Obama Seeks Palestinian Statehood in State of Union 2014 - Full Video - Kerry Middle East Peace Plan

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FULL TRANSCRIPT: Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address ...

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-obamas-2014-state-of...

Jan 28, 2014 · President Obama delivered his 2014 State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2014, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Transcript courtesy of Federal News

• Kerry expected to present framework for Middle East peace talks

Israel-Palestinian peace talks: the key issues

• Middle East peace talks

• Kerry returns to Israel as goalposts shift for once-ambitious peace plan

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• Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
• theguardian.com, Thursday 30 January 2014 11.42 EST
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Borders/territory

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, says negotiations on borders should be based in the pre-1967 "green line" – the armistice line drawn in 1949 at the end of the war that followed Israel's declaration of a state – with agreed land swaps to compensate for Jewish settlements in the West Bank that would be incorporated into Israeli territory. For Israel, this would mean giving up settlements deep inside the West Bank. The rightwing Jewish Home party, a key member of the coalition, has declared this a “red line”. The 1967 line is broadly acceptable to Palestinian negotiators, but the actual route of the border and land swap details are crucial.

2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian ...

www.democraticunderground.com › … › Israel/Palestine (Group)

Jan 22, 2014 · Palestinians, and their undemocratic UN cohorts, are off to a roaring start for 2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Last week

1. Kerry: Peace ultimately requires full IDF pullout from ...

   

   www.timesofisrael.com/kerry-peace...idf-pullout-from-palestinian-areas

   US Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that a permanent peace agreement must ultimately involve the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian .

   
   

   1. Washington - The 'Kerry Plan': Palestinian Capital In East ...

      www.vosizneias.com/153600/...kerry-plan-palestinian-capital-in...state

      Jan 29, 2014 · Washington - The 'Kerry Plan': Palestinian Capital In East Jerusalem, Recognition Of Jewish State
      
      
      

      Palestinian leader turns to Putin for Palestinian state ...

      debka.com/article/23625

      Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) launched his “diplomatic intifada” against Israel and exit from the Kerry peace initiative Thursday, Jan

Is Modern Israel in Bible Prophecy or a Big Hoax?

Is Modern Israel in Bible Prophecy? Anti-Semitism Define -

Thousands expect Israel to play a major role in God’s future plan for earth. What is the Biblical evidence?

Many people today consider the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine to be a direct and dramatic fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a phenomenal best seller of the last few decades, and Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye’s Lift Behind, along with Bishop T.D. Jakes declares that the end of the world will come within the lifetime of the generation that saw the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, hereby applying the words of Jesus: “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)

Coupled with this fascination with Israel is a novel teaching regarding the return of Jesus, called the “secret rapture.” These books and many other speaks for many today who expect God secretly to take the “church” to heaven prior to the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on its old site where the sacred Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, now stands. According to this position, after the “church” is “raptured” to heaven, there will be seven years of the worst period of famine, bloodshed, and pestilence ever experienced by man. During this great tribulation the focus will be on God’s dealings with the Jews, who are again given the responsibility for the evangelization of the world.

According to secret-rapture preachers, the battle of Armageddon will climax the end of the seven-year tribulation as the nations of the earth take sides over the future of Israel. When mankind teeters on the brink of incinerating the world, Jesus will return gloriously and save man from self-extinction. At that time Jesus will set up a literal one-thousand-year reign on earth with Jerusalem functioning as the spiritual capital of the world.

Most evangelical periodicals and pulpits teach this view today, and to those who do not know better, it might appear that this prophetic scenario, known as pretribulationism, has been the traditional teaching of the Christian church since New Testament days. Nothing is further from the truth. Be not deceived.. Did the architects of the creation of modern day Israel have any thing to do with the development of the rapture theory? Where did the Rapture theology originate? Is the crisis in the Middle East and the war in the Iraq have anything to do with the erroneous rapture theory?

