XPost: alt.government.employees, alt.society.labor-unions, alt.thought.southern XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities
From: rkoch@banmlkday.com

Before scoffing at this headline, you should know that in 1999,
in Memphis, Tennessee, more than three decades after MLK's
death, a jury found local, state, and federal government
agencies guilty of conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Peace
Prize winner and civil rights leader. The same media you would
expect to cover such a monumental decision was absent at the
trial, because those news organizations were part of that
conspiracy.

William F. Pepper, who was James Earl Ray's first attorney,
called over 70 witnesses to the stand to testify on every aspect
of the assassination. The panel, which consisted of an even mix
of both black and white jurors, took only an hour of
deliberation to find Loyd Jowers and other defendants guilty. If
you're skeptical of any factual claims made here, click here for
a full transcript, broken into individual sections. Read the
testimonies yourself if you don't want to take my word for it.

It really isn't that radical a thing to expect this government
to kill someone who threatened their authority and had the power
to organize millions to protest it. When MLK was killed on April
4, 1968, he was speaking to sanitation workers in Memphis, who
were organizing to fight poverty wages and ruthless working
conditions. He was an outspoken critic of the government's war
in Vietnam, and his power to organize threatened the moneyed
corporate interests who were profiting from the war. At the time
of his death, he was gearing up for the Poor People's Campaign,
an effort to get people to camp out on the National Mall to
demand anti-poverty legislation – essentially the first
inception of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The government
perceived him as a threat, and had him killed. James Earl Ray
was the designated fall guy, and a complicit media, taking its
cues from a government in fear of MLK, helped sell the
"official" story of the assassination. Here's how they did it.

The Setup

The defendant in the 1999 civil trial, Loyd Jowers, had been a
Memphis PD officer in the 1940s. He owned a restaurant called
Jim's Grill, a staging ground to orchestrate MLK's assassination
underneath the rooming house where the corporate media alleges
James Earl Ray shot Dr. King. During the trial, William Pepper,
the plaintiff's attorney, played a tape of an incriminating 1998
conversation between Jowers, UN Ambassador Andrew Young, and
Dexter King, MLK's son. Young testified that Jowers told them he
"wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess
it and be free of it."

On the tape, Jowers mentions that those present at the meetings
included MPD officer Marrell McCollough, Earl Clark, an MPD
lieutenant and known as the department's best marksman, another
MPD officer, and two men who were unknown to Jowers but whom he
assumed to be representatives of federal agencies. While Dr.
King was in Memphis, he was under open or eye-to-eye federal
surveillance by the 111th Military Intelligence Group based at
Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia. Memphis PD intelligence
officer Eli Arkin even admitted to having the group in his own
office. During his last visit to Memphis in late March of 1968,
MLK was under covert surveillance, meaning his room at the
Rivermont was bugged and wired. Even if he went out to the
balcony to speak, his words were recorded via relay. William
Pepper alleges in his closing argument during King v. Jowers
that such covert surveillance was usually done by the Army
Security Agency, implying the involvement of at least two
federal agencies.

Jowers also gave an interview to Sam Donaldson on "Prime Time
Live" in 1993. The transcript of the interview was read during
the trial, and it was revealed that Jowers openly talked about
being asked by produce warehouse owner Frank Liberto to help
with MLK's murder. Liberto had mafia connections, and sent a
courier with $100,000 to Jowers, who owned a local restaurant,
with instructions to hold the money at his restaurant.

John McFerren owned a store in Memphis and was making a pickup
at Liberto's warehouse at 5:15 p.m. on April 4th, roughly 45

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--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)