![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Edcurtinlogo2.jpg)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/grayslateBand2.jpg)
MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.
“Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves – or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe? From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
- Sophie Scholl, 21 years old, a member of the German White Rose resistance group, convicted of high treason for handing out anti-war literature at the University of Munich in Nazi Germany. She was executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943
One day, perhaps over morning coffee
As you drag yourself awake
Slowly, ruminating at the kitchen table
About nothing in particular, it appears
And cuts your breath: you know it can
Be different, life is yours to choose
Freely, if you wish, you can own
This disappearing act of yours
Before you vanish from yourself and those
For whom you say you live it.
But you feel it slipping past you,
Trickling out in trivial deeds
Repeated daily, the pillars of a normal life.
Sickening thought, this normalcy that grips you
By your throat and wrings you dry and dead.
Now in this quiet breath of solitude
Before the world arises into walking sleep
You are paralyzed by possibilities, nothing
Clear, just images that weave like dancing girls
Concealing and revealing wisps of dreams.
That is your burden now and hope
For tomorrow and the next day after that.
Begin with the smallest thing that owns you:
The need you have to think about another
Upon whom you can thrust your deepest doubts;
The stifling of a true response to a question.
Forget for once to blame your lie on love
For the other’s sensibilities. Admit your faith
In lies which you have deftly built your life upon
And which will fall in time into a heap of hurts.
It is always best to begin with truth,
If you can find it and the trust enough
To let it come and smash your normalcy
To bits. It will. It hurts, at first. Few
Like it, or you speaking it for that matter.
But it does matter greatly, it will burden you
With nothing much, the aperture to nothing more
Than everything that you can see as possible.
It’s tough to choose the terror of the truth
When trivia tranquilizes with such a soothing smile.
Then they are gone, the coffee and disturbing thoughts
As clocks alarm the others from their shady lives
To greet you, stunned and staring stupidly
Through space.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Ed-Curtin-beach-e1499600021865-1-1.jpg)
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology,
Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is
http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
![horiz-long grey](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-14-at-12.31.16-PM.png)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TGP-notice-1.png)
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Edcurtinlogo2.jpg)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/grayslateBand2.jpg)
MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.
A Quasi-Review of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton by Hugh Turley & David Martin
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thomas-merton-800.jpg)
Merton: His death seems to point to foul play.
“Killing a man who says ‘No!’ is a risky business,” the priest replied, “because even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse?” Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
Fifty years have elapsed since Thomas Merton died under mysterious circumstances in a cottage at a Red Cross Conference Center outside Bangkok, Thailand where he was attending an international inter-faith monastic conference. The truth behind his death has been concealed until now through the lies and deceptions of a cast of characters, religious, secular, and U.S. governmental, whose actions chill one to the bone. But he has finally found his voice through Hugh Turley and David Martin, who tell the suppressed truth of Merton’s last minutes on earth on December 10, 1968.
This is an extraordinary book in so many ways. First, because the authors prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trappist monk and anti-war writer Thomas Merton was assassinated and did not die in a fabricated accident, as has been claimed for all these years.
Second, because it is so meticulously researched, sourced, documented, and logically argued that it puts to shame and the lie to so many works, including academic ones, that purport to be profound but fall apart once carefully inspected, especially all those that have been written about Merton and his alleged accidental death. These false accounts of his death, obviously presented purposely by the key players – that he was electrocuted by a fan while wet from a shower – have been repeated ad nauseam over fifty years as if curiosity were reserved for cats and a writer’s job were to repeat commonplace absurdities. And of course the mainstream media, the prime organs of propaganda dissemination, have carried out their function by repeating these lies at every turn. The transparency of Turley and Martin’s presentation is greatly enhanced by the presence of footnotes, not endnotes, which allow readers to easily check sources as they read. Most footnotes refer to primary documents – letters, police reports, etc. – that are reproduced in an appendix that is, however, in need of enlargement, but whose contents have, for some odd or not so odd reasons, escaped the thousands of writers who’ve penned words about Merton.
Third, because it greatly expands our understanding of that fateful year – 1968 – by adding the prophetic Merton’s name to the list of well-known anti-war leaders – MLK and RFK – who were slain that year by U.S. government operatives intent on crushing the growing opposition to their genocidal war waged on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The links between these assassinations are made manifest as one follows the authors’ brilliant analysis that allows an informed reader to see the template common to them all and one that clearly leads to intelligence agencies practiced in the arts of murder and cover-up.