Is there a master conspiracy at work

According to dispensationalists John Hagee, Jack van Impe, Ken Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, John Walvoord, Grant Jefferies, Tim Lahaye, Benny Hinn, Clarence Larkin, H. Caldwell, TD Jakes and others who teach and preach about the Rapture, Israel has two dispensations, or time periods, in which they functions as God’s special instrument of salvation. Between these two periods of time comes the dispensation of the “church”. The church received a heavenly reward at the time of the rapture, while Israel received an earthly reward at the end of the tribulation.

There is no support in the New Testament for such an erroneous view.

The chief reason why the modern state of Israel has no prophetic significance is that after the Jews as a body rejected Jesus as the Messiah, God gave to the Christian church the special privileges, responsibilities, and prerogatives once assigned to the ancient Jews. No longer were the Jews to be His special people with a prophetic destiny.

Rom.2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; vs.29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.

All the promises of a glorious kingdom on earth once given through the Jewish prophets to the Jewish people became void because the Jewish people as a nation did not fulfill the conditions of these prophecies. Failing to receive the glory that could have been Israel’s is probably the saddest story in literature. Placed at the crossroads of the ancient world, God furnished them with every facility for becoming the greatest nation on the earth. God wanted to reward Israel with every physical and spiritual blessing as they put into practice the clear-cut principles that He had graciously taught them through His prophets (Deuteronomy 7, 8, 28).



The Old Testament records the sad story of how the vineyard of Israel produced, not the mature fruit of a Christ-like character, but “wild grapes,” a misinterpretation and perversion of what the God of Israel was really like. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (Isaiah 5:4 RSV).

Even when the Jewish nation was suffering the bitter consequences of disobedience during the Babylonian captivity, God mercifully promised that a restored Israel was possible and that there was yet time to recover its special role as His representative on earth - if it would honor His law and submit to His principles. Even then the Jews could have become, if faithful, the head and not the tail, in matters physical and spiritual; all nations would have looked upon Jerusalem as not only the center of wisdom but also the spiritual capital of the world (see Isaiah 45:14; 60:1 - 11).

When the Jews returned to Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, the promises given to Abraham and expanded through the writings of Moses and other prophets would have been fulfilled; the whole earth would have been alerted for the first advent of Christ, even as the way is being prepared for His second coming today.

Missed Their Last Opportunity.

These Old Testament prophecies that picture Israel dwelling in peace and prosperity, with all nations beating a path to her doors, could have been fulfilled 2000 years ago if they had indeed prepared the world for the first coming of Jesus (see Zechariah 8:14). But instead of fulfilling their greatest assignment they missed their last opportunity, and Jesus their Lord finally had to pronounce with irrevocable judgement: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not Behold your house is forsaken and desolate” (Matthew 23:37, 38 RSV).

Those who regard the establishment of the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of those Old Testament prophecies overlook the fact that these promises were made either prior to their release from Babylonian captivity or during the rebuilding days soon after their return. God would have fulfilled these promises if Israel had been faithful and obedient to the conditions on which the promises were made.

Although God promised a “second chance” to Israel after their failure leading up to the Babylonian captivity, He promised no “third chance” to them after their final rejection when their Lord Himself “came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11 RSV)

But God did not give up, even though Israel as a nation had failed Him. Although corporate Israel no longer was to function as God’s special agent, the individual Jews who received and obeyed Jesus Christ would constitute the new organization through which He would now work.

Paul describes this remarkable transition in Romans 9 to 11, where he appeals to individual Jews (such as himself) to respond to God through Jesus, join those Gentiles who have found in Him the solution to their anxious, sinful condition, and together arouse the world to the simple fact that God wants to make an end to sin and its misery by setting up His eternal kingdom composed of those who have found in Jesus the promised Saviour.



Those who preach and teach this erroneous Rapture doctrine are purposely misleading multitudes. This doctrine was created by the Jesuits as an anti-reformation and anti-protestant tool to divert attention away from the Catholic and the Pope whom the reformers had identify as the anti-Christ in Revelation. Those who teach and preach the rapture theory are proxies and agents for the Kabbalists and those who want to establish a New World Order (NWO). The Rapture theory has more to do with politics than theology, more to do with mans involvement in world affairs than Gods involvement, more about Zionism than the people of Zion. I will discuss this later.

