sightvs.blogg.se

Table of Contents

Chapter 4: Minority rights activists

• Fred Hampton
• Marcus Garvey
• Martin Luther King
• Malcolm X

Chapter 4: Minority rights activists

“Too many martyrs and too many dead

Too many lies too many empty words were said

Too many times for too many angry men

Oh let it never be again.”—Phil Ochs

Fred Hampton, 1948-1969 (aged 21).

Relevant positions:  High-ranking member of the Black Panthers Party (BPP).

Official cause of death:  Murdered in cold blood by the FBI and Illinois police (this is the official narrative).

Grounds for murder?

• His leadership skills “marked him as a major threat in the eyes of the FBI.”
• The FBI saw “the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords and similar radical coalitions forged by Hampton in Chicago, as a frightening steppingstone toward the creation of just such a revolutionary body that could, in its strength, cause a radical change in the U.S. government.”
• “In 1968, Hampton was on the verge of creating a merger between the BPP and a southside street gang with thousands of members, which would have doubled the size of the national BPP.”  That move would have also improved the BPP’s ability to fight back in what was, until then, a one-sided war.
• Like M. L. King and Malcolm X, Hampton realized the problem was not only racism, but poverty and an entrenched oligarchy.  Before his death, he was trying to forge an alliance among disenfranchised blacks, whites, and Hispanics.  The FBI understood that this was an ideological and strategic breakthrough, an untenable ultimate threat, and resolved to employ “any means necessary” to decimate the BPP.

Attempts to sideline, silence, smear, surveil, harass, incarcerate, and kill

• “The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967.  In 1968, Hampton’s mother’s phone was tapped and Hampton was placed on the Bureau’s ‘Agitator Index’ as a ‘key militant leader.’”
• The FBI blackmailed a criminal to infiltrate Hampton’s chapter of the Black Panthers Party (BPP), and that informant became Hampton’s bodyguard.
• In 1969, Hampton was sentenced to two to five years for an alleged theft of . . . ice cream bars.
• On July 1969, the Chicago police killed a member of the Black Panther Party and arrested 6 on trumped-up charges.  There followed an armed confrontation between party members and the Chicago Police Department, which left one BPP member mortally wounded and six others arrested on serious charges.
• On the night of the unprovoked raid on Hampton’s apartment, the FBI infiltrator to the group slipped sleeping pills into Hampton’s drink, to make sure he would be asleep during the raid. The police entered and killed the sleeping Fred Hampton. The police killed another person in that raid, and seriously wounded four others.  These four were “then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of the officers.  They were each held on US$100,000 bail.” (That’s the way it is: They shoot unarmed dissidents . . . and, if the dissidents survive, they do not take them to the hospital but to the clink—see for instance, Judi Bari entry).
• At a press conference the next day, the police, as they often do, lied through their teeth.  They alleged the death squad had been attacked by the “violent” and “extremely vicious” Panthers and had defended themselves accordingly.  In a second press conference, the death squad was praised for its “remarkable restraint,” “bravery,” and “professional discipline,” for not killing all the Panthers present.
• During the trial, the Chicago police department (serving as proxies for the FBI) claimed that the Panthers were the first to fire shots; however, a later investigation found that the Chicago police fired between ninety and ninety-nine shots while the Panthers had only fired once (a shot “caused by a reflexive death convulsion after the raiding team shot” Hampton’s associate”).  The mainstream media backed the police’s lying version of events.

Additional clues implicating the Invisible Government

• This premeditated murder was a bit too much for a segment of the half-awake public, so a kangaroo inquest was set up.  As always in such cases, it consisted of carefully-chosen compliant members, and was in reality “a well-rehearsed theatrical performance designed to vindicate the police officers.”
• “Following a long, corruption-ridden, judicial battle, “the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which each would pay $616,333 to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of Hampton and Clark.  The $1.85 million settlement was believed to be the largest ever in a civil rights case.”  That is as close to an admission of guilt that the American government ever comes to.
• The FBI “decimated” the Black Panthers leadership.
• When an FBI agent informed headquarters that the Black Panthers were primarily involved in organizing breakfasts for children, Director Hoover “fired back a memo implying the career ambitions of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover’s view that the BPP was ‘a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means.’”
• The FBI successfully caused dissension, splits, violence, and killings in the ranks of the Black Panthers memberships and affiliated organizations.