Fourth, because it proves that in the long run the pen is mightier than the sword, and the spiritually powerful poetic words of a God-entranced man living in seclusion can rattle the cages of men who embrace the void of violence while rejecting the spiritual essence of all religions – that non-violence and love are the laws of existence. Merton may be dead for his killers, but not for those who hear his voice whispering on every page: “The very thoughts of a person like me are crimes against the state. All I have to do is think: and immediately I become guilty,” Merton wrote in “A Signed Confession of Crimes Against the State.”
Lastly, because The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton markedly forces the reader to face its harsh truths and examine one’s soul and complicity in evil as one learns of the perfidy and betrayal of Merton by friends, associates, and biographers whom a naïve person might assume are beyond reproach, until, that is, one reads this book. It is a very hard lesson to accept and understand. But Hugh Turley and David Martin sequentially force the reader to contemplate such matters; to conjecture why some have conspired and abetted in Merton’s murder and especially its fifty year cover-up.
Thomas Merton (Fr. Lewis) was a Catholic monk, poet, writer and theologian who became very well-known in 1948 with the publication of his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, which became a bestseller. Over the next dozen or so years, he published many books on religious themes, mainly avoiding social or political subjects. But although he lived in a monastery, and eventually by himself in a hermitage nearby, he corresponded widely and was tuned in to worldly events. He became a friend and mentor to religious/political activists such as Martin Luther King, Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, James Douglass, among many others. He was a friend of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker. He corresponded with Boris Pasternak and Ethel Kennedy; wrote about Albert Camus and Eugene Ionesco. During the 1960s his writing turned more overtly political while remaining rooted in a deep mystical and contemplative spirituality. He became a major inspiration for radical activists who opposed nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and the materialist way of life fostered by capitalism that relied on the spread of the American empire through world-wide violence. Although living far away from the din and drama of day-to-day politics, his writing, encouragement, and influence were profound, and he became a major impediment to the propaganda and policies of the military-industrial-political-intelligence complex. He was an inspiration whose spirit disturbed church and state in the most radical way. Turley and Martin say of him:
Merton saw clearly that devotion to truth could not help but bring a person into
conflict with sinister special interests. The effectiveness of the truth-seeker would,
of course, be greater to the extent he could rally others to his cause, but ultimately,
he said, the truth seeker’s strength lay in trust in God.
Merton died on the afternoon of December 10, 1968 when those sinister special interests snuck up on him. He had just given a talk, had lunch, and returned to his cottage shortly before 2 P.M., accompanied by Fr. Francois de Grunne, O.S.B. (Order of Saint Benedict) from Belgium, who shared the cottage with Merton and two others, Fr. Celestine Say, O.S.B. from the Philippines, whose room was across from Merton’s on the first floor, and John Moffit, a journalist editor whose room was directly over Merton’s on the second floor adjacent to de Grunne’s. The walk from the dining hall to the cottage took 10-15 minutes. Say and Moffit were walking a good distance behind Merton and de Grunne and arrived at the cottage about 5-7 minutes after them. When they entered the unlocked building, they did not see Merton and de Grunne and presumed they had gone to their respective rooms.
Shortly after de Grunne and Merton entered the cottage, Merton was killed. The actions of de Grunne, a mysterious figure who, according to the authors, “seems to have fallen off the face of the earth” and whose “abbey will not even respond to our questions about him,” clearly make him a prime suspect in the crime. His actions and story are not believable and are contradicted by the most reliable witness, Fr. Say, whose statements have been absolutely consistent.
Beyond speculation, however, are the facts gathered by the authors that clearly prove that from the start there was a concerted effort to make a crime look like an accident. These efforts were initiated by de Grunne, who was the first to call it an “accident,” but ably assisted by many others, including the Thai police or their surrogates, whose police report was released by the U.S. Embassy seven months after Merton’s death and has no title, author, date, photographs, laboratory reports, or investigators’ memos, and omits the testimony of the first two witnesses on the scene, Fr. Say and Fr. Egbert Donovan, who viewed Merton lying in a position and dressed in shorts totally inconsistent with the accidental death scenario. Most importantly, this “report” omits an autopsy report since no autopsy was conducted, a dead giveaway that a cover-up was underway. When a person is found dead, the first assumption of a competent investigation is that a crime may have been committed, and when the victim is found with a severe gash on the back of his head, is lying in a position inconsistent with an accident, an autopsy becomes essential. But none was performed in Thailand or when Merton’s body arrived back at the Abbey of Gethsemani. That the United States Embassy, at the request of Most Reverend Dom Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., who was presiding over the conference, had the U.S Army take possession of Merton’s body shortly thereafter, embalm it, and five days later fly it back to the U.S. aboard a military plane together with the corpses of American casualties of the Vietnam War is not only supremely ironic but downright suspicious.
