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| | The Truth Seekers Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | MLK: Assassination Facilitated Cover Up House Select Commitee on Assassinations | Views: 453 | | Jan 11, 2008 7:22 pm | | MLK: Assassination Facilitated Cover Up House Select Commitee on Assassinations | # |
L J | | 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.
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