This must be National Conspiracy Month - there has been a spate of books lately from across the political spectrum. LPSFers may be most interested in Jack Cashill's First Strike, which goes far beyond the video Silenced to answer the question of what happened. But for drama and tightness of evidence, Pepper's book would be hard to beat.
A couple of years ago Newsweek carried a brief article about a civil suit brought by the King family. I was surprised at how insulting it was toward the Kings, who were portrayed as these poor, gullible people being exploited by yet another shyster lawyer with a conspiracy theory. There was no follow-up, and it turns out Newsweek, like all the other major media, didn't even have a reporter at the trial.
William Pepper, who had been a personal friend of King's, was the lawyer and investigator in the case, and the King family brought a civil suit against Loyd Jowers, an accomplice in the crime, limiting the damages to $100 so the truth could be told.
The dust jacket tells the story:
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a workers' strike. By the end of the day, top-level army snipers were in position to knock him out if ordered.... Two black firemen had been ordered not to report to duty that day and a black Memphis Police Department detective on surveillance duty in the fire station was physically removed from his post and taken home. Dr. King's room at the motel was changed from a secluded ground-floor room to number 306 on the balcony. Loyd Jowers, owner of Jim's Grill which backed on to the motel from the other side of the street, had already received $100,000 in cash for his agreement to participate in the assassination. He was to go out into the brush area behind the grill with the shooter and take possession of the gun immediately after the fatal shot was fired. When the dust settled, King had been hit, and a clean-up procedure was immediately set in motion. James Earl Ray was effectively framed, the snipers dispersed, any witnesses who could not be controlled were killed, and the crime scene was destroyed....
Seventy witnesses set out the details of a conspiracy in a plot to murder King that involved J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Richard Helms and the CIA, the military, the local Memphis police, and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis. The evidence was unimpeachable. The jury took an hour to find for the King family. But the silence following these shocking revelations was deafening. Like the pattern during all the investigations of the assassination throughout the years, no major media outlet would cover the story.
There are a few details which Pepper was unable to prove conclusively, including notably the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. The circumstantial evidence is strong, however; and Martin's son Dexter, in his recently released autobiography Growing Up King, does not hesitate to identify him (a deceased Memphis police lieutenant). Left tantalizingly undeveloped (but also obviously outside the scope of this book) are connections to the Kennedy assassination. Ray's contact, whom he identified as Raul, was seen in Dallas with Jack Ruby. (Raul is now protected, and paid, by the U.S. government in a new identity in New York.) And how's this for a tidbit: Madeleine Brown, LBJ's mistress and mother of his illegitimate son Steven, tells of a party in Dallas on November 21, 1963, attended by J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and H.L. Hunt, among others. Toward the end of the evening they went into a private meeting. Johnson emerged from the meeting, Brown said, "anxious and red-faced," and whispered in her ear, "After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again - that's no threat, that's a promise" (p. 127).
Pepper's liberal credentials are impeccable; there are two rather extraneous chapters in the book which argue passionately for socialism (without using the word, of course). So it is interesting to see how the conspiracy looks to him: The bad guys are the big corporations, and "the relevant government agencies and their officials become mere footsoldiers for the mighty economic interests" (p. 6). Libertarians wouldn't hesitate to join him, of course, in finding the business interests culpable, but it is still remarkable that he can see government officials as mere helpless pawns. There may be hope for him. After the trial, he petitioned the government to appoint an independent investigatory board into the assassination. Clinton, however, turned it over to the Department of Justice, which of course found, after a massively expensive operation, that James Earl Ray had acted alone. (Not even Ray's fellow inmates could believe he killed King.) A lengthy appendix is devoted to answering the DOJ's claims point by point. The concluding paragraph of the book is poignant. Pepper acknowledges that he and the King family were wrong, perhaps foolish, to have trusted the government to conduct an inquiry on itself. "But, in the depths of most democratic souls, there is a hope and a yearning for the ideals with which we are raised, a hope that our government will ultimately do the right thing in such a case, and a yearning also that our worst fears will not be realized - that it has all been a lie and that, at the end of the day, our democracy is a perpetrated illusion, a myth, even a disappearing fantasy when it comes up against the special interests of wealth and power who from the shadows dominate the institutions of public life and power in our Republic" (p. 261). That disillusionment looks to me like the garden path to anarchism, if we want to take advantage of it in our liberal friends.
The only (domestic) conspiracy ever alleged in the case of TWA Flight 800 was the cover-up. That was a major operation because, as viewers of Cashill's video Silenced know, there were over 700 eyewitnesses, mostly educated, well-to-do people on Long Island, and a number of them had extensive military experience. Many of these witnesses provided detailed descriptions and drawings. Some saw the missile itself, others only the streak; some even got photos - and one video, which was of course confiscated and never seen again. Pilots with Vietnam experience were unequivocal that one of the explosions was ordnance rather than jet fuel. All their testimony had to be excluded from the official investigation. But the physical evidence was also a problem. Every time a government official came up with a new theory of what happened, another piece of evidence had to be lost, destroyed, or hammered into the appropriate shape. Most important was a campaign of intimidation. When James Sanders, the coauthor of the book, obtained a sample of residue from the seats and had it independently tested, Clinton immediately issued an executive order repealing whistleblower protection in relation to the incident.