Absolute Proof More Modern Jews Not Biblical Israelites

rense.com/general89/notjws.htm

Absolute Proof More Modern Jews Not Biblical Israelites The 13th Tribe' by Arthur Koestler (suicided by Mossad) explains the creation of the

Khazar Empire, Illuminati and New World Order « Socio ...

socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/khazar-empire-illuminati...

Jan 24, 2009 · Jack Otto right from the start says he ... “that if 95% of Jews were from Khazaria we would ... and uranium mines of South Africa. The House of

1. The Thirteenth Tribe - Christus Rex

   198.62.75.1/www2/koestler

   Arthur Koestler documents the Caucasian ancestry of Ashkenazim Jews. ... the lifeless bodies of Arthur Koestler and his wife were found in their London home.

1. Khazaria—the Myth of Anti-Semitism Exposed at Last!!

   www.reformation.org/khazaria.html

   (Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, ... (Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 136). Arthur ... Random House, New York, 1976.
   
   
   

   1. The Khazars Kingdom, Gog and Magog, Jewish Khazars

      www.apfn.org/THEWINDS/library/khazars.html

      Khazar history shows they have no ancestry to Jews. Some are convinced that Khazarians are all Jewish. Some hold that Gog and Magog are the Khazars.

The “Jews” Are Not The Seed of Abraham! How The Racial Hoax of The “Jews” Was Finally Exposed !
Zionist Claim to Israel Unfounded ! Ashkenazi Jews are NOT Descendents of Israel !
New DNA Research Confirms That Modern Khazarian “Jews” Are Not the Descendants of Ancient Isrealites or The Seed of Abraham!
The End of The LIE ! 90+% of Modern Jewry are Non Semitic Ashkenazi Khazars! Not Real Jews! Not Descendents of 12 Tribes of Israel !
New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine! Koestler’s Khazar History Vindicated ! Zionists Design Myth of Jewish Genome to Usurp Palestine!
Debate on European Jews’ Origin Settled? Koestler’s Khazarian Theory Vindicated !
Ashkenazis ‘Self Styled’ Jews Are NOT the Descendants of the Ancient Israelites!
Benjamin Freedman: Ashkenazi Khazars Self Style “Jews” Are Not Semitic And Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !
The 13th Tribe of Khazaria! Ashkenazi Khazars Are Not The Jews of The Bible!
Modern Ashkenazi Jews are not the Jews of the Bible!
New Genetic Research Confirms Koestler’s “Khazar” Theory! Ashkenazi Jews Are Not The Jews of The Bible !
Ashkenazi Jews are Turkic Khazars! They Are Not The Israelites of The Bible! Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !

The Thirteenth Tribe - Bible Believers

www.biblebelievers.org.au/13trindx.htm‎

In the second part of this book, "The Heritage," Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and .

 

Khazaria?the Myth of Anti-Semitism Exposed at Last!!

www.reformation.org/khazaria.html‎

"The most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated" are the words used to describe this "Jewish" hoax or myth by a Khazar author named Arthur Koestler:.

The Thirteenth Tribe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe‎

Koestler's hypothesis is that the Khazars (who converted to Judaism in the 8th century) migrated westwards into Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries 

New Genetic Research Confirms Koestler's "Khazar" Theory

truthtellers.org/alerts/GeneticResearchConfirmsKhazarTheory.html‎

Sep 12, 2012 - Koestler said that in about the 8th century AD the Khazars, a nation living in Central Urasia, converted to Judaism. They migrated to Poland and

Top Israeli scientist says Ashkenazi Jews came from Khazaria, not ...

www.darkmoon.me/.../top-israeli-scientist-says-ashkenazi-jews-came-fro...‎

May 8, 2013 - Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler,

Most Jews Are of Khazari Descent, Without Any Link to Abraham or ...

