Framed:  America's Patsy Tradition    

 Espousal of Lies

The 60's Patsy Trio:  Oswald, Ray and Sirhan

 "Truth" Control

Freedom of the press is one of the guarantees of our constitution, but that freedom has been grossly abused throughout our history. The powerful groups that steer the content of our media have absolute control over what the American public sees and hears. Our very perceptions are being molded by this vast grip.

This trend is probably more evident in three of the most atrocious crimes in our history: the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy. In all three cases, the mainstream media has demonstrated a blatant disregard for facts that throw serious and reasonable doubt on the "official" versions of the crimes.

It would be so easy for the media to present the whole story in these three shocking murders. It isn't a matter of outrageous or unsubstantiated information brought forth by "kooks" or conspiracy nuts being rejected. For over 30 years the testimony of people who actually witnessed or were closely connected to these assassinations, reliable people, has been ignored and even ridiculed by the media.

The information that contradicts the official versions of these murders reached a "common knowledge" point long ago among the fair and serious research community and people who really have a regard for the truth. I say "fair and serious" because even though most books that delve into the murders deal with the evidence that contradicts the official line, there have been books that espouse it, choosing to ignore or distort this info to support their views. These latter publications always get a "sweetheart" treatment by the media while the former ones are swept under the rug. The Warren Commission is the grandaddy of these official media sweethearts.

 Victim's Shoes

Let me for one moment put you, the reader, in an imaginary position in an attempt to conjure up a feeling. Suppose someone in your family is the victim of a crime that has a shattering effect on you and your loved one's lives. After the trial for the "perpetrator" of the crime, you come upon some information, reliable and substantiated, that leads you to believe that the wrong person was convicted. Your sense of outrage is reawkened.

You press the authorities with the new-found information, hoping to right the mis-conceived conviction and bring the real culprit to justice. Everywhere you turn the door is shut in your face, so to speak. You can't understand why people aren't interested in the truth and real justice. About a month later, you finally find out what you are up against- the real culprit, the one that escaped the net of justice while the trial convicted someone with a record that painted him a criminal in the eyes of the jury and public- the real culprit just happens to be the son of a very important and powerful person of the local political establishment.

Your family has been violated. Your life has been violated. But the reality of politics has stonewalled your right to vindication, even in a legal manner. Wouldn't you be angry and disgruntled? Wouldn't you seek others who might be able to bring the injustice to the light of day?

This is exactly the same scenario that was and is being played out in the three major American assassinations of the 60s. In all three cases, the person branded as the assassin was no more than a framed individual surrounded in the shadows by those who made sure his portrait fit that of a stalking and demented murderer. The real murderers are still at large or deceased, avoiding the official prosecution of our government. Is it really our government?

Just recently, "convicted" Martin Luther King, Jr. assassin James Earl Ray passed away from liver malfunction. Ray had tried for 30 years, since three days after being handed a conviction in 1969, to receive a new trial on appeal. All of the appeals were turned down, despite the public backing of Ray's innocence by numerous black civil rights leaders, including the family of the slain leader ML King, Jr. One doesn't have to delve into this case very far, just as in the Kennedy assassinations, to be swept over with a sense of outrage over the abuses of the legal system and the subsequent distortions and neglect by the media.

Coverups in all three cases were and continue to be aided immensely by the legal/media establishment, a tool that the rich and powerful have at their disposal to wash their hands with, so to speak. "Not in this country!" . . . a mis-informed person might utter when faced with this sentiment. Let's just take a quick look at the three "assassins" of the Kennedys and King.

Lee Harvey Oswald 

As most people are aware of, Oswald never even lived to have a trial, being gunned down by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police Department two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Despite claims that Oswald was offered the opportunity to receive legal counsel after his arrest, the fact remains that he never received it. Oswald apparently tried to reach attorney John Abt of New York but Abt was unavailable.

Like everything else in this case, who knows for sure the true story of Oswald's attempt to get legal representation? We know for a fact that he did request a lawyer at the famous mid-night press conference. In other words, ten hours after Oswald had been arrested, he still didn't have a lawyer to represent him! If there ever was a case where one was needed, this was surely it!

There were no transcripts available of Oswald's weekend-long interrogations, either. This is no surprise since any lawyer representing Oswald would have insisted on this or at least his client's silence.

