John Geraghty

Friday of LA conference broadcast live The Friday session of the COPA conference from Los Angeles will be broadcast live from www.politicalassassinations.com This session includes a panel consisting of Paul Schrade, Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag and a talk by Dr William Pepper. The conference will also be recorded for resale following the event. We will be using ustream.tv to stream the content for free over the internet. Please check politicalassassinations.com from 7pm LA time on Friday 6th of June. If you live outside of this time zone please remember to make the necessary conversions.

I heard Walt speaking about this project on Black Op Radio several times. It sounds like a huge contribution to research. To give you a taste of how detailed it is, the chronology starts in the 19th century with the establishment of the funeral home that dealt with JFK's body. It sounds quite amazing, I do wish I had a few quid t spare at the moment. It's going on my 'to buy' list. John

The Custom Hotel has a good internet connection, we are hoping to move the conference there. As for publicity, I have applied to have the conference on the events calendar for the LA Times, LA Daily News, LA city beat and LA weekly. I have also posted it on either the forums or main pages of the LA Times, LA eventguide.com, LA Indymedia, Craigslist, Inside Bay area, KNBC LA, Metromix LA, and a few others. The event is being sponsored by KPFK-FM, so they will be publicizing it on air too. If anyone else has any other ideas I'm all ears. I hope to be joining you all by sitting back with a nice pack of popcorn watching the conference on my laptop that weekend. Edit: Add Democracy Now to that list. They did a good show on the assassination of MLK in April.

Michael, Indeed the conference in LA looks stellar. As I said in another thread, we are doing or best to ensure that we can broadcast the conference in its entirety over our website and on other blogs. So far as I know, the venue does not have a wireless connection in the conference room, but we are looking into other avenues. If anybody has any knowledge of broadcasting over the web, I'd love to hear from you. Our main problem is getting an internet connection. William Pepper seemed realistic in his appraisal of Sirhan's case. Baby steps seem to be his approach, first of all getting Sirhan out of maximum security and into an atmosphere where they have more access to him. I saw an article recently which stated that on September 11th, 2001, Sirhan was moved to a ultra secure area of the prison out of fear that he had some hand in it (work that one out if you will). John

Splendid, thanks Nathaniel. I have been looking for new ways to advertise COPA. I will be making promo videos and posting them on youtube, posting events on craigslist and I will be assembling a long list of blogs that we will invite to become part of the COPA blog network. We are trying to get into events listings in LA papers, but your method seems like it might be quite good. Thanks for the link.

Clinton draws rebuke over RFK remark This is very interesting timing for such a statement from Hillary Clinton. Indeed, RFK was on the way to the Democratic nomination following his victory in California. By Thomas Ferraro Reuters Friday, May 23, 2008; 11:04 PM SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton mentioned the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in explaining on Friday why she had resisted calls to end her White House bid, drawing a rebuke from Democratic front-runner Barack Obama’s campaign. Clinton, who later expressed regret over the remark, made it to the editorial board of a South Dakota newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, when explaining that other races for the Democratic presidential nomination had lasted into June. “My husband (Bill Clinton) did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she said. “I don’t understand it,” Clinton said, referring to calls for her to pull out of the Democratic race in which the final nominating primaries are held on June 3 in South Dakota and Montana. The Democratic nominee will face Republican John McCain in the November election. Kennedy, brother of slain U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, was assassinated during his 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton’s comments drew a sharp response from the Obama campaign. “Senator Clinton’s statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. Clinton told reporters later: “I regret if my referencing of that moment of trauma for our entire country and particularly the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I had no intention of that whatsoever.” “I’m honored to hold Senator Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family,” Clinton added. A spokesman said Clinton had simply been pointing out that Democratic campaigns in the past had continued into June and therefore people should not be pressuring her to withdraw. ‘HISTORICAL EXAMPLES’ “She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Robert Kennedy in 1968 as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer. Any other reading is inaccurate,” Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said. Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the slain senator, said in a statement, “It is clear from the context that Hillary was invoking a familiar political circumstance in order to support her decision to stay in the race through June.” “I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense,” said Kennedy, a Clinton supporter unlike some other members of his family, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, who back Obama. There have been concerns about the safety of Obama, an Illinois senator who would be the first black U.S. president. He began receiving Secret Service protection 18 months before the November election — earlier than any other candidate has received increased security. Obama has an almost insurmountable lead over Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination. The former first lady has said she would continue until the last state has held its nominating contest. (Editing by Peter Cooney)