www.aljazeerah.info/.../Most%20Jews%20Are%20of%20Khazari%20Des...‎

Sep 23, 2013 - Who were the Khazars? Where had they come from? Koestler: The country of the Khazars, a people of Turkish stock, occupied a strategic key 

(Jesuit Controlled !) Scottish Rite Albert Pike WW3 agenda - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e9AdnCdPwo‎

Nov 11, 2012 - Scottish Rite Albert Pike WW3 agenda ! ... Its ONE BIG NAZI Scheme controlled by High Level Freemasonry , The .... to their deaths, sells out to baphomet= KHAZARIAN bankers (jewish wannabes) who pave the way for satan

Torch of Truth International: Khazaria, Original Home of Modern-day ...

joeland7.blogspot.com/.../khazaria-original-home-of-modern-day.html‎

Dec 30, 2009 - Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact ..... of Freemasonry & Illuminati Bloodlines- Lucifer WW3 Tribe of Dan .... Obama Wins Over Notre Dame – Albert Pike and the New World Orde

TruTube.TV - Forbidden Knowledge - History of the Khazar ...

trutube.tv/video/9320

Forbidden Knowledge - History of the Khazar Empire - Lecture by Jack Otto: The history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern

UN Passes Palestinian Statehood - Israel Continue Terrorist Attack

joeland7.blogspot.com/2012/.../israle-air-srick-on-hamas-leader-egypt.ht...‎

Nov 15, 2012 - (Arthur Koestler, ... As long as Apostate Israel (New Khazaria) exist...there will never be any ... NWO Luciferian Albert Pike's WW3 plan is posied to begin. ..... Mormonism and False Prophecies · Mormonism and Freemasonr

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration 2014 - King Assassination Transcript

Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Celebration 2014
January 12 - 20
MARCH RALLY - JANUARY 20

http://mlkmarchaaar.org/index.html

Welcome - Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration

mlkcelebrationdallas.org

About the Celebration. Thirty-two years ago, a group of civic-minded citizens under the leadership of Dr. Beverly Mitchell- Brooks gathered at the Martin Luther KingMartin Luther King Jr's Birthday is a day of honor and commemorative events at a variety of sites in Washington, DC. Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday is January 15th and is celebrated each year on the third Monday in January. In 1994, to further commemorate a man who lived his life in service to others, Congress transformed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday into a national day of community service. Here is a schedule of special events to honor this civil rights leader and to give local residents the opportunity to reach out to help those in need.
 Martin Luther King Memorial
This weekend is a great time to visit the Memorial. National Park Service Rangers discuss King's role in the Civil Rights movement daily. The National Park Service will host a wreathlaying service on January 20, 2014, 8-9 a.m. in observance of the birthday-anniversary for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On January 18-20, 2014, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. a Junior Ranger program will be held for kids.

2014 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service
January 20, 2014. Major service events will take place across the country. Join a community service organization or create your own event to serve the DC community and make a difference.

Martin Luther King Jr. Parade
January 20, 2014, 11 a.m. Martin Luther King Jr. Ave SE and Milwaukee Place SE, Washington DC. The Anacostia parade/peacewalk includes the Ballou Marching Band and representatives from the area's Asian, Bolivian, Jamaican and African American

"I Have A Dream" speech

MLK Memorial: Remembering the Dream

Martin Luther King is rightly remembered for his dream, first articulated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 48 years ago this Sunday, that the principles embodied in “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” would one day be vindicated and applied to all men, regardless of “the color of their skin.” Fewer remember that in the ensuing years before his untimely death in 1968, King gradually abandoned the dream of equal rights and sought instead “the realization of equality” through government redistribution of wealth.
How fitting, then, that the new Martin Luther King Memorial, unveiled Monday on the National Mall in Washington, DC, should stand between the Lincoln and FDR memorials—the former a tribute to the greatest champion of the Founders’ vision of equality, the latter a monument to the President who redefined rights and expanded the reach of government like no one else.