The first public report of Merton’s death was delivered on December 11, as Turley and Martin report: On December 11, 1968, the Associated Press reported that Merton had been electrocuted when he touched a short in a cord while moving an electrical fan, according to anonymous [my emphasis] Catholic sources. The initial news reports did not include any important details such as who found Merton, the names of any witnesses or officials at the scene, or who determined it was an accident.
The Thai doctor’s cause-of-death certificate and the official death certificate said Merton died of sudden cardiac failure, but failed to mention the bleeding rear head wound seen by witnesses.
Most importantly, when Say and Donovan first saw Merton lying on the floor on his back, his legs straight, and his arms straight down by his side with palms to the floor as if placed in a coffin, with a floor fan lying across a thigh to the opposite lower waist, Donovan urged Say to take photographs of Merton before the crime scene was subsequently disturbed. They were very suspicious. Through great detective work, Turley and Martin have acquired a copy of these two photos, but they have been prohibited by the current abbot of Gethsemani from publishing them or even an artist’s rendering of them. The authors say:
The photographs taken by Say are the best available evidence of the actual scene of Merton’s death….The reason the monks took the photographs, as we have emphasized, was to document exactly how they found the body. As we have seen, people whom they would hardly have ever suspected, have consistently done their best to suppress those images. The photographs are an essential resource to anyone interested in knowing the truth about how Merton was killed.
But it is clear that many people would like to suppress that truth and have been hard at work doing so for half a century. But since this is intentionally a quasi-review because one must read this book from beginning to end to grasp the intricacies of this murder mystery and the cast of characters that comprise it (no review can do justice to such a detailed and brilliant investigation, and, even so, attempting one would spoil the book), I will end with the authors’ words:
- Contrary to the common view, there is really no mystery about how Merton died.
- The best evidence indicates beyond any serious doubt that Merton was murdered.
- It’s a simple fact that the average person is far more likely to be murdered than to be
- killed by an electric fan, and Merton was no average person. The story that a fan killed
- Merton is so preposterous that a series of fantastic stories have had to be invented to
- make it believable….Who did it and why? The CIA had the motive and the means.
- 1968: It was a very dark year: MLK, RFK, and Thomas Merton – martyrs all.
If we want to see clearly and revive hope, the time has come to face the faces of the ghastly gallery of liars and deceivers guilty of these crimes. Only then can we live the truths their victims suffered and died for.
Then we too can confess with Merton that we have thought “Crimes Against the State.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Ed-Curtin-beach-e1499600021865-1-1.jpg)
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology,
Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is
http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
![horiz-long grey](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-14-at-12.31.16-PM.png)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TGP-notice-1.png)
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Edcurtinlogo2.jpg)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/grayslateBand2.jpg)
MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trump-urinal.jpg)
April 10, 2018
Donald Trump is preparing to ignite the Middle East and move the world a big step closer to total war. There is a very good chance the corporate mainstream media, accomplices in massive war crimes, will be announcing “breaking news” this evening or night that the U.S., in conjunction with its evil twin Israel that bombed a Syrian air base 24 hours ago, has launched a massive attack on Syria “justified” by a false flag chemical attack on Saturday. That such an expanded and terribly dangerous escalation of the war against Syria, whose ultimate goal is Iran and Russia, should come as no surprise to anyone halfway sentient. Open source intelligence has been available for at least 6 weeks that the world is facing a momentous point of no return unless somehow, against all odds, sane voices miraculously intervene to stop this push for world war, which could very well end with nuclear war. But don’t count on it.
I am sick at heart at the thought of what is coming. When will we ever learn? What follows were warnings shouted out in the only places – alternative media sites devoted to truth – that care to prevent such carnage. Imagine your own continuing timeline, if you can bear to do so. Somehow, some way, we must find ways to awake those Americans asleep to the evils conjured up by their own government before it is too late. I really don’t know how, but can’t resign myself to giving up, for if I do, I give up on humanity, the “humanity” Trump says so glibly is at stake as he prepares to shed more blood.
