Category Archives: Hidden history

The Origins of American Empire – What They Didn’t Teach You in School

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Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States – Prequel A

Directed by Oliver Stone (2014)

Film Review

Owing to the series’ great success, Oliver Stone has produced two prequels to his  Untold History of the United States. The first traces the origins of America’s present empire-building spree at the end of the 19th Century.

Stone credits Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward (1861-69) for the launch of America’s imperialist ambitions. Following the US conquest of half of Mexico in 1848, Seward sought to expand US empire even further by conquering Alaska, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii and Midway.The US would eventually succeed in annexing all of these territories, except for Canada, Haiti and the Dominican Republic – although they only formally possessed the northern section of Columbia, which they renamed Panama.

Then, as now, the US undertook these military adventures at the behest of Rockefeller, JP Morgan, William Randolph Hearst and other Wall Street robber barons. After the severe depression of 1893 (which caused 20% unemployment), they were convinced the only way to prevent further economic instability was to conquer foreign countries for their resources, cheap labor and markets for surplus US products.

During this period, US troops also invaded Cuba, the Philippines, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and China for the benefit of Standard Oil, United Fruit and other US corporations. Stone quotes extensively from General Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket. Butler participated in nearly all of these invasions.

Stone goes on to trace the British, French, US and czarist designs on Middle Eastern oil that were the true basis for World War I and the invasion of Russia by British, French, US and Japanese troops following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. I was unaware the US refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, when Roosevelt took office.

My favorite parts of this film concern the brave rebels who opposed this US imperialist aggression despite a brutal federal crackdown on all protest activity: Mark Twain and other in the Anti-Imperialist League, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood and International Workers of the World, Emma Goldman and Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones).

Mexico’s Experiment with Direct Democracy

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Zapatista: A Big Noise Film

Benjamin Eichert, Richard Rowley, Stale Sandberg (1999)

Film Review

Zapatista is about the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) uprising in Chiapas on Jan 1, 1994. This was the day the North American Free Trade Treaty (NAFTA) took effect between the US, Canada and Mexico. As a condition of NAFTA, Mexico’s PRI government abolished the ejidos (sections of land farmed communally with state support) established in the 1917 revolution. As large numbers of indigenous people were driven off their land for US oil drilling and cattle ranches, they lost their ability to provide for themselves and their families.

Chiapas is a province rich in resources, such a petroleum, coffee, hydroelectric power and uranium. Yet most of this wealth goes to US corporations and a few local elites. Prior to the 1994 uprising, the poor of Chiapas had no access to clean water, electricity or medical care. Seventy-five percent of the population met international criteria for chronic hunger.

The EZLN seized two cities on January 1 1994, San Cristobel de la Casas and Ocozingo, and delivered heir revolutionary proclamation. The occupation lasted two days before 12,000 Mexican troops, equipped with US bombers and attack planes drove them back into the jungle. Initially the Mexican army pursued them, intending to wipe out the Zapatista leadership. After a few weeks, they recognized the immense popular support the EZLN enjoyed and agreed to a ceasefire.

In February 1995, as a condition of a $47.5 billion US bailout, the Mexican government broke the ceasefire to launch a reign of terror they called the “Great Offensive.” Faced with the sudden onslaught of thousands of troops, trucks, thousands of civilians were forced to flee into the mountains.

This offensive was ultimately unsuccessful, in part due to strong support the Zapatistas received from human rights organizations and the international press. Through their initial spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos, they made a concerted effort to spread the message of “Zapatismo” to other peoples oppressed by multinational corporations and neoliberalism.

The purpose of the EZLN uprising, according to Marcos, wasn’t to take over the Mexican government but to “create a space where people can decide how they want to live their lives.”

The EZLN is elected out of the communities that support them. Women comprise one-half of the general command and one-third of the armed force. Their weapons serve a purely defensive function and haven’t been fired since February 1994.

 

The Zapatista Uprising: 20 Years Later

The second film mainly concerns the San Cristobel journalist who helped the Zapatistas get their story out to the world. As of 2013, 60,000 families lived under self-government in EZLN-controlled territory. In addition to establishing schools and clinics for the first time, the Zapatistas also run production units, supply centers and transport systems.

Follow current Zapistista news at their blog

CIA Drug Trafficking on Prime Time TV

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Kill the Messenger: Montel Williams with Mike Levine & Gary Webb

(1996)

Film Review

This film is a historic 1996 talk show featuring late San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, DEA whistleblower Michael Levine and Lance Cole, special council for the Kerry Committee (the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations), and Black Congressional Caucus member Charles Rangel. For balance, a CIA troll from the right wing lobby group Accuracy in the Media also appears.