Miss Black Arkansas USA & Miss Black Arkansas Talented Teen USA Pageant at MLKing Maradee  1-20-2014

Annual 'Marade' honors King's legacy

By Gavin Lesnick

Hundreds of marchers took to the streets of Little Rock Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day march-parade, an annual event that pays tribute to the slain civil rights icon.

Dozens of groups, ranging from high school bands to politicians seeking office to local businesses and churches, joined in the "Marade" that started at 33rd and Chester streets and was set to end at the state Capitol.
Some marchers clutched posters of King's face or a famous quote. One children's group sang "We Shall Overcome" as they walked past crowds gathered on the sidewalk. A sports car in the parade blasted a recording of one of King's speeches over its loudspeaker.
Diane Charles, coordinator for the Marade, said this marks the 31st year for the popular event.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr

   City Year Little Rock/North Little Rock Day of Service:

   MLK Day is a day on -not a day off- for young people committed to making a difference in their communities. The service event will be held at Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Little Rock on January 21 to celebrate the power of service and community in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Service projects will include beautification projects across the campus. Read more.

   . - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
   Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
   

   • Early life and education ·
   • Ideas, influences ... ·
   • Montgomery Bus ...

Arlington MLK Celebration Announces Keynote Speaker and …

myarlingtontx.com/2013/12/20/arlington-mlk-celebration-announces...

Celebrating 25 Years! The Arlington Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration has reached a milestone. In 2014, the Arlington community will commemorate 25 years of MLK .

1. MLK Savannah Home - Welcome to MLK Celebration - …

   mlkingsavannah.com

   The 35th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Observance Day Association Celebration
   
   
   

   • 

     Jeremiah Wright slams President Obama at MLK event; says he has a 'kill list'

     Everything Alabama Blog · 21 hours ago

     The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration in Chicago Wednesday, took several swipes at President Barack Obama, at one…
     

     King had a dream, Obama has a drone, Rev. Wright says ...

     www.suntimes.com/news/metro/24975992-418/king-had-a-dream-obama...

     Jan 16, 2014 · If the Rev. Jeremiah Wright believes — as he’s claimed in the past — that he and President Barack Obama will ... Martin Luther King Jr

   LR Family: Celebrating Dr. MLK, Jr's lasting legacy | thv11.com

   www.thv11.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=294816

   Jan 15, 2014 · LITTLE ROCK, Ark. ( KTHV) - It's not just one day, but an entire month dedicated to serving the community. This month of service continues King's vision of
   

   
   

   • Martin Luther King Day of Service in Washington, DC
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   • For Kids: 10 Ways to Mark Martin Luther King Day 2014
   • Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Nashville - MLK Events in Nashville

   MLK event features one of “Little Rock Nine”

   Indiana Statesman ·
   

   Ernest Green will be on campus Friday as part of ISU’s Martin Luther King Day commemorative events. Green was one of the “Little Rock Nine,” a group of African
   
   
   
   

The King Assassination Conspiracy: Betrayed by Judas
On April 3, 1968, Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine Motel received a call from a member of Kings inner circle in Atlanta requesting that a specific room on the second floor be reserve for King. (King had always stayed in a secure room on the 1st floor.) On April 4, Lorrain Bailey overheard a member of Kings entourage asking him to come out of his room and speak to a small group that had assemble in the parking lot. Lorraine Bailey knew that King was in bed suffering from a severe headache but this member of Kings inner circle insisted that King come out and talk to the people. King reluctantly came out of his room to speak to the small crowd when he was shoot. Lorraine knew the identity of the Judas who had Dr. King set-up to be assassinated.

Was the Judas following orders from his Masonic Master?

Loree Bailey was killed, hung in the stairwell of her motel immediatly after the assassination. The official cover-up statement said that Loree Bailey had a stroke on April 4th and died a few days later.

Who was the Judas who set-up King? Was King assassination a Masonic hit? Was a beer distributorship part of the payoff?

Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr ...

Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination Conspiracy Trial ... Olivia Catling, neighborhood resident around Lorraine Motel. Mr ...

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Dissident Voice : Who Killed Martin Luther King?

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Across from the Lorraine Motel was Fire Station no. 2. Who ordered ... to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your ...

www.tucradio.org/Who_killed_MLK.pdf

In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies -- particularly the FBI and Army intelligence -- with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial's second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson's trial was the trial of the century. Clinton's trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who's here?"

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government's "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King's martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper's progress as James Earl Ray's attorney in uncovering Jowers's role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn't be there that night."

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim's Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto's involvement in King's slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto's warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."

Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto's in the late 1970's, testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.

"[Liberto] said, `I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done.' I said, `What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?' He says, `Ahh, he wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . . a setup man.'"

The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King's son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim's Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King's body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was "the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin."

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim's Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn't actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD's best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging, ailing Jowers "wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it." Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot's purpose was to kill King -- a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn't know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers's story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

background to the assassination;

local conspiracy;

the crime scene;

the rifle;

Raul;

broader conspiracy;

cover-up.

1. Background to the assassination
   James Lawson, King's friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King's stands on Vietnam and the Poor People's Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King's speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.
   Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.
   "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."
   Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers' march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent -- subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.
   
   
2. Local conspiracy
   On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he was needed at his old station because his departure left it "out of service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead." After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department.
   The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been threatened.
   Wallace guessed it was because "I was putting out fires," he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, "No. Never did. Not to this day."
   In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King's murder.
   To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that when King's party and the police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he "noticed something that was unusual." When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told Redditt he could leave, Redditt "noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did." Given Redditt's concerns for King's safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not have fit into others' plans.
   Redditt testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar Hoover's office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his life had been threatened.
   In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. "It was a farce," he said, "a total farce."
   Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt's surveiling King (as he was doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the afternoon, "I came here as a friend of the investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don't want to deal with the truth." He told the committee angrily that if the secret purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, "to protect the country, just tell the American people! They'll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes."
   When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a friend in the White House who said, "Man, your life isn't worth a wooden nickel."
   Redditt said his public testimony the next day "was a set-up": "The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn't go into this open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to look at the questions and answers."
   "So in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you're going to answer to, and this is how you're going to answer.' It was all made up -- all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce."
   Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine "because we couldn't furnish proper security there." ("It was just an open view," he explained to me later, "Anybody could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from the very beginning.")

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."

For King's April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the planning meetings at Jim's Grill) that the change occurred because somebody in King's entourage had asked specifically for no black security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the omission "even to this day."
Leon Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968 he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel's owner and manager, Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King's murder, Cohen spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine. Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change King's room to the location where he was shot.
Bailey explained that the night before King's arrival he had received a call "from a member of Dr. King's group in Atlanta." The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun "he") wanted the motel owner to change King's room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view.
"If they had listened to me," Bailey said, "this wouldn't have happened."
Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased), commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin's escape much easier. Evans said he gave the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King's party, Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor's request made no sense whatsoever.
Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o'clock, she said, "Oh, my God, Dr. King is at that hotel!" She ran with her two children to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling's house moving her to exclaim, "It's going to take us six months to pay for the rubber he's burning up!!" The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.
I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. "I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray."
"The police," she told me, "asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], `What did you see?' Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?"
Catling also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, "The shot came from that clump of bushes," indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.


3. The crime scene
   Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine's balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities.
   In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4, "James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King's leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn't have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King's life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.
   "I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.
   "I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o'clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . .
   "I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.
   "When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.
   "I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968."
   Also read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI and to the Memphis police. Jones was King's chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, "he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . . This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka." In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area hurriedly.
   Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans "requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination." Stiles called another superintendent of sanitation, who assembled a crew. "They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner." Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.
   Within hours of King's assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.
   
