Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (40 page)

•There is still an
active focus
on media propaganda in the U.S. by Intelligence agencies to discredit conspiracy theories and solidify the official version of historical events;

•The reason that there was virtually no media coverage of the civil trial in 1999 resulting in a conspiracy verdict in the King assassination is directly linked to governmental control of the media in the United States.
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At this point, misinformation has been so imprinted in the minds of Americans that “James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King”—that even certain proof to the contrary would not be accepted, because that’s the way that disinformation works.

“Disinformation is not only getting certain things to appear in print, it’s also getting certain things not to appear in print. I mean, the first—the first thing I would say as a way of explanation is the incredibly powerful effect of disinformation over a long period of time that I mentioned before. For 30 years the official line has been that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King and he did it all by himself ... And when that is imprinted in the minds of the general public for 30 years, if somebody stood up and confessed and said: I did it. Ray didn’t do it, I did it. Here’s a movie. Here’s a video showing me do it. 99 percent of the people wouldn’t believe him because it just—it just wouldn’t click in the mind. It would just go right to—it couldn’t be. It’s just a powerful psychological effect over 30 years of disinformation that’s been imprinted on the brains of the—the public.”
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FORENSIC, BALLISTICS & MEDICAL EVIDENCE

There is a
total ballistics mismatch
with the evidence of this case. Judge Joe Brown was the main trial judge during proceedings where new evidence was introduced. After spending two years examining technical points about the murder weapon, Judge Brown concluded that:

The bullet that killed Dr. King
could not
have been fired from Ray’s rifle; the scientific testing
excluded
it as having come from that cartridge case.
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The
entire
set of ballistics just doesn’t match up. As Judge Brown put it:

•“What you’ve got in terms of the physical evidence relative to ballistics is frightening.”

•“First, it’s not the right type of rifle.”

•The Remington Gamemaster 30.06 is a pump-action rifle and would be extremely difficult to fire from a position of resting it on a window sill;

•“It’s never been sighted in.”

•Test-firing the rifle verified that the alignment of the rifle was off, by several feet, at about 100 yards;

•“It’s the wrong kind of scope.”

•“With a 30.06, it makes a particularly difficult shot firing at a downward trajectory in that circumstance.”

•“Metallurgical analysis excludes the bullet taken from the body of Dr. King from coming from the cartridge case they say was fired in that rifle.”

•
The bullet that killed Dr. King
did not come
from the rifle found at the crime scene.
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During the time period that he was presiding over James Earl Ray’s appeal, Judge Brown informed the Black Congressional Caucus that it was
not possible
that Ray’s rifle, the alleged murder weapon, had fired the shot that killed Dr. King. After that comment, Judge Brown was removed from presiding over that trial for alleged bias.

U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney wrote that Judge Brown told her and the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus that, unequivocally, Ray’s rifle was
not
the weapon that killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are her words, exactly as she recorded them:

“Yesterday, Judge Joe Brown told us unequivocally that the so- called murder rifle was NOT the weapon that killed Dr. King.”
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As veteran researcher Michael Rivero noted:

“Ballistics tests are an either/or situation. Either the bullet matches or it doesn’t. Either the James Earl Ray rifle fired that bullet or it didn’t. Legally, if it cannot be proven, it didn’t happen. A report leaked from the court confirms that the second set of ballistics tests showed that there is a manufacturing defect in the James Earl Ray rifle that gouges any bullet it fires. That mark does NOT appear on the bullet that killed Martin Luther King. When the judge ordered one more set of tests to make sure, the Federal gov-ernment, instead of complying with the court order, had the judge removed from the case March 7th, 1998!”
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In the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. he was shot only once. Therefore, the trajectory of that bullet is crucial evidence.

Bullet trajectories do not tell lies. They reveal clear indications of bullet paths. They telegraph to us exactly where gunshots originated.

Dr. King was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee while standing on the balcony of Room 306 which was actually located on the second story of the building. The 2
^hd
floor bathroom window of the rooming house across the street is the site from which James Earl Ray allegedly fired the shot.

The bullet entered Dr. King’s right cheek and passed through from right- to-left in a sharp, downward trajectory, then severing the spinal column in his neck, continuing downward, and lodging, still lower, in his left shoulder.

Therefore, the trajectory tells us that the bullet was fired from a point high above the victim and to his right, which also happens to be precisely where three eyewitnesses on the balcony are pointing in the photographic evidence from immediately after the shot.

Dr. Jerry Thomas Francisco, the Medical Examiner, testified about the autopsy:

“The examination revealed a gunshot wound to the right side of the face, passing through the body into the neck, through the spinal cord at the base of the neck, with the bullet lodging beneath the skin near the shoulder blade on the left.”
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Yet we are told that the shot came from the bathroom window at Ray’s rooming house which is
only slightly above
the balcony of Dr. King—in fact, it’s almost what is called a
flat trajectory.