Oswald's civil and legal rights were trampled over in a frenetic, shocking weekend that we will never forget. The alleged assassin of JFK, in examining what case there was against him, would certainly have been acquitted of the crime. I say this for one main reason: there was no case against him other than some far-reaching circumstantial evidence.

Obviously, a patsy isn't meant to receive justice by the very meaning of the term "patsy". He is meant to be the scapegoat, the person blamed for the crime, hence, what need is their for justice? The JFK conspiracy didn't need a case against Oswald because they had Jack Ruby and who-knows-what-else as fail-safe mechenisms against the truth or partial truths emerging.

When you look at the way Oswald's legal rights were treated, you have to wonder if he really needed them. When conspiracies have their way, there is never really a case against a patsy. If the real facts emerge, maybe he could be tried as a co-conspirator at most. To prevent acquittal and an eventual reopening of a case, the patsy must be either eliminated or put in a position of legal exile where his story will never reach the public. Sound familiar?

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan

After Senator Robert Kennedy made his California primary victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the evening of June 4, 1968, he was led through a kitchen pantry to a waiting press conference. Kennedy was headed in another direction as he left the stage but was diverted at the last minute by a hotel official.

Waiting in the pantry area was 21-year old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian refuge who had spent most of his life living in the Pasadena area northwest of Los Angeles. As Kennedy approached Sirhan's position, Sirhan shouted out "Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch" and proceeded to draw a .22 pistol and began shooting at the victorious candidate.

According to all the witnesses present, Sirhan never got within three feet of Kennedy and always remained in front as he emptied his pistol. Kennedy fell backwards as the shooting started. Sirhan was wrestled away from Kennedy right after he opened fire by several men. These have become established facts of this case. However, the autopsy of RFK clearly revealed that the fatal wound was a point-blank shot that entered the back of the head just below the right ear. Two other wounds in Kennedy were also inflicted from the same position: behind and at close range.

This discrepancy, this impossibility of ballistics, was never given the slightest play in Sirhan's eventual trial. Add this to the fact that about 13 separate bullet marks were accounted for in the pantry area, and Sirhan's gun was an 8-shooter! One of the panels from the pantry with bullet holes in it was destroyed by the LAPD, which called it "routine".

Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar was in the postion to inflict RFK's wounds, trailing the candidate closely to the right rear. One witness actually saw Cesar draw and fire his weapon the moment Sirhan started firing, hitting Kennedy in the process. With the shock of Sirhan's initial shots all attention in the crowded pantry was either diverted or blocked out. Cesar's actions were never investigated thoroughly by the LAPD.

While many people were trying to get into the pantry right after the shooting began, two people were suspicious in their attempt to flee the area. Several witnesses spoke of an attractive young lady in a polka dot dress who seemed to be speaking with Sirhan right before he went on his shooting binge. One witness, Sandra Serrano, who was sitting outside on a fire escape, saw three people, including Sirhan and the "polka dot dress" woman with another man, enter the hotel where she was seated. After hearing what she thought sounded like a "backfire", she saw two of the same people, minus Sirhan, exit the premises excitedly shouting, "We shot him! We shot him!" When Serrano asked who they had shot they replied "We shot Senator Kennedy!"

An All Points Bulletin was issued for the "polka dot dress" lady, but this was inexplicably quickly cancelled by LAPD. They had their man at the Ambassador Hotel. Despite public interest in the "polka dot" mystery, the girl who was with Sirhan and another man was never found. From the beginning, Sirhan was, like Oswald, molded in the public's eye as the lone, deranged, mal-contented assassin. The police handling of the case revolved around this strict established premise.

All winesses who had more to add to the investigation or information that threw doubt on the official LAPD position of the crime were intimidated and coerced into changing their testimony by members of the Special Unit Senator(SUS) force that was formed to look into the murder.

Sirhan never had a chance, like Oswald, to actually flee the scene of the crime. He was quickly detained by several men much larger than him in the crowded room. It leaves me to wonder whether some of the shots from behind RFK weren't meant for him. California Senator and Kennedy booster Jesse Unruh actually rode with Sirhan in the patrol car that brought him to police headquarters, fearing another appearance of "Jack Ruby".