   
4. The rifle
   Probe readers will again recall from Mike Vinson's article three key witnesses in the Memphis trial who offered evidence counter to James Earl Ray's rifle being the murder weapon:
   1. Judge Joe Brown;
   2. Judge Arthur Hanes Jr.;
   3. William Hamblin.
   1. Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that "67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle." He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King's body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle's scope had not been sited, Brown said, "this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn." Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, "It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon."
   2. Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama, had been Ray's attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.) Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with Ray's prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven (or otherwise) sent for the State's case against Ray, can be accepted as credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge Hanes summarized the State's lone-assassin theory (with reference to an exhibit depicting the scene), "James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway." Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the police's arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged in his white Mustang.
      Concerning his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory, Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided "terrific evidence": "He said that the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added]."
      Hanes thought Canipe's witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed by Philip Melanson's research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming with police, some already watching King across the street, "when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In addition to the time involved [in Ray's presumed odyssey from the bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station."
      When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented, "That's what I've been saying for 30 years."
   3. William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting. Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James McCraw, who had died.
      James McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before 6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so McCraw turned out the light and left without him -- minutes before Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to Stephen's room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the bathroom -- where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.
      William Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down.
      In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin, "Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the door and did away with it." McCraw told Hamblin he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.
      Hamblin said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because, like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: "He really wanted to come out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn't really tell the truth."
      William Pepper accepted Hamblin's testimony about McCraw's disposal of the rifle over Jowers's claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul. Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had been lying "at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one years."

Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans "requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner." . . . Within hours of King's assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.

5. Raul
   One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a series of witnesses.
   In a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray's movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set him up in Memphis.
   Andrew Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to hold at Jim's Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)
   The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul's included: British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the `60s and `70s and who told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce Wilburn, Glenda's brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.
   Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul's family who, after first denying any connection to Ray's Raul, said "they" had visited them. "Who?" Reis asked. "The government," said the woman. She said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.
   In his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: "Now, as I understand it, the defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell his side of the story or to defend himself."
   
   
6. A broader conspiracy
   Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the Army officers had a bird's-eye view of Dr. King's balcony doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station.
   The testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA's notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They told him that in 1968 the Army's 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they "reportedly watched and took photos while King's assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away."
   Testimony which juror David Morphy later described as "awesome" was that of former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot "an unknown target" on April 4. After training for a triangular shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King's assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.
   Terrell said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the details of Hill's death, Terrell thought the story about Hill's wife shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In an interview, Terrell said the CIA's heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill's death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill's wife was responsible.
   
   
7. Cover-up
   Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King's colleague and a 20-year member of Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated King's assassination. Fauntroy testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation "it was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces." He discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard Sprague, HSCA's first chief investigator, said he would make available all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the subcommittee's ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, "without having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent." Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably had help, and that the government was not involved.
   When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution article. The article said Fauntroy now believed "Ray did not fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement agencies, " and added: "Fauntroy said he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his family."
   Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to read through his files on the King assassination, including raw materials that he'd never seen before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover's logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before King's murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with "persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation in Southeast Asia." Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed. "What were they doing there?" he asked.
   When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he'd "uncovered since the assassination committee closed down," he was promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he interpreted the Justice Department's action to mean: "Look, we'll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I'll tell them I won't go and finish the book, because it's surely not worth it."
   At the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from Tennessee's Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA's star witness and Blanton's most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in Fauntroy's words, "we all breathed a sigh of relief."
   The Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover evidence helpful to Jowers's defense. William Pepper then cross-examined Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:

   Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Glankler, did you interview Mr. Maynard Stiles, whose testifying --

   A. I know the name, Counselor, but I don't think I took a statement from Maynard Stiles or interviewed him. I don't think I did.