The show first aired months after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” expose first appeared in the Mercury News. This series was based on extensive documentary evidence that CIA operatives who armed and trained the Contras who tried to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government smuggled tons of cocaine into US for inner cities.

The show begins with a recorded interview with Freeway Ricky Ross (from prison) revealing that he sourced the cocaine he distributed to inner city gangs from CIA operative Oscar Blandon.

Six years later Webb would mysteriously “suicide” by shooting himself twice* in the face with a shotgun (see Webb Murdered?).

His life is recounted in the 2014 film Shoot the Messenger.

*Twice?????

Columbia: the Israel of Latin America

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The Colombia Connection
Directed by Pablo Naverette (2012)

Film Review

The Colombia Connection is a Press TV documentary about the complex military alliance between the US and Colombia, which one local trade unionist describes as “the Israel” of Latin America.

The US has played a substantive role in funding and training Colombia’s military and intelligence service since the late forties. US advisers are strongly implicated in the assassination of reformist presidential candidate Jorge Gaitan in 1948 and the 1948-53 reign of terror (La Violencia) responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of civilians.

After World War II, Columbia joined other Latin American countries whose corrupted leaders colluded with the US government to drive peasants off their land for the benefit of US corporations. Liberal opposition leaders, trade unionists, human rights groups, judges, journalists and elected officials who opposed this process were violently suppressed via targeted assassination, forced disappearance and torture.

The US assisted in this process through the US Army School of the Americas, which operated in Panama between 1946 and 1984, when it was relocated to Fort Benning Georgia. The specific role of the School of the Americas is to train the paramilitary death squads of right wing Latin American governments in torture and other terror techniques. Convinced they had no legal or peaceful option for reclaiming their stolen land, poor Colombians began joining guerilla groups in large groups, with the FARC and the ELN (both formed in 1964) being the largest.

In 1998, starting with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, numerous Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Ecuador), began electing left of center governments. In response, in 2000 Bill Clinton launched Plan Colombia, which substantially increased direct US military involvement with the construction of seven military bases.

At present, US military aid to Columbia is the third largest ($7.5 billion between 2000 and 2010), after Israel and Egypt. The pretext is that US forces are helping the Colombian government eradicate cocaine production. However leaked Wikileaks cables indicate their real purpose is to attack rebel strongholds.

One example involves a Colombian paramilitary force the US secretly dispatched to Venezuela to try to assassinate Hugo Chavez.

Part 3 touches on candidate Obama’s promises to reign in Columbia’s human rights abuses by cutting military aid – as well as his 180 degree reversal the moment he took office.

South Africa’s Economic Apartheid

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Some Children Are More Equal than Others

Stefan Gottfried (2015)

Film Review

This film is about de facto segregation in South African schools – a major factor in making South African more unequal (two rich people control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population) than when schools were first “de-racialized” with the end of apartheid in 1994.

At present South African schools are divided by parental status and income, rather than race. Urban professionals send their children to “English” public schools in the cities. In contrast, poor township residents have no choice but to send their kids to free Bantu schools. Township students are denied entrance to “English” schools – they are always “full” – even when parents can pay the substantial school fees. Owing to officials’ fears white parents will take their kids off to private schools, the latter are never turned away.

In “English” schools, 98% of students complete high school and 80% go on to complete a bachelor’s degree. Only 50% graduate from township schools, only 11% go on to complete a bachelor’s degree and only 1% receive a vocational qualification. These grim statistics translate into a 50% unemployment rate of black youths 18-24 and an overall illiteracy rate of 51%.

The teachers and education officials interviewed in this film blame the deplorable state of South African schools on endemic corruption. The shocking physical state of the leaky, ramshackle, toiletless township schools certainly lends credibility to this viewpoint.

How 20th Century Missionaries Opened Up Latin America for Wall Street

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The Missionaries: God Against the Indians

By Norman Lewis

Penguin (1988)

Book Review

The Missionaries is a travelogue by British journalist Norman Lewis recounting his visits in the fifties, sixties and seventies to remote regions of Vietnam and Latin America. His purpose is highlighting the systematic genocide of indigenous tribes during this period and the role played by evangelical missionaries (with close CIA collaboration) in evicting native peoples from land US corporations sought to exploit it.

As a prologue, Lewis describes the English invasion and occupation of Tahiti in 1767. English missionaries spent seven fruitless years trying to voluntarily convert native Tahitians to Christianity. They eventually resorted to force, collaborating with colonial police to execute natives who refused to convert and outlaw cultural practices such as dancing, tattooing, surfing and wearing flowers. The usual sentence for engaging in such practices was hard labor on the roads.

