty to be wary of this person as a result of Fletcher’s analysis of his earlier high profile revelations.
Finally, it is a matter of public record that, over the years, I have been canceled by a number of liberal/progressive-hosted NPR programs and not invited to countless others. One of the latter, supported, I understand, by the Ford Foundation, regularly gives a forum to Jesse Jackson around the anniversary time of the assassination, while I have never been interviewed. Regarding Reverend Jackson, Dexter King and I were scheduled to appear on the Larry King Show and he showed up to join us. His presence was appar
ently mandated from above.
In the event that the misinformation and omissions discussed above were simply produced by oversight, neglect, or naiveté and not the result of sinister governmental collaboration, I have not used the names of the actors. It is also important to note that many of the small, selected sample of progressive commentators and programs to which I have referred do cover issues and events not available anywhere else. In this respect they provide a genuine public service.
Nevertheless, there are lines they will not cross and political assassinations are a no-go area, as is 9/11.
Assassins and their masters come and go, live and die, but their agencies and corporate masters live on in a world where the media image makers and information providers of the day are confronted with mortgage payments, tuition and medical bills, loans and credit ratings, all geared to treasured lifestyles and status.
Considering the previous existence of some independence in mainstream media entities, the current consolidation of control and suppression of ideas, facts, and events, virtually across the board, is lamentable and one more major indication of the death of democracy in the American Republic.
For example, as noted earlier I recall in early 1967, the willingness of Look magazine, under Bill Atwood, to publish my Ramparts article and photographs: “The Children of Vietnam.”
As noted elsewhere, though I believe it worth repeating, as an example of the lengths those in power will go to enhance their interests, when I went to Look’s offices for a lengthy meeting, I was greeted by Bill with the statement, “You may be interested in knowing that I had a visitor last week.” I asked who it was, and he said, “Averill Harriman” (former New York governor and Democratic Party leader). Bill said, “He brought me greetings from President Johnson, along with a request for a favor from the president.” I asked what was the president’s request, and he said, “The president would like you not to publish anything Bill Pepper writes.” Bill continued, “Now how does that make you feel? You are not yet thirty years old and the President of the United States is worried about what you are writing.”
The Plot to Kill King Page 43
