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Why was Dr. King assassinated?

Manuel E. Yepe

25/09/2014

Opinión

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The murder of outstanding personalities has a long tradition in the United States. Assassinations from Lincoln’s to Kennedy’s attest to the violence which has characterized the struggle for power in that nation. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and many other political leaders considered threats to the status quo illustrate the feasibility of murder as a political tool of the American elite in power.

In the book "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King" by William Pepper, a former foreign correspondent in Vietnam, attorney and friend of the black American, the author demonstrates that Dr. King was executed because of his strong stand against the war in Vietnam and the campaign he had been planning since 1967 to mobilize five hundred thousand poor people which would block Washington, D.C. until certain basic economic demands of the humble were accepted. These demands included guarantees of full employment, income and decent housing, all at the expense of the prevailing global banking and military system.

In his famous speech against the Vietnam war, Dr. King said the United States had lied in the reasons it gave for the war, and had betrayed the Vietnamese after the Second World War. The U.S. had funded and supported France's efforts to re-colonize the country.

Despite threats on his life and being abandoned by many of his closest allies, Dr. King decided to devote all the strength of his integrity, moral authority and international prestige to challenging the power of the United States. He considered the U.S. a morally bankrupt country and "the greatest purveyor of violence on earth."

He also refused to support the war in Vietnam because it shifted money which should have been used for domestic aid programs for the poor.

For Dr. King, "the damage the war caused, devastating the hopes of the poor, was aggravated by the fact that young blacks were being sent 8000 miles away to allegedly secure in Southeast Asia freedoms that they didn't have in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

The elite were concerned that if the demands of the poor were not met, a revolution could erupt.

Pepper's book documents how, in the plot to assassinate Dr. King, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his insidious COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) were involved as leading figures. COINTELPRO, which had emerged as an anti-communist repressive mechanism, later included among its targets the black freedom movement, native peoples, fighters for civil rights, and many other groups accused of dissidence.

On the night of April 4, 1968, Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, lending his support to a strike by the city's predominantly black sanitation workers. At the end of the day, high-ranking army snipers occupied positions from which they could eliminate him as soon as they were given the order. Two army officers were on the roof of a fire station near the Lorraine Motel to photograph events. Two black firefighters had been ordered not to report to work that day, and a black detective with the Memphis Police Department on surveillance duty at the firehouse was relieved of his assignment and sent home.

At the motel where Dr. King was staying, he had been moved from a ground floor room to another on the third-floor with a balcony. The owner of a barbecue restaurant behind the hotel had already received $100,000 in cash for his involvement in the crime. He had to go to the area behind the BBQ with Dr. King’s assassin and take possession of the gun immediately after the fatal shot. When calm was restored and Dr. King had fallen, the cover-up would be launched immediately.

The designated killer, James Earl Ray, would be accused, the snipers dispersed, out-of-control witnesses would be killed, and the crime scene destroyed.

And that's just what happened. Several people who could provide testimony leading to the clarification of the facts were successively eliminated under dubious circumstances. Among these were: heart attacks (Andrew Breitbart), heart attacks (Tim Russert), poisoning (Michael Cormier), or unknown causes, such as reporter Mark Pittman, age 58.

After four weeks of civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, with testimony from more than 70 witnesses, the twelve jurors issued the historic unanimous verdict that Dr. King had been victim of a conspiracy, and that the defendant, the shooter James Earl Ray, had been just a pawn in it.

Pepper's book confirms that Dr. King had always been a revolutionary, uncompromisingly committed to the cause of the poor against exploitation, and that the conspiracy that ended his life was, in fact, an act of state.

September 13, 2014.

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs4171.html

https://www.alainet.org/pt/node/103694