Over the next 25 years, the British and French governments successfully colonized all the South Pacific islands and virtually extinguished all native culture.

The book fast forwards to World War II, when the invention of the caterpillar tractor allowed Europeans and Americans to finally penetrate inaccessible jungles in South East Asian and Latin America – enabling them to kill and displace even more indigenous populations.

Lewis focuses mainly on the two most powerful missionary organizations: the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the New Tribes Missions (NTM). Both assisted the CIA and their puppet dictators in displacing thousands of indigenous groups from the jungles of Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and Paraguay. The evidence he lays out directly implicates these missionary groups in the slaughter (in some cases by aerial bombardment), enslavement and forced prostitution. In most cases, individual  missionaries had their own commercial stake in colonizing these regions (eg selling food to native populations following the destruction of their jungle habitat and hiring out their female children as domestic servants and prostitutes).

The callous attitude (towards the enslavement and extermination of their converts) of these so-called men of God is quite astonishing. They rationalize their actions based on the “inevitability” of native assimilation. If the transition to civilization kills most of them, so much the better. By baptizing them, the missionaries can ensure they go straight to Heaven.

Once Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Panama and Columbia ousted their US-sponsored military dictators, all five countries banned both the SIL and the NTM, which were ultimately denounced by both the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) for violating the UN Genocide Convention.

People can read a more detailed account of the CIA/SIL collaboration to open up Latin America to US corporate interests in Thy Will Be Done the Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

Hidden History: Spices, Colonization and the East India Companies

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Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History

By Giles Milton (1999)

Book Review

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is about the conquest of the the Banda Islands in the East Indies (aka the “Spice Islands”), the enslavement of the indigenous Bandanese and the ferocious 17th century wars between Holland and Britain over the nutmeg monopoly. Milton’s book is derived mainly from original journals, diaries and letters of explorers and merchant seaman, and official British and Dutch East India Company archives.

It’s always puzzled me why spices such as pepper, cloves, mace and nutmeg were so highly valued when Europeans already had the ability to preserve meat and fish with salt? Milton clears this up by reminding us that salting meat without benefit of preservatives or aromatic spices leaves the unpleasant tang of putrefied flesh. Nutmeg was especially prized after Elizabethan physicians began prescribing it as the only certain cure for bubonic plague.

Shipping nutmeg overland resulted in a 60,000 percent mark-up – after Turkish traders and Venetian middlemen took their cut. This price gouging was the main impetus driving Europeans determination to find a sea route to the “Spice Islands.”

Competing Claims on the Spice Islands

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg traces the expeditions of all the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch explorers seeking an ocean route to the East Indies and the merchant bankers who financed them. Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in the Banda Islands in 1511. However, unlike the English and Dutch, they lacked financial backing to set up permanent trading posts and settlements.

What I found most striking about Milton’s accounts of these voyages was the massive mortality rate (from scurvy caused by vitamin C deficiency). Any expedition lasting longer than three months could count on losing 50-75% of their sailors. James Lancaster, commander of the first expedition organized by the Britishc East India Company, accidentally found a cure for scurvy (oranges and lemons or their juices) in 1601. Owing to his failure to publicize this discovery, it would be another 170 years before Captain James Cook officially “discovered” it.

The British and Dutch East India Companies

The charter Elizabeth I signed in 1600 granted the British East India Company a total monopoly of trade over the East Indies and all the countries and ports of Asia and Africa and America. It awarded the Company massive powers, including the right to set up foreign trading posts and settlements and protect them with military force. In 1602, Holland granted the Dutch East India Company comparable privileges. Intense rivalry between the two would lead to four Anglo-Dutch wars beginning in 1652. All were fought entirely at sea between the English and Dutch navies.

England Takes Possession of Manhattan

In 1667, England and Netherlands ended the so-called “Nutmeg Wars” by signing the Treaty of Breda. The Treaty allowed the English to retain New Netherlands (Manhattan Island) and the Dutch to retain Europe’s primary source of nutmeg, the Banadanese island of Run. Henry Hudson had claimed Manhattan Island for the Dutch during an unsuccessful 1609 expedition to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean.

By 1667, the English were happy to relinquish Run, after successfully transplanting nutmeg seedlings to their territories in Ceylon and on the eastern coast of India.

Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement

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Berkeley in the Sixties

Directed by Mark Kitchell (2002)

Film Review

Berkeley in the sixties is a documentary about the history of 1960s Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM). Prior to watching the film, I had no idea that Youth for Goldwater helped start the FSM, joining forces with left leaning groups in 12-18 hour strategy meetings aimed at a university ban on political information tables. By necessity, these meetings made decisions by consensus. Decisions based on majority vote always engendered the risk the losing minority would walk away.

In 1963, the FSM would collaborate with black civil rights leaders in a massive civil disobedience that forced San Francisco hotels to end their discriminatory hiring practices.

Following this initial victory, the FSM oriented their protests against the Vietnam War, inspiring similar actions by tens of thousands of students at campuses across the US. In 1967, they successfully shut down the Oakland army induction center for five days.

The documentary also explores the FSM collaboration with the Oakland Black Panther Party in the Free Huey movement, their tenuous linkages with the CIA-fabricated  (see How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left Haight Ashbury counterculture movement and their involvement in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

There is some great footage of Berkeley President Clark Kerr and Governor Ronald Reagan behaving like assholes.

*Newton was framed for the manslaughter of Oakland police officer John Frey during a Panther gun battle with the police. He was ultimately released after three unsuccessful attempts to convict him.

How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left

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drugs-as-weapons

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac and Other Activists

by John L Potash

Trine Day LLC (2015)

Book Review

Drugs as Weapons Against Us is a virtual encyclopedia of the global drug trade. Author John L Potash devotes special attention to the long involvement of the British and US government in illegal trafficking – for the political and financial benefit of the elite families who control these governments. Most of the book focuses on MKUltra, the top secret CIA program devoted to developing and experimenting with mind altering drugs such as LSD, MDA (an ecstasy precursor), STP, PCP and scopolamine.

Although CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra records destroyed in the mid-seventies, 30,000 pages of documents were preserved in the CIA Finance Department. Meticulously researched and footnoted, Drugs as Weapons relies on an extensive variety of sources, including the 30,000 pages, FOIA releases, police files, whistleblower statements, media and alternative media investigations and other prominent researchers such as Peter Dale Scott, Alfred, McCoy, Alex Constantine, Catherine Austin Fitts, and the late Gary Webb and Michael Rupert.

Using MKUltra to Target Leftists and Radical Pop Stars

As the title suggests, Potash is mainly interested in the CIA’s use of LSD (with the help of British intelligence, which ran a parallel MKUltra program at the Tavistock Clinic) to “neutralize” leftists and activist pop stars, such as Paul Robeson, Mick Jagger, Abbie Hoffman, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.*

Like many activists, I am well aware of the CIA’s historic role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia and in cocaine trafficking in Latin America. However prior to reading Drugs as Weapons, I was totally unaware they were also responsible for most of the LSD produced between 1955 and 1973 – for the specific purpose of “neutralizing” the New Left in Berkeley, at Columbia University and elsewhere. This particular MKUltra project was conceived in response to a 1962 Rand Corporation study recommending that getting left wing leaders hooked on LSD could “cause them to resign or become inactive.”

The Haight Ashbury was a CIA Invention

I was particularly horrified to learn about the LSD distribution network MKUltra agents set up in the Haight Ashbury to lure Berkeley students away from the nationally influential Free Speech movement. The latter, originally formed in 1957 to protest the anti-democratic activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House on Un-American Activities Committee, went on to inspire the national anti-Vietnam War Movement.

In addition to various MKUltra scientists and agents, the CIA also relied on a number of high profile personalities – LSD guru Timothy Leary (an admitted CIA asset), author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and Grateful Dead band members – to promote and distribute LSD as an alternative to organizing against the Vietnam War.

How the Opium Trade Created America’s First Millionaires

Potash begins his book with important historical background on the origins of the global drug trade, which he traces back to 1500 and which European elites relied on heavily to finance imperial expansion and colonization. He also recounts the history of important Wall Street families – the Cabots, Cushings, Bushes, Astors, Russells, Pierponts (JP Morgan’s family) – who all owe their immense wealth to the opium trade the British involuntarily forced on China via the Opium Wars. The investment of these families in illegal drug trafficking continues to the present day, as evidenced by the involvement of all major US banks in multibillion dollar drug money laundering.

The Russell family, who would go on to found Yale and the Skull and Bones Society, openly used a skull and bones pirate flag on their opium trading ships.

The Vietnam War: Protecting Wall Street Drug Interests

Potash also carefully details the special relationship between these Wall Street families and the intelligence agency they founded during World War II (the OSS, which became the CIA in 1947) to protect their special interests. This comes out really clearly in the chapter in which Potash traces the origins of the Vietnam War. He makes a really strong case that this war (which began in the late fifties as a CIA intervention) stemmed directly from CIA determination to protect Golden Triangle opium production from efforts by nationalist leaders in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to eradicate it.