So what was being covered up, and why? One theory had been a missile fired by terrorists from the shore. Another surmised a Navy practice session gone bad. The latter theory would explain the Navy ship, the Normandy, steaming directly away from the crash site at 30 knots, in violation of international law - as well as the cover-up. Cashill thinks neither theory was quite right. On the day of the attack, July 17, 1996, the military had been placed on the highest alert since the Cuban missile crisis, in response to ominous messages that had been intercepted. The area south of Long Island was crawling with Navy ships, subs, and planes. One of these planes watched a small, six-seater plane as it narrowly missed USAir Flight 217 northbound to Providence. Both the terrorist plane and the Navy plane had their transponders turned off to avoid detection. Cashill conjectures that the terrorist pilot changed his mind on seeing how small his first target, a Fokker, turned out to be. He then spotted the 747 taking off from Kennedy, and turned around and descended to approach it from behind. The turn toward the 747 was a dead giveaway to the Navy P-3 plane monitoring the small plane, and two missiles were fired to intercept it, one from the north (evidently from the Normandy) and one from the south. The timing was just a little off. The terrorist's hook under and behind the 747 confused the southbound missile, which hit the 747. A few seconds later, the northbound missile found the terrorist plane, about 60 feet away from the 747. The small plane, loaded with explosives, detonated with such force that it fused the DNA of the couple sitting nearest the blast.
So, although the Navy was directly involved, it was actually trying to prevent the disaster; and there is no way, once the situation became clear, that TWA 800 could have been saved. So why the necessity of a cover-up? The incident was right before the Democratic convention and the Atlanta Olympics. A terrorist attack, identified as such, would have wreaked havoc on air travel, in addition to exposing our vulnerability to terrorism in the middle of a campaign season. But it was presumably frustrating to the terrorists to have their suicide mission labeled an accident. The next time they had to make sure that didn't happen. Of course, if it had been identified as a terrorist attack, we would have had the Patriot Act five years earlier....
Cashill has said he is about 90% sure of the scenario sketched here. But it fits the available evidence, including the presence of shrapnel in one body for which the family was able to get the autopsy report under the Freedom of Information Act. He is also careful to document his claims, and to indicate the parts that are conjecture. His tone is professional and dispassionate, and his attitude toward various government creeps and their lackeys in the media is generous. A partial exception occurs in the later chapters, where, to my ear, the tone becomes a little bitter and melodramatic. My guess is that Sanders may have had more of a hand in these chapters, particularly in the account of the trial of Sanders and his wife. But I could forgive more than a little bitterness about the outrageous treatment to which they were subjected. This book is definitely better than the movie.
Kristina Borjesson was a CBS reporter assigned to the TWA 800 investigation. When she uncovered incontrovertible evidence of a missile hit, CBS pulled the story and fired her. She felt as though she'd been shoved "into a buzzsaw." Dumfounded and outraged, she eventually discovered a number of other journalists who had had similar experiences on different issues. This book is a collection of their stories.
One chapter, for instance, is by Gary Webb, the investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who found that the CIA had been responsible for creating the first mass market for crack cocaine in this country, and was still selling it to finance its undercover operations. His editor, Jerry Ceppos, had been solidly supportive up through publication. After the story broke, however, Ceppos published a partial retraction, saying that some of the evidence was less than reliable. Webb was astonished, contending that there was no basis for this retraction at all. But the retraction got a bigger play in the New York Times than did the original story.
There are a number of other stories here which were completely new to me. In each case an enterprising journalist - often a recipient of professional awards, like Webb and Borjesson - started out believing in the system, and in a free press, then found herself or himself persecuted, undermined, and bewildered about what happened to their stories, and to themselves for telling them. Their bewilderment is the weakness of the book; none of them has very much of a perspective beyond his or her case, or an understanding of what is really happening. The book is a useful and interesting document, but there's clearly more to be told about what has happened to American media. Pepper's book has an observation that may be relevant: The CIA owns or controls 2500 media entities worldwide, and, "In addition, it has its people ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors in virtually every major media organization" (p. 135).
Watergate had a major impact in revealing to ordinary Americans just how corrupt ordinary government could be. So long as it was only Nixon, or only the Republicans, however, it could be dismissed as an exception. Other historical conspiracies can actually be very helpful to the libertarian movement, in undermining the blind trust in American government instilled by high school civics classes. But first, of course, on the way to being documented as conspiracies, they have to pass through the stage of being conspiracy theories. Let's not join the CIA-infiltrated major media in deriding conspiracy theories per se.
Mike Acree is a past Treasurer and Newsletter Editor for the LPSF.