February 21, 2018
The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will). Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act.
These sinister players have signaled us quite clearly what they have in store. All signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Lebanon and Syria, and all the sycophantic mainstream media are in the kitchen prepping for the feast. Russia and Iran are the main course, with Lebanon and Syria, who will be devoured first, as the hors d’oeuvres. As always, the media play along as if they don’t yet know what’s coming. Everyone in the know knows what is, just not exactly when. And the media wait with baited breath as they count down to the dramatic moment when they can report the incident that will compel the “innocent” to attack the “guilty.”
March 1, 2018
Last week I wrote that “all signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Lebanon and Syria, and all the sycophantic mainstream media are in the kitchen prepping for the feast. Russia and Iran are the main course, with Lebanon and Syria, who will be devoured first, as the hors d’oeuvres.” Those signs are growing more numerous by the day.
Israel’s mainstream newspapers, Haaretz, and the more conservative Jerusalem Post, both announce in headline news that Iran has built a new base in Syria with missiles capable of hitting Israel. One look at these newspapers with their talk of Israeli war preparations and the potential in assassinating the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah makes it very clear that an expanded Middle Eastern war is fast approaching. Russia, Syria, and Iran are being demonized as mind control propaganda spews forth. The mainstream corporate media in the United States and other countries are sure to follow.
March 14, 2018
Donald Trump’s days of playing the passive/aggressive host of a reality-television game show are coming to an end. Either he fires all the apprentices who might slightly hesitate to wage a much larger world war and lets the bombs fly, or he will be replaced by one who will. Signs are that he has learned what his job entails and the world will suffer more death and destruction as a result.
Now we have the British Prime Minister Theresa May accusing Russia of poisoning in England the double-agent Sergei Skripal and threatening Russia to give a “credible” explanation why they killed this man or else, a man who sold the identities of Russian agents to the UK for cash, putting them in serious danger. Or else, she says, the UK “will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.”
Naturally she presented no evidence for Russian involvement, but the BBC, as is its wont, speculates on how the British may punish Russia, and the other corporate media chime in. But we are left to wonder where this is leading. Could it be Syria? Former British diplomat Craig Murray suggests it could be a false-flag setup aimed at raising Russiaphobia to hysterical proportions. But to what end?
If we look to the United Nations and the accusations and threats flying from the mouth of the US Ambassador Nikki Haley, Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s doppelganger in war lust, we see that the picture expands. Haley threatened that the US will take unilateral action in Syria against Syrian and Russian forces if the UN didn’t adopt her resolution that would have allowed anti-government terrorists plenty of time to escape from East Ghouta. She said, echoing words we have heard numerous times:
It is not the path we prefer, but it a path we have demonstrated we will take, and we are prepared to take again….When the international community fails to act, there are a Times when states are compelled to take their own action.
In response we have the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warning that another US strike on Syrian government forces would have serious consequences. And the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov saying,
We have reliable information about militants preparing to falsify a government chemical attack against civilians. In several districts of Eastern Ghouta, a crowd was assembled with women, children, and old people, brought from other regions, who were to represent the victims of the chemical incident.
He added that “White Helmets” activists (proven to be financed by the US and UK) had already arrived at the scene with satellite video transmitters ready to film the scene and that the Russians had discovered a “laboratory for the production of chemical weapons in the village of Aftris which was liberated from terrorists.” After the planned false-flag attack, the US was going to bomb government held districts in Damascus fulfilling Haley’s threat.
And here in the US, Col. Lawrence Wilkinson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff when Powell lied at the UN in 2003 to garner support for the criminal attack on Iraq, spoke to The Israel Lobby and American Policy 2018 conference ten days ago and said, speaking of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, that:
They’re both headed for war. Of that I’m convinced. They will use Iran’s allegedly existential (sic) to Israel presence in Syria which is becoming even more so from a military perspective every day, Hezbollah’s accumulation of some 150,000 missiles if we believe our intelligence agencies. The need to set Lebanon’s economy back yet again, that’s important. Look at what they’re deliberating right now with regard to the new very, very rich gas find in the Eastern Mediterranean with Israel claiming Section 9 and Lebanon claiming Section 9. Take that, Lebanon. We’re going to bomb you, then you’ll let us have it. And that will be their excuse.
