_______________ TRIUMPHANT IN DEATH BY DAVID J. GARROW (04/28/98)
	I was disappointed to read the ill-informed piece by David Garrow on James Earl Ray. I agree with him that William Pepper has done a disservice to his client, Ray, and to the public and history by espousing a hallucinogenic vision of government involvement in the assassination of Dr. King. During the making of the HBO special "The Trial of James Earl Ray," I tried to persuade Pepper that the conspiracy to kill King had its origins in the White Supremacist movement. Admittedly, there were FBI agents, and police officers, sympathetic to that movement, and it is entirely possible that some law enforcement people sabotaged the resulting investigation. I've always said Ray was involved, but not the trigger man. Garrow cites George McMillan's "The Making of an Assassin" as an authoritative work on the King assassination. It is not. It was a shoddy book that I have often criticized in print. In May 1997, I wrote a 6,000-plus word article for the New Times in Kansas City that explored this case in some depth. You might want to have Mr. Garrow read that. Not that it will make much difference at this point. -- J.J. Maloney Thank God David Garrow has said in public what has been on my mind ever since the King family shot their credibility to hell in embracing James Earl Ray as an "innocent" man. He has said what no media outlet has even hinted at, and that might be a key in the lack of credibility among journalists who have taken the idea of "objectivity" to its illogical extreme, where, no matter what the evidence, one must never speak what is believed to be the complete truth -- Bill Peschel Book page editor, Rock Hill (S.C.) Herald The folks at Salon, of all people, should recognize the folly of allowing government shills to force critics into embarrassed silence by shouting "Conspiracy nut!" I refer, of course, to David Garrow's piece on the King family's request for a new trial for James Earl Ray, now mooted by his death. What evidence existing for Ray's guilt was provided by the FBI -- the same FBI that tried to smear Martin Luther King repeatedly, culminating in a letter demanding he commit suicide. The Feds "lost" the ballistic data on the bullets taken from King (well-documented in books other than Pepper's), failed to perform even cursory follow-up investigation until trails had gone cold and placed in the witness stand a man known to have been passed out drunk at the time he was supposed to have seen the assassin -- and put said witness's wife in a mental institution when she threatened to go to the papers with the truth of his unreliability. (Look this stuff up yourself -- I'm not going to spoon-feed you, and the researchers and authors are numerous.) To then cite Gerald Posner as a source of journalistic truth -- whose book "Case Closed" was repeatedly debunked and revealed as laughably porous -- is a sign of desperation. Did Ray shoot King? At this point, we may never know. The law enforcement agencies who investigated the case were hopelessly corrupt, and had every reason to bury complicated truths in favor of a quick solution. Even assuming no government collusion in the assassination, please recall that the investigation was occurring in a town where racist murders had been covered up for decades and was overseen by an agency whose director made no secret of his hatred for the murdered man. Those facts alone render the question of Ray's guilt inconclusive. -- Michael Treece San Francisco
_______________ THE COWARD BY DAVID CORN (04/27/98)
	David Corn was right that Secretary Donna Shalala would have resigned over the needle-exchange decision by the White House if she had any credibility left, but what about White House AIDS czar Sandy Thurman? The AIDS community should demand her resignation delivered on a platter for not taking a stand. Thurman, from being the director of AID Atlanta for years, knows the importance of needle-exchange programs firsthand. She has less political courage than Dr. Shalala. I have known Thurman for years and like her, but she has turned her back on the people she represents, the AIDS community. It is time for Thurman to go. -- Chris Hagin Fayetteville, Ga. Cheers for David Corn's article attacking the federal ban on clean-needle programs! My viewpoint is not unbiased: I am a recreational (not addicted) heroin user, and I am tired of spending money on clean needles that I could be using to buy more of the good stuff. The last thing I need to worry about when I am nodding on heroin is the risk of getting AIDS! And when I think about the potential heroin users out there, who are scared away from the drug because of the AIDS scourge, it makes me absolutely irate. The 1996 welfare thing was bad, too, but I'm glad Mr. Corn chose to focus on the needle-exchange fiasco, because that's where my sympathy is: not with poor people trying to find a job and feed their kids, but with heroin users too cheap to take simple precautions to protect their own health. Let's keep the party going, baby! -- Anson Lang
_______________ SALON'S COVERAGE OF THE CLINTON CRISIS (01/21/98 - 04/27/98)
	Be glad that you have Camille Paglia and Christopher Hitchens. If not, I'm sure you would have very few readers. I don't know why the POTUS lamented your magazine not having a table at the big "affair" last Saturday. The type of reporting that you have been doing of late warranted a place under his table, with a pair of Monica's kneepads thrown in for good measure. Concentrating on a Hale-Scaife-Starr connection in today's political climate is like looking for a pimple on a leper's rear end. I know that journalistic integrity is an oxymoron, but really ... get a life, folks. -- J. Verner My personal fear, knowing that Richard Mellon Scaife is loose upon the land, has led me to barricade myself in my home each day at sunset. I don't even let my cat out at night, for fear that RMS will swoop down upon her and whisk her away for whatever nefarious purpose. What confuses me about RMS has to do with his 13 percent contribution to a chair for Starr at some college down south. If this is true, it appears to me that he was plotting to end Kenneth Starr's investigation by bribing him to accept said position, and therefore should be investigated for obstruction of justice and bribery. -- Tony Rohl Grass Valley, Calif. The six Ps of the military are "Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance," and so I warn you to be "prepared" as you have inherited the noble heritage of being the voice of the people. In poll after poll the American people have spoken, resoundingly so, and YOU are ingeniously delivering what our better instincts rightly tell us, namely, "Where's the Beef." The "beef," as we shall soon see, is contaminated un-American raw meat being served up by some mean-spirited conspiring so-called conservative right-wingers. Your noble efforts could well feast on a Nobel Peace Prize. I thank you. -- Emanuel Kustas Congratulations Salon! Your investigative reporting of the Clinton chronicles is worthy of a Pulitzer. The stories you've published have scooped the world's mainstream media (i.e. the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post), with their mummified editors in chief who are as guilty of fat-cat complacency as the bureaucrats they once sought to expose. I've read every word of every story, and the only thing it compares to is the Woodward-Bernstein series during the Watergate investigation, when the Post still had some balls. How disappointing to see that because the Clintons didn't kiss Sally Quinn's hostess-ass, Ben Bradlee won't dig up the kind of information on Kenneth Starr's $40 million circus that Salon has accomplished with far fewer resources and a helluva lot less respect. And to think there are still right-wing columnists who continue to whine about the "liberal bias" of the mainstream media! Mainstream or not -- as William Randolph Hearst said, "The power of the press belongs to those who own one." Now Salon owns one -- and thank Christ they do, or those of us who continue to be astonished at the ridiculous lengths the Clinton-haters will go to bring down the presidency would have nowhere else to go to commiserate. Lead on, Salon, and let the old guys sneer about you being an "Internet publication." Your readers will follow. -- T. Henderson Indianapolis SALON | April 30, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| SALON'S COVERAGE OF THE CLINTON CRISIS

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