Despite the contradictory testimony of witnesses and the non-corroborating evidence, Sirhan was convicted as the lone assassin of Robert Kennedy and languishes today in California State prison at Corcoran. He has been denied parole seven times.

James Earl Ray

Two months before Robert Kennedy was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers' strike. On the evening of April 4, as King and his entourage were preparing to leave the Lorraine Motel for dinner, an assassin shot the civil rights leader as he was talking to someone in the parking lot from the second-floor balcony. The bullet entered King's face and traversed his neck, coming to rest just inside the skin of his right shoulder blade. He was pronounced dead an hour later.

Several witnesses saw a man crouching in some bushes across the street from the Lorraine Motel and one actually saw smoke rising from them(sound familiar?). One witness, chaffeur Solomon Jones, saw this man actually climb down an 8-foot retaining wall in front of the bushes across Mulberry Street and run to a parked Memphis PD patrol car down the street.

Police quickly and conveniently found a blanketed bundle in front of the Canipe Amusement Company, located across the street and under a rooming house. In it were numerous items, including a 30.06 Remington rifle that became the official murder weapon.

Right after the shooting, a citizen picked up an apparent chase on his CB radio that was relayed to a policeman, who in turn relayed it to dispatch. This CB broadcast was later determined to be a bogus one intended to draw the police in the wrong direction.

James Earl Ray, eventually convicted of the murder, had purchased the gun, he said, under orders from a man named Raul, whom he had met in Toronto a few months previous and had offered to include him in a gun-running and smuggling operation. Ray has stated that he was having a flat spare tire fixed during the shooting a couple blocks away at a service station. Raul had told him to go to the movies for a couple hous right before the assassination, but he elected to fix the flat tire because Raul might be using the car.

The state eventually established that the shot was fired from a bathroom window adjacent to a sleeping room(above the bush area) that Ray had rented in the roominghouse above the Canipe Amusement Company and Jim's Grill. This despite the fact that cabdriver James McGraw, who was at the roominghouse to pick up a fare, saw no one in the bathroom very shortly before 6:00 when King was shot. Also, the angle of the shot from the window was a very difficult one.

After firing at Dr. King, Ray allegedly quickly gathered his possessions in the blanketed bundle and hurriedly left the building, exiting from the Canipe Amusement Co. entrance downstairs. When he saw a police car parked as he exited the building, parked at the corner of South Main and Butler Streets, just down the street, Ray is supposed to have dropped the bundle and fled in his white Mustang.

This story is the official rendition despite the fact that the police officer in the car, Emmett Douglass, says he was parked further back from the intersection and behind some shrubs that would have made sighting his car from the front of Canipe Amusement Co. impossible. Those shrubs were completely cut down the next morning, helping to facilitate the official version of the story.

The mass of trees and bushes between the roominghouse and the 8-foot retaining wall were also completely cut down early the next morning by the same Memphis City maintenance crew. The shot from the bathroom window had to pass through this thicket and there is strong conjecture, as in the police car "sighting" by Ray on South Main and Butler, that this cleanup operation made the shot more offficially plausible.

The state's star witness became Charles Stephens, a man in the roominghouse who was "too drunk to stand" at the time, according to a Memphis police officer who questioned him right after the shooting. Stephens stated that he saw a man fitting Ray's description in the hallway right after the shot. However, Grace Walden, Stephens' common-law wife, testified to seeing a man who didn't come close to Ray's description. Stephens was given the royal treatment while Walden was committed to a mental hospital. Disclosure can be so messy!

What the general public doesn't know, thanks to the media coverup in this case, is that there was a real confession in this case. Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim's Grill, stated on national television(ABC Nightline) in December, 1993 that he aided in the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. and that James Earl Ray was just an innocent patsy.

Substantiating Jowers testimony is the recollection of one of his waitresses, Betty Spade, who saw Jowers run back into the kitchen of Jim's Grill from the backyard bushy area carrying a rifle right after King was shot. Cabdriver McGraw also remembers Jowers showing him a rifle from under the counter that he said was the murder weapon of King. Jowers said that the hit on King was coordinated through the mafia with local produce man Frank Liberto handling the Memphis strategy and money. Liberto admitted this to several people before he died.