A philosophical query

• There is overwhelming evidence that Fred Hampton and some of his associates were victims of premeditated murder.  Civil court lawsuits involving both Hampton and M.L. King support the allegation of murder.  The USA is known, throughout its history, to have killed millions of minorities.  This leads to the following generalization:  whenever an influential minority fighter for freedom and justice prematurely dies, the prime suspect is the government.

 _____________

Marcus Garvey, 1888-1940 (aged 52).

 Relevant positions:  Publisher, journalist, African nationalist.

Official cause of death:  Two strokes, putatively after reading a mistaken, and negative, obituary of himself in the Chicago Defender, which stated, in part, that Garvey died “broke, alone and unpopular” (another example of the Invisible Government mocking us?)

Grounds for murder?

• Promoted a movement of African redemption, aimed at ending Western exploitation of Africa.
• Garvey was an effective leader:  “Already by 1921, in New York City, Garvey attracted 50,000 people to an event heorganized.”
• His influential organization promoted “social, political, and economic freedom for black people.”
• By 1917, he suggested that it was “a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”
• By 1920, membership in his organization “had grown to four million.”
• Like (assassinated) Gandhi and (assassinated) M. L. King after him, Garvey understood the key links between economic and political freedom.  For instance, his organization became the owner of a ship and a winery. Also, Garvey started the Negros Factories Association, “a series of companies that would manufacture marketable commodities in every big industrial center in the Western hemisphere and Africa.”
• According the M. L. King, Garvey “was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.  And make the Negro feel he was somebody.”

Attempts to sideline, silence, smear, surveil, harass, incarcerate, and kill

• After Garvey’s first efforts to achieve economic freedom and self-sufficiency for exploited blacks and Africans, an investigation by an Assistant District attorney was started in New York, followed by numerous interrogation sessions, libel lawsuits, and an indictment.  These were sufficiently vicious and intimidating to force Garvey to retract . . . thetruth.
• First assassination attempt occurred in 1919, by a man who claimed that he had been sent by the same Assistant District Attorney who had earlier harassed, sued, and intimidated Garvey.  Four shot were fired “wounding Garvey in the right leg and scalp.”
• Also by 1919, J. Edgar Hoover began to “investigate” Garvey’s activities, hiring the FBI’s first black agents, and accusing Garvey of “mail fraud.”  A jury trial followed, in which Garvey, refusing to be cowered, represented himself.  This kangaroo trial ended in . . . the maximum sentence of 5 years in prison.  Like M. L. King, Garvey wrote a moving letter from prison.
• He was deported from the USA after serving a prison term from 1925 to 1927.  Predictably, in his absence, his organization of millions withered.
• By 1929, in Jamaica, whatever remained of the economic assets of Garvey’s organization was confiscated.  When he opposed this politically-motivated desire to block economic self-sufficiency of oppressed black people, he was again sent to prison.

_____________

Martin Luther King, 1929-1968 (aged 39).

Relevant positions:  An extremely influential political leader of a mass movement fighting against racism, vast income inequalities, poverty, militarism, and wars; Nobel peace prize winner.

Official cause of death:  Lone assassin.

Historical Background

• Martin Luther King’s assassination bears all the hallmarks of the Invisible Government, including King’s prominence, opposition to American militarism, his defense of unions, and his planned multiracial poor people’s march on Washington in 1968 (the year of his death).  The Invisible Government responded to his peaceful but influential escape from his promoted and proscribed role of “civil rights leader” with smears, incarcerations, infiltrations of his inner circle, FBI surveillance and threats.  They tried blackmailing him into a suicide and their lone assassin routine (by a “deranged” black woman).   Eventually they succeeded, staging King’s murder and blaming it on an innocent man.  Below, only partial documentation will be provided, relying in large measure on a 40-year-long courageous crusade for justice by King’s close friend, associate, and attorney, William Pepper.  In particular, in a civil court trial, Pepper cajoled the American “justice” system into ascribing King’s murder to his government:

“After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations” that “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.  Almost 32 years after King’s murder . . . on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.”

Grounds for murder?