   Q. Did you ever interview Mr. Floyd Newsum?

   A. Can you help me with what he does?

   Q. Yes. He was a black fireman who was assigned to Station Number 2.

   A. I don't recall the name, Counsel.

   Q. All right. Ever interview Mr. Norvell Wallace?

   A. I don't recall that name offhand either.

   Q. Ever interview Captain Jerry Williams?

   A. Fireman also?

   Q. Jerry Williams was a policeman. He was a homicide detective.

   A. No, sir, I don't -- I really don't recall that name.

   Q. Fair enough. Did you ever interview Mr. Charles Hurley, a private citizen?

   A. Does he have a wife named Peggy?

   Q. Yes.

   A. I think we did talk with a Peggy Hurley or attempted to.

   Q. Did you interview a Mr. Leon Cohen?

   A. I just don't recall without --

   Q. Did you ever interview Mr. James McCraw?

   A. I believe we did. He talks with a device?

   Q. Yes, the voice box..

   A. Yes, okay. I believe we did talk to him, yes, sir.

   Q. How about Mrs. Olivia Catling, who has testified --

   A. I'm sorry, the last name again.

   Q. Catling, C A T L I N G.

   A. No, sir, that name doesn't --

   Q. Did you ever interview Ambassador Andrew Young?

   A. No, sir.

   Q. You didn't?

   A. No, sir, not that I recall.

   Q. Did you ever interview Judge Arthur Hanes?

   A. No, sir.

   So it goes -- downhill. The above is Glankler's high-water mark: He got two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler go:

   Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell?

   A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.

   Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?

   A. I just don't recall that name.

   MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation -- no further questions for this investigator.

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, "And today it is much worse in my view" -- "the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King]." To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People's Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

The vision behind the trial

In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill (1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few. (Thanks to the King Center, the full trial trascript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.) What Pepper's work has accomplished in print and in court can be measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or oneself.

The King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at least as much theirs as it is William Pepper's, for ultimately it is the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her family's purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: "This is not about money. We're concerned about the truth, having the truth come out in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I've always felt that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people -- my family, other people, the nation."

Dexter King, the plaintiffs' final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: "From a holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we're all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.

"It is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media just went totally negative against the family. I couldn't understand that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?'

"She reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.'

"Now the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic ramifications . . . "

In his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the root reason for King's assassination: "When Martin King opposed the war, when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware, the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of the war.

"The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest country in the world."

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, "And today it is much worse in my view" -- "the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King]."

To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People's Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

Dexter King testified to the truth of his father's death with transforming clarity: "If what you are saying goes against what certain people believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with -- maybe not the way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt with covertly. The result is the same.

"We are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we've participated in assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that domestically.' Well, I don't know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.

"The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don't agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without violence.

"We're not in this to make heads roll. We're in this to use the teachings that my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We know that it works. So we're not looking to put people in prison. What we're looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we're saying we're willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for reconciliation, why can't others?"

When pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of his father, Dexter King said, "One hundred dollars."

The Verdict

The jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

"In answer to the question, `Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?' your answer is `Yes.'" The man on my left leaned forward and whispered softly, "Thank you, Jesus."

The judge continued: "Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?' Your answer to that one is also `Yes.'" An even more heartfelt whisper: "Thank you, Jesus!"

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis. Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its "limited re-investigation" into King's death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up -- just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: "We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that's not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.

"Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd."

I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on Olivia Catling's security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said she'd had the flu. I told her the jury's verdict, and she smiled. "So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that's the best part about it."

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its "limited re-investigation" into King's death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up -- just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

The faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.A. -- as Dr. King's vision, if made real, would have done in 1968 -- should be willing to receive the same kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of martyrdom ("witness") is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good news

Martin Luther King's murderer — newly released photos and ...

... when gunned down while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. ... restaurant owner was sued in civil court as part of a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King.

www.digitaljournal.com/article/305238

Fox 8 Exclusive: Who Really Killed MLK, Jr.?

Who really killed Dr. Martin Luther King? ... flop house" across the street from theLorraine Motel ... patsy and an unwitting participant in a conspiracy ...

www.fox8.com/news/wjw-fox-8-exclusive-mlk-jr-conspiracy

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