One of Mao’s first acts after winning control of China was to destroy the country’s vast opium network. With the support of the CIA, the nationalist Chinese generals who had controlled it moved their networks into Burma, Laos and Thailand.

The Link Between CIA-backed Nazi War Criminals and Colombian Cocaine

In a similar vein, the CIA assisted Klaus Barbie and other Nazi war criminals it smuggled out of Germany in setting up a cocaine production and distribution network in Colombia and later the Afghan Mujaheddin in turning their country into the world’s largest producer of heroin.

Potash makes a compelling case that the proximate cause for the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 was the Taliban’s successful eradication of opium production earlier that year.

*The cases of radical pop stars and activists targeted with LSD and other drugs (in many cases along with witnesses and key investigators) Potash examines include

  • Paul Robeson – African American singer whose career was destroyed when he was involuntarily dosed with LSD and committed for two years to a psychiatric hospital, where he received 54 electroconvulsive treatments,
  • Richard Wright – African American writer involuntarily dosed with LSD who later died under extremely suspicious circumstances.
  • Elvis Presley – became addicted to amphetamines and narcotics after covert intelligence officer became his manager.
  • Mama Cass Elliott – died under mysterious circumstances at age 32 after starting to date an international drug smuggler with suspected intelligence links.
  • Abbie Hoffman –introduced to LSD by roommate who worked for Army Intelligence research LSD effects on unconsenting GIs.
  • Mick Jagger – involuntarily dosed with LSD and subject to numerous drug frame-ups and two unsuccessful Hell’s Angels (working closely with US intelligence) assassination attempts.
  • Brian Jones – subject to numerous drug frame-ups and intense phone harassment and stalking prior to 1969 murder (which police covered up as “accidental” drowning).
  • Jimi Hendrix – intelligence-linked manager strongly implicated in death related to involuntary drugging.
  • Janis Joplin – introduced to amphetamines and heroine via intelligence-linked boyfriend, died after “friend” slipped her a bolus of pure CIA heroin.
  • John Lennon – involuntarily dosed with LSD and framed on bogus cannabis charge. Lennon’s alleged assassin Mark Chapman had strong intelligence links and appeared to be under influence of scopolamine.
  • Bob Marley – involuntarily injected with the cancer-causing chemical methlychoanthine (via a copper wire hidden in boots gifted to him by CIA asset Carl Colby) and subsequently died of fibrosarcoma.
  • Kurt Cobain – involved in heavy drug use by his wife Courtney Love, who had shadowy underworld and intelligence connections. Cobain allegedly shot himself in the head with a shotgun after consuming so much heroin he would have lost consciousness before he could pull the trigger.
  • Huey Newton – initiated into heavy cocaine use by girlfriend/undercover agent. Witnesses maintain he was shot after a failed attempt to kidnap him, discrediting police disinformation about “a drug deal gone bad.”
  • Tupac Shakur – multiple assassination attempts and police frame ups. Coerced, as part of a bail agreement, into signing with Death Row records (see The FBI War on Rap). The latter was run by Los Angeles police intelligence unit and heavily involved in drug and gun trafficking. Killed in drive-by shooting instigated by US intelligence.
  • Eminem – initiated into heavy drug use via undercover intelligence “friends” after helping Afeni Shakur (following Tupac’s assassination) to record many of Tupac’s songs.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

Researcher Fingers Jesse Jackson as Police-CIA Liaison in King Assassination

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BREAKING NEWS Ole Dammegard: Probable cause evidence shows Jesse Jackson was key police/CIA operative responsible for April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King assassination.

According to NewsInsideOut, author and researcher Ole Dammegard, recipient of the 2016 Prague Peace Prize, has documented probable-cause evidence showing that Jesse Jackson (AKA Jesse Louis Burns) acted as a key police-CIA operative in the covert operation which resulted in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968.

Jesse Jackson was one of an integrated covert assassination team that also included US Army sharpshooters, CIA, FBI, and Memphis police that assassinated Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Dammegard maintains that Jesse Jackson acted as a messenger between the head of the Dixie Mafia (the FBI-CIA’s contractor for the King assassination), and the Lorraine Motel in changing Dr. King’s Ground floor room 206 to 2nd floor balcony room #306 so that US Army sharpshooters and other cabal shooters would have a clear shot to Dr. King. Jackson took the covert phone call from the Dixie Mafia chief’s wife, who directed him to ask the Lorraine Motel to change Dr. King’s Room to Room 306.

Read more here