• “King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared.  Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock.  He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.”
• “They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains.  “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had.  And I think it was a justifiable fear.”
• “King was accepted by the established powers, although very reluctantly, as it was a political necessity to support him unless one wanted to risk a revolution.  However, when King moved against not only the issue of racial inequality, but the issues of poverty and imperialism, and drawing the connections between these areas and building opposition to them, King could no longer be tolerated by the established powers.”  “King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War.”
• Martin’s “trying to organize the poor to challenge this government in Washington, D.C. in the Poor People’s Campaign, and Martin’s determination not just to speak out against the Vietnam War, but to speak out against the entire imperialist and militarist direction of the country—all of that has to be understood when we try to understand Martin’sassassination.”
• Like Gandhi and Garvey (see also: Marcus Garvey), King intended to capitalize  on the collective economic power of poor people and on the threat such power—once organized—could pose to the Controllers.  He said:

“Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we [African-Americans] are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively — that means all of us together — collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world.”

• “Had Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X been able to complete their lives and visions in less tragic ways, a Muslim-Christian vision of transformation would have emerged as a way to change this country and the world.”

Attempts to sideline, silence, smear, surveil, harass, incarcerate, and kill

• “Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and ‘Dixie Mafia’ crime figures in Memphis,Tennessee.”
• “The Church 1975 Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) further revealed that in March 1968, the program against black nationalists was expanded from twenty-three to forty-one FBI field offices, which were instructed to prevent the rise of a black “messiah” who could ‘unify and electrify’ the movement, specifically naming Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed.”
• “The Church Committee revealed that “the FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.”
• There have been at least one previous attempt on his life that bears all the marks of an Invisible Government operation.  Let Martin himself, in his own inimitable style, recount it (doing so, ironically, one day before he was murdered “at last:”

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?” And I was looking down writing, and I said, “Yes.” And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, your drowned in your own blood — that’s the end of you.”

• Martin was threatened countless times after he broke away from his proscribed role of “civil rights leader.”  On the day before his murder, he said:

“And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?  Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

Additional clues implicating the Invisible Government

• “We know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer.”
• “The King family had for a long time publicly acknowledged that they believed the accused killer, James Earl Ray, to have been innocent of the crime he was accused of.“
• “The most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King– which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.”  “Chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entered the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, ‘Stop working on the nigger and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out . . . the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head.’”
• Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the nominal top. “The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”
• “The only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was told an hour before the shooting to stay home because a threat had been made on his life.
• “The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there.”
• “Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.”
• “Loyd Jowers was the owner of Jim’s Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. In December 1993, Jowers appeared on ABC’s Prime Time Live and related the details of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the U.S. government to kill King. According to Jowers, James Earl Ray was a scapegoat, and was not responsible for the assassination. Jowers said that he hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. The existence of such a conspiracy, and Jowers’ involvement, was supported in the verdict of a 1998 court case which was brought against Jowers by the King family.”
• “Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.”  Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.”
• “Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot.  Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.  ‘We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],’ Pepper says.’”

Additional References

• William F. Pepper (2003).  Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King.
• William F. Pepper (2016).  The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

_____________

Richard Wright: Filed under writers.

_____________

Malcolm X, 1925-1965 (aged 39).

Relevant positions:  Influential revolutionary, critic of American policies, and champion of the rights of African-Americans and the poor.

Official cause of death:  Assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam.

Grounds for murder?

• In 1961 in Los Angeles, police raided a Nation of Islam temple, arrested many members on bogus charges, beating others, shooting 6, and killing one.  The murderous police went scot free, but, as usual, some of the surviving victims were arrested.  Malcolm wanted to fight back.
• In 1964, Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam, and “expressed a desire to work with other civil rights leaders”—an FBI nightmare.  Moreover, towards the end of his life, that nightmare got worse, for Malcolm was rational enough to “rearrange his thinking” and let go of the racist teachings of the Nation of Islam (which actually play to the Invisible Government’s divide and rule strategy).  In a truly moving conversation, two days before his death, Malcolm said:

“Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I’ve lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.”

• Prof.  Manning Marable underscores that transformation, and the threat such thinking posed to the status quo:

“Malcolm, on Jan. 15, 1965, a month before he dies, does an interview in Canada, I believe in Toronto, where he says, ‘All my life, I believed that the fundamental struggle was Black versus white. Now I realize that it is the haves against the have-nots.’ Malcolm came to the realization, King came to the realization, that the nature of the struggle was between those who have and those who are dispossessed.”

