From alternet.org:
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).
The FBI Has Some Explaining to Do About King's MurderBy Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New American Media
Posted on April 2, 2008, Printed on April 4, 2008
"Dangerous," "evil," "colossal fraud," were the choice terms that then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials routinely spit out about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They didn't stop at name calling. They talked ominously of "neutralizing" him as an effective leader. And even more ominously they sent him a letter flatly saying "King you are done."
The FBI's name calling, paranoid harassment and violent threats brutally and disgustingly captured the secret and patently illegal wiretapping of King. This is not smoking gun proof that the FBI had a hand in King's murder. The tapes do raise the legitimate question: What did the FBI know and when did it know about possible attempts on King's life?
Americans certainly deserve to know the whole truth about the killing of King. But there are two truths about the murder. The first is painful for those who fervently believe that James Earl Ray was a Lee Harvey Oswald-type patsy and that the government orchestrated King's killing. Yet, the evidence is still overwhelming that Ray was the triggerman. His fingerprints were on the alleged murder weapon. He was at the crime scene, and he confessed. At different times before his death, Ray gave conflicting, confusing and muddled accounts of his activities and whereabouts at the time of the murder.
His protests of innocence and frame-ups sounded like a discredited man's desperate effort to salve his conscience, grab media attention, and cash in on the notoriety of the case. It worked. Ray's public trashing about on the King murder sent conspiracy buffs stampeding to the barricades shouting that the government killed King. The King family gave Ray's much belated feigning of innocence credence when Coretta Scott King took the stand on his behalf at a civil trial in Memphis in 1999.
The verdict of history stands that Ray killed King. But Ray's guilt, however, doesn't let the government off the hook, as the FBI wiretaps disgracefully show. Unfortunately, the other truth is that the House Select Committee on Assassination that investigated King's murder ordered the files sealed for fifty years. They are still sealed. So we don't really know what the FBI did or didn't do in the run-up to King's murder. The files just might answer many questions about the secret war the FBI waged against King from the late 1950's to his murder.
CONTINUED...
http://www.alternet.org/story/81108/ Dr. King got us to where we can do something about the situation.
Please, we must help each other continue the good work.