Wecht institute conference on the assassinations-October A new conference hosted by the Cyril Wecht institute on forensic medicine and law has been announced for October 3-5. The conference will be hosted at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More details will be available soon, but the line up includes author of 'Brothers' David Talbot and coroner in the RFK assassination Dr Thomas Noguchi. This looks set to be a fascinating symposium from leading experts. COPA will bring you more news as it is available. We expect more details to be available on the Wecht Institute website very soon. http://www.forensics.duq.edu/conference/conferencefront.html

Cynthia McKinney campaign Green party presidential nominee to be Cynthia McKinney may be speaking at the COPA conference in LA this June. COPA has endorsed the McKinney campaign and we hope you enjoy this new supporter video. Cynthia McKinney's blog comments on the video, http://www.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/Vi...uthIsMarchingOn

Short documentary on the JFK assassination This video is an excellent example of what can be done using new media. This video was directed by Braddon Mendelson and presented by researcher Pat Speer. Pat is a regular contributing forum member on the education forum. His work is well respected and extremely accurate.

Hitman Charles Harrelson on the assassination of JFK Charles Harrelson was accused by Chauncey Holt as having been one of the three tramps arrested following the assassination of President Kennedy. .

COPA has a blog on their main website which is updated quite regularly. Instead of posing every individual blog post as a separate thread, I will post all updates to the blog in this thread. I will change the topic description to the latest blog story. I will post the last few blog posts from oldest to most recent. The actual blog itself has photographs and videos are embedded for easy viewing. It can be found here, http://www.politicalassassinations.com Dr William Pepper on CNN Dr William Pepper appeared on CNN international recently discussing his work as Sirhan Sirhan's new attorney. Dr Pepper will be in attendance at the COPA conference in Los Angeles between 6-8 of June. Part 1 Part 2

I have uploaded a portion of a video interview with Charles Harrelson to the COPA youtube channel. In it he discusses the assassination of JFK. "Do you believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy... alone without any aid from a rogue agency of the U.S. government or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you're very naive if you do." http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=RpVlqh14WHY

Here is the updated schedule. *"The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Killing Hope"* *National Coalition on Political Assassinations in Los Angeles* *40th Anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy Assassination* *Important New Forensic Evidence* /Washington, DC/ – The Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) will hold a regional meeting in Los Angeles from *June 6-8, 2008* to mark the *40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy*. Forensics experts and scholars will present explosive new scientific, legal and historical evidence regarding the presence of a second gunman in the Ambassador pantry, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6, 1968. Legal experts, forensic and audio experts, former FBI agents, eyewitnesses and others are confirmed to speak at the events which will be held at *KJ's Diner, 8731 Lincoln Blvd, Westchester, CA*, near LAX. Registration is on site, open to the public and press. *Speakers and films:* Keynote: Friday, June 6, 7:00 pm *Dr. Robert Joling*, forensic expert and co-author of /An Open and Shut Case/, www.anopenandshutcase.com *Philip Van Praag*, audio engineer, analyzed tape of RFK assassination with 13 shots, co- author of /An Open and Shut Case/ Saturday, June 7, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm *Dr. William Pepper, Esq*, former attorney for James Earl Ray and Martin Luther King family in civil suit exonerating Ray, author of /Orders to Kill/ *Paul Schrade*, eyewitness and victim in the Ambassador pantry shooting in 1968, working to reopen the case *William Turner*, former FBI agent, author of /The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy/ *Shane O'Sullivan*, film documentarian, producer of /RFK Must Die/, new evidence of links to CIA JM/WAVE, www.rfkmustdie.com *Michael Calder*, author of /JFK v CIA/ with new evidence from the RFK police files *Lisa Pease*, researcher and co-author of /The Assassinations, /and many others.