• Jim Douglass captures what was at stake here for the Invisible Government—and for the rest of us:

“Had Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X been able to complete their lives and visions in less tragic ways, a Muslim-Christian vision of transformation would have emerged as a way to change this country and the world.”

• Malcolm X correctly argued that since the U.S. government was unwilling to protect the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of black people, blacks should protect themselves “by whatever means necessary.”

Attempts to sideline, silence, smear, surveil, harass, incarcerate, and kill

• FBI file was opened in 1950, and surveillance began in 1954.
• By 1957, undercover agents infiltrated Malcolm’s then organization, the Nation of Islam.

Additional clues implicating the Invisible Government

• Malcolm’s assassination is a signature COINTELPRO operation: “John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was believed to have been an FBI undercover agent. Malcolm X had confided to a reporter that Ali exacerbated tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad, and that he considered Ali his “archenemy” within the Nation of Islam leadership. Ali had a meeting with Talmadge Hayer, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X, the night before theassassination.”
• Prof. Marable explains:

“Law enforcement, the FBI and the NYPD, and its Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), which was its red squad, actively wanted to do surveillance disruption of Malcolm X and possibly eliminate him; certainly the FBI, because their nightmare was seeing King and Malcolm embrace. That was their nightmare.”

• As late as 2014, the White House—now nominally controlled by a black man—almost half a century after Malcolm’s death—refused ‘to release without alteration any files they still held relating to the murder of Malcolm X.”  What are they hiding?
• The FBI appears to continue the witch-hunt against Malcolm’s descendants.  In 1994, Malcolm’s daughter Qubilah “was being drawn into a plot to assassinate Louis Farrakhan by an FBI informant.”  That snitch was “a childhood friend who was a Government informer and betrayed her to curry favor with law-enforcement officials.” Her mother insisted she was framed.  Why would the FBI go to the trouble of entrapment?  One likely explanation is that they were trying to create the impression that it was Farrakhan who ordered the killing of Malcolm X and that they had nothing to do it.
• Farrakhan appears to be connected to the murder in a variety of ways.  Malcolm left the Nation of Islam (a severe blow to the prestige of the organization), and quipped about its head, Elijah Muhammad: “considered divine by many of his followers, a charlatan with an appetite for teen-age girls.”  Following this, the totalitarian-minded Farrakhan said:  “Malcolm shall not escape.  Such a man is worthy of death.”  Elsewhere, Farrakhan said: “If we dealt with [Malcolm] like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?”  And yet:  Farrakhan was never charged or even interrogated for his outspoken complicity in the murder, and is still leading a thriving organization at age 83!
• Hayer, one of Malcolm’s alleged assassins, confessed to the murder, but signed an affidavit stating that the other two assassins (who were not caught at the scene) were not the ones who were tried and convicted of the murder. Instead, he named three other people as his collaborators.  Also, FBI information released to the lawyer of the innocent two suggested that others were involved.  The two alleged assassins remained in prison after the affidavit was signed, and consistently maintained their innocence.  Another witness said he hadn’t seen either one of the two at the incident.
• Malcolm’s lawyer “and some Black Muslims have said that Malcolm X may have been killed by the police, the F.B.I. or both.  They note that Malcolm X was under surveillance by the bureau, and that the F.B.I. tried to foster a feud between him and other members of the Nation of Islam years before they parted ways.”
• “Gene Roberts, a New York police detective, was working undercover as one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards and was present when he was assassinated.  Though Malcolm X was heavily guarded, the assassins apparently were able to distract the guards with little difficulty.”
• “The police knew of the threats on Malcolm X’s life and watched him closely, ostensibly to protect him.  The police had stationed themselves at the door to the Audubon Ballroom on the fateful day, but” . . . left.
• Attallah, Malcolm’s daughter, believed that both Farrakhan and the FBI are culpable.
• Malcolm’s grandson was murdered in Mexico under bizarre circumstances, leading Farrakhan to say that this was a government’s operation to destroy Malcolm X’s “only remaining male member to carry on his legacy and his name.”