Bob Marley Murdered

In a very interesting cover article published in the February 2002 issue of High Times magazine, the authors disclose that in 1976, Carl Colby, son of ex-CIA Director William Colby, visited the Hope Road home of Marley and gave the Reggae Star a gift in the form of a pair of boots. The High Times article quotes eyewitnesses as saying that Bob cried out “Ow!” when he stuck a foot in one of the boots. Something had jucked (stuck) him in the toe(s). Talk about being aware or beware of “Greeks baring gifts”. Subsequent investigation of the boot by hand, retrieved a piece of copper wire that had been sticking up inside the footwear. Entitled, “Chanting Down Babylon: The CIA and the Death of Bob Marley”, the High Times article went on to pose another Blunt Question: had the copper wire found in Bob’s new boot been chemically treated with a carcinogenic toxin? There is no doubting that with today’s technology, carcinogenic (that is cancer-causing) substances can be introduced into the human body very easily by a variety of means. By food, drink, smoke, sex, a pin/wire prick, or with the spike of an umbrella.

As the High Times article also observed, 1976 was a time when Jamaica, under the leadership of the Democratic Socialist and pro-Castro Prime Minister Michael Manley, was known to be under direct destabilization efforts by the CIA. According to High Times, Marley and Tosh as Reggae musicians, were targeted in particular because they were using their music to alert the Jamaican people to the dangers of the ongoing CIA covert operations. The visit to Marley by Carl Colby, who was supposedly posing as a member of a foreign film crew, took place a week after the “Ambush In the Night” during which Bob and Rita Marley and Don Taylor were all shot and wounded during the first upfront assassination attempt. Most people took that attack as involving only local partisan politics, with the opposition JLP not wanting Marley & the Wailers to perform at the PNP-Government sponsored and free Smile Jamaica concert days before a hotly contested General Election in Jamaica in December 1976. Marley appeared and performed for a mostly inner-city, urban audience on the Smile Jamaica Concert in the National Heroes Circle, in spite of the gun attack.

At the other, final end of this melodrama, we find Dr. Josef Issels, the supposedly holistic immuno-therapist who treated Bob in Germany after his collapse in Central Park, New York, in late 1980. Information is coming to light that Issels is an ex-Nazi doctor who may be implicated in some of the more nefarious practices associated with German medical studies and practices from the Hitler era. This may explain the painful, starvation-diet based treatment program inflicted on Bob by Dr. Issels. So we want to know: Who exactly is this Dr. Josef Issels? Does he indeed have a Nazi past? And what precisely did his ‘unorthodox’ cancer treatment entail? These Blunt Questions also need Blunt Answers.