Hi James, Does this have any implications for the MLK assassination, does it help us with any photo identification? Gerry Hemming was short on detail on Sague's involvement. Any ideas? John

The Coalition On Political Assassinations will be hosting a conference in Los Angeles from June 6-8 this year. Speakers at the conference include William Pepper, William Turner, Paul Schrade, Lisa Pease, Shane O'Sulivan, John Judge and many others. http://www.politicalassassinations.com/LosAngeles.html Technology allowing, we hope to broadcast the conference over the internet using free resources. In addition to broadcasting over our website, we can also allow others to embed the video in the blogs, websites and social networking sites. If you are a blogger or own a website and would like to carry the conference, please email me and I will send you the necessary code closer to the conference. My email address is johnpetergeraghty@gmail.com Additionally, I would love to hear suggestions for sites and blogs that you think may be open to publicising this event. This is a big leap forward for COPA and the research community. I already have a number of blogs that will be participating, please add your name to the list. If you have any queries, post here or send me an email. Feel free to distribute this as you see fit. All the best, John

Jim Douglas is fairly well known for his work on the Martin Luther King assassination. He was the only journalist to cover the civil trial brought by the Kings in 1999. He spoke this year at COPA's conference in Memphis, http://www.politicalassassinations.com/Memphis.html I just got a copy of the dvd of the conference. I will be uploading extracts from talks by Jim Douglas, Judge Joe Brown, John Judge and others to youtube fairly soon. You will be able to see them at www.youtube.com/user/COPAorg I recently uploaded video of Philip Van Praag discussing his new evidence on the RFK case on CBS. The video has been viewed more than 2,700 times in a few short days. John

I too would agree that the RFK case would be the easiest to prove and to secure documentary release. The JFK case encompasses so many elements that may not see the light of day due to reasons of national security. I also feel that the physical evidence, at this stage, is the most compelling and provable. In terms of securing documentary release, it should, in theory, prove to be an easier exercise, simply because RFK was a senator, not the president and was not directly in control of secretive foreign policy or privy to extremely sensitive information.

This looks like being an excellent event, I encourage all those in the LA area to attend and ask everyone else to publicise this, the only conference on the RFK assassination, as widely as they can. June 6-8 (Friday - Sunday) "The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Killing Hope" 40th anniversary of his murder at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles Regional Meeting of COPA in Los Angeles, CA Custom Hotel, 8639 Lincoln Blvd (near LAX, free shuttle) Call toll-free in the US and Canada: (877) 287-8601 Reserve now for "COPA": $139/night single/double (lowest LA rates) Speakers: Paul Schrade, Shane O'Sullivan ( www.rfkmustdie.com ), Philip Van Praag and Robert Joling ( www.anopenandshutcase.com ) and many others. Registration on site www.politicalassassinations.com

Everything always comes back to New Jersey with you Bill! I'm reading '300 years at the point' at the moment. (For anyone else reading, this is Bill's book about Somers point, NJ). Enjoying it greatly. http://www.amazon.com/300-Years-Point-Hist...2879&sr=8-1