Now Rex Tillerson is out as Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, the far more war minded Mike Pompeo slides naturally into the role. Musical chairs for the power elite. As Trump has said of Pompeo,
“We are on the same wavelength.”
Riding that same wavelength is Nikki Haley, a trio whose alliance bodes very poorly for Middle Eastern peace or for any rapprochement with Russia. The game turns deadlier as the Presidential Apprentice learns the rules and the empire prepares to shed more innocent blood in an unholy alliance with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other “team players.”
But this time the game won’t be, in the words of another CIA liar, “a slam dunk.” The opponents are ready this time. The game has changed.
And in eastern Ukraine, the snow should be melting in the next 3-4 weeks.
March 24, 2018
Edward Curtin: False Flag Operations Will Start New War
Edward Curtin: False Flag Operations Will Start New War #075
RT.COM
Israeli missile strike ‘indirect response’ to Syrian Army’s success in E. Ghouta – Damascus
Published time: 9 Apr, 2018 17:03 Edited time: 10 Apr, 2018
"The Israeli attack constitutes an indirect response to the success of the Syrian Arab Army in eliminating armed terrorist groups from the Damascus suburbs and other Syrian areas,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry wrote in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres obtained by Syria’s SANA news agency.
![An Israeli air force F-15 fighter jet © Amir Cohen](https://cdni.rt.com/files/2018.04/thumbnail/5acb15cdfc7e935f4d8b45e0.jpg)
2 Israeli warplanes carried out strikes on Syrian airbase – Russian MoD
“These groups helped to kill the Syrian people, abduct civilians and use them as human shields. Three thousand shells in just three months have led to the deaths of 155 citizens and wounded 865 civilians, mostly women and children."
The letter states that there will be “serious repercussions” for Israel’s attack, reaffirming that Syria “will not hesitate to exercise its right to defend its territory, people and sovereignty in all the ways guaranteed by the Charter of the United Nations and the provisions of international humanitarian law and international law.”
The letter also called upon the UN Security Council to “condemn these blatant Israeli aggressions and to take resolute and immediate action to prevent the recurrence of such attacks.”
Israel has not commented on Sunday’s missile attack. The Russian military said on Monday that two Israeli F-15s had targeted a Syrian airbase in Homs on Sunday night. Five of the eight missiles launched were intercepted before they reached their target, according to the Russian military. Lebanon has confirmed that Israeli warplanes had breached its airspace.
READ MORE: 'Nothing off the table' in Syria: Trump promises decision on US military action within 24-48 hours
The strike came just hours after US President Donald Trump vowed that there would be consequences for the Syrian government, following accusations that Damascus was responsible for an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Eastern Ghouta.
Trump surprised his military advisers last week after he said that he wanted to “get out” of Syria. Administration officials later clarified that there would be no immediate withdrawal but that Trump was opposed to keeping troops in the country long-term.
Moscow has warned that any military action taken in response to the unverified chemical attack would be “absolutely unacceptable” and could lead to “dire consequences.”
April 9, 2018
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump said Monday he will make a decision as early as this evening on the US response to what he called an "atrocious" chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria and warned that he will hold the responsible parties accountable.
"We cannot allow atrocities like that. Cannot allow it," Trump told reporters on Monday during a Cabinet meeting as he warned that "nothing's off the table." "If it's Russia, if it's Syria, if it's Iran, if it's all of them together, we'll figure it out and we'll know the answers quite soon"
The Syrian government and Russia have vehemently denied involvement in the attack and accused rebels in Douma of fabricating the chemical attack claims in order to hinder the army's advances and provoke international military intervention.
"I'd like to begin by condemning the heinous attack on innocent Syrians with banned chemical weapons," Trump said. "It was an atrocious attack, it was horrible. You don't see things like that as bad as the news is around the world, you just don't see those images."
"We are very concerned, when a thing like that can happen, this is about humanity. We're talking about humanity. And it can't be allowed to happen," he added.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Ed-Curtin-beach-e1499600021865-1-1.jpg)
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology,
Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is
http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
![horiz-long grey](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-14-at-12.31.16-PM.png)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TGP-notice-1.png)
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Edcurtinlogo2.jpg)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/grayslateBand2.jpg)
MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.
“There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MLK-other-radicals.jpg)
It’s been fifty years since Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 and nineteen years since the only trial in the case. In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies. The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King, as delusional. Time magazine – dutifully using the pejorative “conspiracy theory” label the CIA had in 1967 urged their mouthpieces to use – called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s conspiracy theory and “lurid fantasies.” The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide. A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.
Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer in that trial, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced. Through decades of research that extends well into the twenty-first century, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I., Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures. On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.” While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. The Washington Post has a well-earned reputation for being the CIA’s paper of record, but my reading of Jackman’s article and its prominent placing suggests a split somewhere in the conscience(s) of journalists at the paper. Or perhaps it is a fortuitous accident. Whatever the case, after decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.
Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth. He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who says, “I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr. King from the American scene,” and former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, who concurs, “I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.” Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.
“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man. So if Ray didn’t kill MLK, then Oswald didn’t kill JFK, and Sirhan didn’t kill RFK is the implicit thought conveyed. Then who killed Malcom X? Could the same parties have killed them all? And who might they be?
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MLK-James_Earl_Ray.jpg)
James Earl Ray: The super fall guy for an elaborate plot.
But then, as if to pull back abruptly from this line of thought, Jackman quotes David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of King, who has long held that James Earl Ray killed King. Yet the historian Garrow’s statement is so condescending and illogical that a thoughtful person would be taken aback and think: How could an historian say that? Referring to the three remaining King family members as “children,” although all are 50-60 years old, he says that they “are part of a larger population of American people who need to believe [my emphasis] that the assassination of a King or a Kennedy must be the work of mightier forces,” not the victims “of small-fry, lifetime losers.” (Notice how Kennedy, and one presumes he means just one Kennedy, JFK, is thrown in with King to include Oswald in the small-fry, lifetime loser category of the “real” killers, not the childish “need to believe” conclusions of meticulous scholars, such as James W. Douglass, author of the acclaimed JFK and the Unspeakable.) But then comes the kicker. The acclaimed historian Garrow says that credulous “people need to see [my emphasis] a balance between effect and cause. That if something has a huge evil effect, it should be [my emphasis] the result of a huge evil cause.” Now anyone who has not completely lost their ability to think knows that an historian’s raison d’etre is to explore facts in an effort to establish believable relationships between effects and causes, not by following a strict scientific method, but by arranging one’s research findings (documents, witness interviews and statements, etc.) within a narrative structure to reach logical conclusions. Historians “need to believe” that effects have causes and when they are good historians the issue is not one of balancing but of truth. They follow the evidence to truthful conclusions, no matter where it leads. So for Garrow to dismiss the King family and other Americans because of a delusional “need to believe” is patently absurd and not intellectually honest, yet it is a trope that has echoed down the years whenever there is a need to brush off “conspiracy theorists” as ignorant children.
Then as one reads through Jackman’s article he notices three brief statements, one from Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, another from John Campbell, who investigated the King murder for the Shelby County, Tennessee district attorney’s office, and a third from Barry Kowalski who reinvestigated the case under Attorney General Janet Reno in 1998. All three attest to Ray’s guilt. But Jackman gives them little space, approximately a half-page, in an article that extends to nine printed pages.
The remainder of the article – six printed pages – is primarily devoted to the work of William Pepper, the attorney for the King family in the 1999 civil trial in Memphis that found the U.S government liable for the killing of King and the author of three books on the murder, including his latest, The Plot to Kill King, a voluminous and heavily documented masterly work that makes an irrefutable case that the U.S. government and not James Earl Ray killed MLK, and to those who support those findings, including King’s daughter, Bernice, who is given the final word. Jackman quotes her as saying,
“I don’t believe James Earl Ray killed my father. It’s hard to know exactly who. I’m certainly clear that there has been a conspiracy, from the government down to the mafia…there had to be more than one person involved in all this. I think it was all planned.”
This breakthrough article, the first such piece on the front page of a major newspaper to give such space to critics of the commonplace “lone nut” explanation for MLK’s murder, proves Leonard Cohen’s words prophetic: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Even a crack in The Washington Post wherein may dwell persons of conscience, despite the paper’s history of doing the devil’s work.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MLK-gun-to-kill-him.jpg)
Main photo: In 1991, Ben Holley, the property and evidence room supervisor in Memphis, displays the hunting rifle prosecutors say James Earl Ray used to kill Martin Luther King Jr. (Michael McMullan/Memphis Commercial-Appeal/Reuters)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Ed-Curtin-beach-e1499600021865-1-1.jpg)
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology,
Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is
http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
![horiz-long grey](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-14-at-12.31.16-PM.png)
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TGP-notice-1.png)
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]