Jowers didn't actually fire the rifle at King, but retrieved it after the real shooter had done his job. He brought it back into Jim's Grill and put it under a counter. It was picked up the next day by the mysterious Raul.

As in the Kennedy assassinations, plenty of prime suspects have surfaced over the years, even suspects, like Jowers, that have offered up self-incriminating statements, but James Earl Ray has remained tucked away by the legal abuses of the powerful since being apprehended two months after the shooting at London's Heathrow Airport.

Extradited back to the states(on the basis of the drunk Charles Stephens' testimony), he was kept in solitary confinement for nine months, under constant surveillance, in a room that was always lighted, and was slowly coerced and tricked into signing a confession for the crime. Ray waived his right to a trial and escaped the death penalty by signing a confession. Three days after his conviction he recanted and wanted a trial. He never got one.

The most galling thing to me in the James Earl Ray episode has been the media treatment of him. Every story, and I mean every story, about Ray over the years by the media has begun with the same phrase:

"James Earl Ray, the confessed killer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . "

This is a perfect example of truth distortion. People who don't how Ray was slowly-but-surely coerced into signing the confession are quick to accept the media's closed-case branding of this episode and move on to something else. "Confessed killer", a brand that the media has burned on Ray, doesn't even come close to telling the story. It is a lie that has been maliciously perpetrated on the American public for 30 years! It was not a true confession.

Not in this country? I think we've all seen too many movies depicting legal abuse and injustice in other countries. Too many of us have become conditioned that this cannot happen in a free country like the United States. If people want to keep dreaming and let injustice go unnoticed, then the Oswalds, the Rays, the Sirhans will go down in our history as murderous criminals when in fact they were duped pawns of a power elite. If you really care about truth and justice, then learn more about these episodes and let others know about it!

 To Kill An Enemy

Obviously, there is a lot more to all three of the cases mentioned here. I have just scratched the surface to demonstrate a few of the outrageous abuses of justice that have occured. There are many more too numerous to mention in just one column. Anyone who takes the time and has the heart to care for the truth and justice can find out more by accessing the tremendous amount of literature that covers these crimes.

William Pepper's "Orders To Kill" is a comprehensive undertaking about Dr. King's murder. Pepper had a long association with both King and Ray, putting him in a unique position among assassination researchers. He also had to deal with the legal establishment of Tennessee in trying to get more evidence on record in the case and his story only led me to conclude there was no justice at all in this case!

By far and away, President Kennedy assassination literature far outweighs the material on King and Robert Kennedy. JFK's murder was far more traumatic to this nation because 1) he was a very popular president, 2) he was president, 3) the times were peaceful generally- the public perception was that there was no war and everything was, well to borrow a phrase, "Camelot"- generally people never expected a president like Kennedy to be the victim of assassination, and 4) the manner in which JFK was killed- having his brains splattered in clear public view.

The doors to critical literature were opened with the publication of the Warren Commission, which despite a massive investigative effort, stuck to the lone-nut scenario in the face of countless evidence and leads that begged to differ. Basically Commission Report critics saw smoke that darkened the whole landscape of the American public's right to know. Official backers in all three cases have stated that the "smoke" comes from the critics' campfires and no where else.

One thing is certain in all this: there is smoke and the backers of official "truth" in all three murder cases have never been able to prove that the smoke is only coming from the critics' campfires. Also, they have never been able to disprove that the smoke is not coming the official side. The forces that want to bury the truth from the American public cannot resort to facts because the facts don't support them. Instead, they must resort to legal/media manipulation to keep the truth under the rug. It is a "might makes right" contest if there ever was one.

Getting back to my little personal make-believe scenario that I conjured up previously, I feel sorry for the families of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Their American experiences have been forever violated and poisoned by the abuses of powewrful forces above the law of the common man. If these forces can eliminate such loved public men like JFK, MLK and RFK, do you think they care about using and destroying common people like Oswald, Ray and Sirhan?

As long as the legal/media establishment is controlled and used for propoganda purposes instead of informational ones, we are all possible victims of injustice. The actual crime doesn't have to be orchestrated even near perfection when you have the tools of the media and law at your disposal. The glaring amount of loose strings in all three assassination cases mentioned above, and the continued media espousal of official versions without any general public outcry, is sad evidence to this!