There is a huge reluctance on the intellectual left in the US to evaluate either JFK or RFK's threat to the standing order. They were by no means going to deconstruct the capitalist structures that had served them so well , but they both stood in the way of war, profit and rule by fear. Cockburn shares Chomsky's belief that King was assassinated because he posed a threat, but JFK did not pose a threat and thus his death was not conducted by his own class or his own government. Logic has never been so misused, so much so that I dare not call it logic. I would dearly like to know the extent of reading both Cockburn and Chomsky have done on this topic. Sometimes ones insights into power and ones critique of politics is no match for a seat, a book and an open mind. We have discussed Alexander Cockburn's and Noam Chomsky's reluctance to look at the matter previously on the forum, here again is another reminder that one can be intelligent and still lack knowledge. Did the Elites Want MLK Dead--If So, Why? By ALEXANDER COCKBURN http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn04052008.html I believe Oswald killed JFK and Sirhan killed Bobby. Lone gunmen both. With MLK, it could be a different matter. And with the infinitely more radical Malcom X it certainly was. The Kennedys were no threat to ruling power. They were part of the ruling power. Whatever his actual function--and King was given a hard time as an Uncle Tom by radicals in the later Sixties--the ruling power construed him as a threat. He was assassinated forty years ago just after 6 pm as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years. Ray was certainly the gunman. But there are credible theories of a conspiracy, possibly involving US Army intelligence, whose role in the life and death of Martin Luther King was explored by Stephens Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1993. The Army's interest in the King family stretched back to 1917 when the War Department opened a file on King's maternal grandfather, first president of Atlanta's branch of the NAACP. King's father, Martin Sr., also entered Army intelligence files as a potential troublemaker, as did Martin Jr. in 1947 when he was 18. He was attending Dorothy Lilley's Intercollegiate School in Atlanta and 111th Military Intelligence Group in Fort McPherson in Atlanta suspected Ms Lilley of having Communist ties. King's famous denunciation of America's war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam's destruction at the hands of ''deadly Western arrogance,'' insisting that ''we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem." US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, "The Man don't care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble." Carmichael was right. After the 1967 Detroit riots 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the Army's Psychological Operations Group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular leader. That same year, watching the great antiwar march on Washington in October 1967 from the roof of the Pentagon Major General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, concluded that "the empire was coming apart at the seams". He thought there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home. The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama, as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. King was dogged by spy units through early '67. A Green Beret unit was operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store. Army intelligence chiefs became increasingly hysterical over the threat of King to national stability. After his Vietnam speech the major US newspapers savaged King. Fifteen years later the New York Times was still bitter when the notion of a national holiday honoring the civil rights leader was being pressed--with ultimate success--by labor unions and black groups. "Why not a Martin Luther King Day?" an NYT editorial asked primly. "Dr King, a humble man, would have objected to giving that much importance to any individual. Nor should he be given singular tribute if that demeans other historical black figures." Give one of them a holiday and they'll all be wanting one. Within hours of King's murder rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black were killed. On April 6 the Oakland cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead. Futher police executions of Panthers followed, most notoriously the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, as they slept, by the Chicago police, with FBI complicity, in December, 1969. In contrast to Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion, resentments at the disloyalty of the Riverside Church speech conveniently forgotten, has hailed King as a man who chose to work within the system and who furthermore failed to make any significant dent on business as usual. In his last years King was haunted by a sense of failure. Amid a failed organizing campaign in Chicago he was booed at a mass meting there and, as he lay sleepless that night he wrote later that he knew why: "I had urged them [his fellow blacks ] to have faith in America and in white society They were now booing because they felt were unable to deliver on our promises They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare." As the radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote shortly after King's assassination, "That he failed to change the system that brutalizes his race is a profound relief to the white majority. As a reward they have now elevated his minor successes into major triumphs." Forty years on, America is still disfigured by racial injustice. Militant black leadership has all but disappeared. To black radicals Obama's sedate homilies and respectful paeans to America's ladders of advancement available to the industrious are to the fierce demands for justice of Malcolm X and of King in his more radical moments, as Muzak is to Beethoven. Obama is caught, even as King was. The moment whites fear he is raising the political volume, he's savaged with every bludgeon of convenience, starting with the robust sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sin is to have reminded whites that there are black Americans who are really angry. "Damn America," roared the Rev Wright. King was just as rough at Riverside Church in the speech that so terrified the white elites: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government." Honesty of this sort from a black politician in America extorts due retribution. And an Aside on Eldridge Cleaver Reading up on the death of Bobby Hutton, and MLK, a few weeks ago I came across Henry Louis Gates Jr's interview with him for Frontline, from which I recently quoted some lines. I'd been inclined to think of Eldridge Cleaver as a somehat pathetic figure in his later years, after a failed bid in the 1980s to bring the codpiece back into sartorial repute. But Cleaver was a smart fellow who understood that aside most Americans really believe in rebirth. So, amid problems with crack addiction, burglary charges and the rest of it, he sensibly rebirthed himself in the 90s as a Christian and a Republican. He remained as sharp as a tack and essentially a Marxist in political analysis right untl the end, as his interview by Henry Louis Gates for Frontline shows. This must have been done shortly before his death at the age of 62, in 1998. Next time you want to explain Marx's theory of the reserve army of the unemployed to someone, you could do a lot worse than quote Cleaver here: GATES: Are you optimistic about the future? I mean given the fact that we have this large black underclass and a large black middle class, it looks like we have two nations and they're both black. CLEAVER: We have more nations than that because we have poor white people, we have poor Indians, we have poor -- we have got to eliminate the economic basis of the underclass by providing them with jobs not handouts from the federal government. That is the failure of our economic system, that you have economists who say that you've got to keep the people on the brink of starvation in order to motivate them to work and hustle around. The failure of the capitalistic economic system is that they did not provide for full employment. They were satisfied with a certain percentile and then they were willing to keep a lot of people perpetually in reserve and that was to keep wages down and all that kind of pressure. We have got to have a policy of full employment and by restoring the frontier and the union of the western hemisphere it is a full employment program for the whole hemisphere. There's a lot of work to be done but we have to reorient ourselves from a system of scarcity and a belief system in scarcity and there is no problem that we have on our agenda that we cannot solve. GATES: But Tupac was a gangster, wasn't he? CLEAVER: Huey was a gangster. GATES: Oh, he was? CLEAVER: I'm not-- I'm talking about a real gangster. Tupac, they were talking about gangster rap. Huey P. Newton was a gun toting gangster, but that's not all he was. I'm saying he went through that experience as a criminal, but the thing about Tupac was his spirit and his rebellion against oppression. This comes from the way that he was raised and the values that were transmitted to him. His father died in a gun fight with the New York police department and so Afena was a very strong stalwart of the Black Panther party and Tupac was raised like that. He is what we call a panther cub. And that was what he was about. And that is why it was such a blow, [Tupac's] liquidation, and many people think that it was the COINTELPRO that took him out because the story doesn't hold up because anybody who knows Las Vegas knows that after the Mike Tyson fight there, there is no way that anybody going to drive along upside of another car, shoot them and drive away because it's gridlocked for blocks around there, man. So that is not what happened. There is more to it than that. GATES: Eldridge, now, thirty years later, the smoke has cleared, bodies are buried, people have moved on. Was it worth it? I mean was the Panther movement worth it? Was it a good thing? CLEAVER: It was a good thing and like all things, there was good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns. A man told me in Berkeley, said-- 'Eldridge, the two most dangerous demographics in the Bay Area right now are young black men with guns and middle-aged white women with Volvos.' GATES: You're crazy. CLEAVER: They're taking out more people than anything else. GATES: Will history judge you and your contemporaries from the '60s -- Karenga, Rap, Stokely, Angela, the whole gang, Julian Bond -- favorably, do you think? CLEAVER: I think they will. I think they will give us Fs where we deserve them and they'll give us As where we deserve them and they're going to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus.

Unfortunately, it seems as though they were not able to get a laptop for the event. It also seems that CSPAN did not cover the event. Someone is, however, recording the event, so we'll get it online as soon as we can. I'm more hopeful that the RFK and JFK conferences will be broadcast, particularly the Dallas event, as I hope to be there to coordinate it myself. John

Hi Peter, I called John Judge yesterday. They have a camera, but nobody has been able to bring a laptop along with them. If the conference is broadcasted, it will start at 4pm Memphis time today and will be saved on the net. I'm still waiting to hear from John as to whether they can borrow a laptop from someone. I have given them instructions as to how to set it up. Time will tell. John

Judge Joe Brown and Dr William Pepper discuss the King assassination on NPR’s ‘Tell me more’ morning show. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=89372294 Run time: 6min 49sec

I'm usually against this sort of thing, but I say let him off. I never once plagiarised in school or College, but I have to admire this lad for asking. John EDIT: I wonder if the page has been mirrored by another site, perhaps answers.com or some other site. Is it also on freepedia?

I'm a Manchester city supporter, but I could not really put my finger on my reasons ofr starting to support them. I started to support them when they were in the second division (the premiership was in existence), I have always been drawn to the underdog. For a time when I was very young I supported Manchester United, but I soon realised that I did so only because all of the other children in my neighbourhood were supporters. I suppose I was drawn to City because of their temporary minow status, despite being a big club. I would regard myself as a passive supporter of Manchester City, as I have neve been to a game and I'm not English. I would like to see them do well, I watch the games, but I would find it hard to take pride in them. One other club that I hold affection for is A.S. Livorno, an Italian club that are still in Serie A. I first discovered the club through an article in a left wing publication about their striker, Cristiano Lucarelli. Lucarelli was a Livorno native who excelled at football and played at the highest levels of Serie A, being top scorer in the league on a number of occasions. Lucarelli was a socialist/communist and Livorno is known as the left wing club in Italy, the communist party having been founded there. Such was Lucarelli's dedication to his ideals and his home club, he took a huge reduction in wages and joined them. I had great respect for Lucarelli for doing so in what is an exceptionally profit driven sport. Lucarelli has since left the club to join Shaktar Donetsk and Parma following a falling out with the manager. They currently lie one point above the drop zone in Serie A. I hope to make a visit to a home game at some point next season. John