In 1979, the U.S. Congress
House Select Committee on Assassinations
investigated the King assassination. They hired a review board headed by three noted forensic pathologists to examine the autopsy. One of the three was the famous Dr. Michael Baden, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City. Dr. Baden was the spokesperson for the panel. And they agreed with Dr. Francisco on the downward trajectory:

“Dr. Baden testified that Dr. King died as a result of a single gunshot wound caused by a bullet that entered the right side of the face approximately an inch to the right and a half inch below the mouth. The bullet fractured Dr. King’s jaw, exited the lower part of the face and reentered the body in the neck area. It then severed numerous vital arteries and fractured the spine in several places, causing severe damage to the spinal column and coming to rest on the left side of the back. The bullet traveled in a downward, and rearward from a medial direction.”
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Therefore, the shooter was
above
the victim; not parallel in the rooming house across the streetwhere the official U.S. governmentversion ofevents places James Earl Ray. If Dr. King had been struck from a shot fired from where the government states that he fired, then the bullet pathway through Dr. King’s body would,
of scientific necessity
, be almost level, parallel, or only slightly above, since Ray’s rooming house was on a slope; it was on the second floor of a building just like Dr. King was, but a slope on the terrain placed it slightly higher than Dr. King’s balcony. But the sharply downward trajectory of that bullet establishes unequivocally that the shot was fired from a point much higher than the victim. Therefore, it is physically impossible for the official version to be correct.

As author Michael Rivero states:

“If you go back to my article and look at the photo taken from the rooming house window, you will see it is almost a flat trajectory.”
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We also know that the rifle shot came from the victim’s right, because the bullet traversed his body right-to-left. It was up-and-to-the-right from the 2nd floor balcony upon which Dr. King stood; from a position that was about “two-o’clock-high” from the target. That’s
not even close
to the rooming house where the official version places the shot. The rooming house is directly across from the balcony; it’s not to the right and it is most certainly not sufficiently higher to have caused the sharply downward trajectory.

So where
did
the rifle shot come from? It came from above the victim, precisely where a professional assassin prefers to position. The shot also came from precisely where the eyewitnesses are pointing in the photographic evidence.

Below are the official findings of the House Assassinations Committee, 1979. This is direct from their report in the National Archives. Frankly, it is bureaucratic gobbledygook—but read it slowly and with the height and directional issues in mind and see if it makes any sense.

“From extrinsic evidence, the autopsy panel accepted that at the moment the bullet entered his body, Dr. King was at the balcony railing talking to someone on the pavement one story below. Accordingly, the panel found that
the bullet pathway was consistent with the shot coming from his right and above.
The autopsy panel concluded that the single bullet that struck Dr. King must have come from across Mulberry Street, because Dr. King’s body was
facing in that direction
and because a bullet coming from that direction would have traveled on a downward slope. The panel concluded, further, that the bullet was probably fired from the area of the rooming house at 422 1/2 South Main Street, but the panel could not determine, from the medical evidence alone, whether the shot was fired from the bathroom window on the second floor or from the shrubbery below the window.”
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There are
big
problems with the would-be logic of the above statement. If the bullet came from where he was facing then it could not have traversed sharply right-to-left through his face. Ray’s rooming house was directly across the street and only slightly to the right, from Dr. King’s perspective; think of the face of a clock right in front of the victim and the rooming house would be at about 12:30. So if Dr. King
“was facing in that direction”
then there is quite obviously
no way
that a bullet shot from slightly to his right could enter his right cheek and then travel
right-to-left
through his body (unless he was leaning sharply downward and to his very extreme left, in which case he wouldn’t be facing where they said he was!).
Also
above, they say that it may have been fired from street level, yet it somehow managed to go through someone on the second floor in a sharply downward direction! “The shrubbery below the window” is at street-level. So can somebody please tell us how a bullet from street level is going to have a
downward
trajectory when it goes through somebody on the second floor? The area
is
sloped a bit, but the second floor where Dr. King stood is
higher
than “the shrubbery below the window” not
lower,
as you can see in the photos below.

The fact is that the trajectory of the bullet contradicts the official version. That fact
necessarily
mandates that the shooter fired from a level substantially higher than the victim. Logic dictates that a shooting level lower, parallel, or slightly above Dr. King could not have resulted in the sharply downward trajectory of his wounds. Like we said: Trajectory does not tell lies ... the government does.

Below is the actual photograph taken as Dr. King lay dying, seconds after the gunshot. The witnesses on the balcony are looking and pointing at where they thought it came from: