Where is his replacement?

By Paul Craig Roberts

January 20, 2015 "ICH" - January 19 is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday.

King was an American civil rights leader who was assassinated 47 years ago on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. James Earl Ray was blamed for the murder. Initially, Ray admitted the murder, apparently under advice from his attorney in order to avoid the death penalty, but Ray soon withdrew his confession and unsuccessfully sought a jury trial.

Documents of the official investigation remain secret until the year 2027.

As Wikipedia reports, “The King family does not believe Ray had anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King. . . . The King family and others believe that the assassination was carried out by a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, and that James Earl Ray was a scapegoat. This conclusion was affirmed by a jury in a 1999 civil trial against Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators.”

The US Department of Justice concluded that Jowers’ evidence, which swayed the jury in the civil trail, was not credible. On the other hand, there is no satisfactory explanation why documents pertaining to the investigation of Ray were put under lock and key for 59 years.

There are many problems with the official story of King’s assassination, just as there are with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. No amount of suspicion or information will change the official stories. Facts don’t count enough to change official stories.

Many Americans will continue to believe that having failed to tar King as a communist and womanizer, the establishment decided to remove an inconvenient rising leader by assassination. Many black Americans will continue to believe that a national holiday was the government’s way of covering up its crime and blaming racism for King’s murder.

Certainly, the government should not have fomented suspicion by settling such a high profile murder with a plea bargain. Ray was an escapee from a state penitentiary and was apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport on his way to disappear in Africa. It seems farfetched that he would imperil his escape by taking a racist-motivated shot at King.

We should keep in mind the many loose ends of the Martin Luther King assassination as we are being bombarded by media with what Finian Cunningham correctly terms “high-octane emotional politics that stupefies the public from asking some very necessary hard questions” about the Charlie Hebdo murders, or for that matter the Boston Marathon Bombing case and all other outrages that prove to be so convenient for governments.

Those gullible citizens who believe that “our government would never kill its own people” have much understanding to gain from knowledge of Operation Gladio and Northwoods Project, about which much information is available on the Internet and in parliamentary investigations and officially released secret documents.

The Northwoods Project was presented to President John F. Kennedy by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It called for shooting down people on the streets of Washington and Miami, shooting down US airliners (“real or simulated”), and attacking refugee boats from Cuba in order to create an atrocity case against Castro that would secure public support for a full-fledged invasion to bring regime change to Cuba. President Kennedy refused the plot and removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, an action that some researchers conclude led to his assassination.

Operation Gladio was revealed by the prime minister of Italy in 1990. It was a secret operation coordinated by NATO and operated by European military secret services in cooperation with the CIA and British intelligence.

Parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium and testimony by secret service operatives have established that Gladio, originally established as a “stay-behind” secret army to resist Soviet invasion, was used to commit bombing attacks on Europeans, especially women and children, in order to blame communists and keep them from gaining political power in Europe during the Cold War era.

In answer to questioning by judges about the 1980 bombing of the central train station in Bologna resulting in the deaths of 85 people, Vincenzo Vinciguerra said: “There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men . . . a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives [which] took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, or preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.”

Vinciguerra told the UK newspaper The Guardian that “every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix . . . mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”

There is no doubt about Gladio’s existence. The BBC did a 2.5 hour documentary on the secret terrorist NATO organization in 1992. There are a number of books, articles and reports in addition to the parliamentary investigations and testimonies from participants.
There are reasons to believe that, although exposed, Gladio is still in operation and is behind terrorist attacks, such as Charlie Hebdo, in Europe today. Of course, today Washington has such control over Europe that no parliamentary investigations comparable to those that exposed Operation Gladio are possible.

With the documented and officially admitted existence of many official government conspiracies against their own peoples resulting in numerous deaths, only witting or unwitting agents of government conspiracies respond to valid questions about alleged terrorist events by trying to shout down truth-seekers.

The function of shutting down suspicion of official stories has been well performed by the “mainstream” print and TV media in the Western world. This presstitute function has been joined by many tabloid internet sites, such as Salon, and other such sites that originate in money or desire for profit.

Money flows to those who serve the establishment. The way to riches is to cover for the powerful private interest groups that comprise the One Percent and control the government.

Many websites unwittingly contribute to the power of the One Percent to control explanations and to discredit truth-seekers. This is the main function of comment sections on Internet sites where paid trolls operate.

Studies have concluded that the largest percentage of a population is too insecure to take a position different from peers. Most Americans simply do not know enough to have confidence in making independent decisions. They go with the flow and rely on their peers to tell them what is safe to think.

Trolls are hired for the purpose of making disparaging and ad hominem attacks on those who diverge from accepted opinion. For example, I am constantly attacked in personal terms in comment sections by people hiding behind first names and aliases. Others employ left-wing and progressive hatred of Ronald Reagan to discredit me on the grounds that anyone so wicked and evil as to serve in the Reagan administration cannot be trusted. Many of my denigrators worship the ground that Hillary Clinton walks on.

Today in the so-called “western democracies,” it is permissible to be politically incorrect against Muslims and to invoke denigration and hatred against them. However, it is not permissible to criticize the government of Israel for indiscriminate and murderous attacks on Palestinian citizens. The position of the Israel Lobby and its obedient and well-intimidated presstitutes is that any criticism whatsoever of Israel is anti-semitism and an indication that the critic desires a new holocaust. In other words, the Israel Lobby defines any critic of any Israeli government policy as an incipient mass murderer.

This effort to silence all critics of Israeli policies applies also to Israelis and Jews themselves. Israelis and Jews who legitimately criticize Israeli policies in hopes of steering the Zionist State away from self-destruction are branded “self-hating Jews” by the Israel Lobby. The Lobby has demonstrated its power to destroy academic freedom and to reach into private Catholic universities and public state universities and both block and withdraw tenure appointments of candidates, both Jews and non-Jews, who have incurred the Lobby’s disapproval.

I see Martin Luther King as an American hero. Whatever his personal failings, if any, he stood for justice and for the safety of every race and gender under law. King actually believed in the American dream and wanted to achieve it for everyone. I am confident that had I confronted King with criticism, he would have considered my case and responded honestly regardless of any power he might have held over me.

I cannot expect the same consideration from any western government or from the trolls that operate in comment sections provided by Internet sites in hopes of boosting their readership.

Gullible and credulous people are incapable of defending their liberty. Unfortunately these traits are the principal traits of western peoples. Western liberty is collapsing in front of our eyes, and this makes absurd the desire by Vladimir Putin’s Russian opponents to integrate with the collapsing western states.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.