The following letter is part of the exposure process of current
COINTELPRO operations on behalf of the federal government against New
Afrikan organizations and prisoners in particular. MIM(Prisons) can
attest to these operations against a number of organizations and
individuals. MIM(Prisons) has been similarly labeled a “Security Threat
Group” in Virginia and our
literature has
not been allowed into Red Onion State Prison as a result. The author
is one of countless prisoners who have been targeted for long-term
isolation due to their political beliefs and affiliations in the united
$tates.
MIM(Prisons) disagrees with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party’s
(NABPP) analysis of amerika and the principal contradiction, which is
reflected in this letter. The author quotes Eldridge Cleaver to say that
there is no difference between the white and Black movement in amerika.
There is a serious difference in that the Black nation faces substantial
oppression under imperialism, while whites fill the role of the
oppressor. As true internationalists, the Black Panthers never took up
racism. Their line on the amerikan class structure evolved over time,
while they always upheld the need for self-determination of oppressed
nations. At their best, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver had come to
understand the amerikan people as bought off allies of imperialism. This
view later devolved into what the Panthers became, a reformist
organization stuck in electoral politics.
As an organization that claims to apply the scientific analysis of
dialectical materialism, MIM(Prisons) sees the NABPP line on the
amerikan class structure as idealist and therefore revisionist. The only
evidence they can offer to substantiate their position is dogma and
chauvinism.
We print this letter in support of the righteous struggle to expose and
beat back the use of prisons and the criminal injustice system as tools
of political repression.
Racial and Political persecution of Grassroots Black Political leaders
and Activists
As many of you are likely aware, Amerika’s ‘intelligence’ and executive
policing agencies, (federal, state and local), have a sordid legacy of
persecuting and targeting grassroots Black political leaders and
activists for destruction. The spectrum of methods applied here ranged
from slander (false character and image depictions and attacks) spread
through and by government agents and friendly media ‘assets’ to false
and malicious criminal arrests and prosecutions, to violence and
outright murder.
Such designs come as no surprise in a country that was built upon
history’s first race-based and most brutal system of enslavement, and
Native genocide and land theft. The very place where the false concept
of race and attendant racism (white racial supremacy) were created.(1)
Since chattel slavery, and Amerikan society was artificially divided
along politically created racial lines, it has been a central policy to
prevent Blacks from organizing independent political institutions and
parties. Until just a few decades ago, this policy included our
systematic exclusion from participating as genuine citizens in electoral
politics. Indeed, Amerika’s ‘dual party’ system evolved from the
struggle to keep Blacks enslaved and out of the political sphere –
contrary to deceptive official claims that this system arose as an
expression of respect for diverse political views and
representatives.(2)
It is also telling that many of the historical figures projected today
as Amerikan heroes and ‘founding fathers’ embraced bigoted views and
practiced genocidal and criminal policies that would have made even the
most vicious German Nazi blush(27). Let’s not forget that the Central
Intelligence Agency, in its formative years, absorbed and employed many
of the Nazi’s worst war criminals as agents, assets and advisers.(3)
Indeed, president George W. Bush’s grandfather was Hitler’s chief
Amerikan financier during World War II, and ended in having his Union
Banking Corporation confiscated under the Trading with the Enemies Act
in October 1942 by the Roosevelt administration.(4)
Since U.S. executive policies of targeting ‘non-imbedded’ Black
politicos for destruction were exposed in the 1970s, culminating in
several congressional investigations and reports(5), efforts have been
made to gloss over this history and to rehabilitate the images of these
agencies, particularly through glamorized images and cultural fantasies
projected of Amerikan police and intelligence agencies, via the vast
entertainment/information media. However, behind this iron curtain of
deception, official designs have not changed. A fact that I bear witness
to, because I have been and am a target of them. Which is the basis of
this letter.
I have been incarcerated since 1990, and have experienced first hand the
brutal reality of Amerikan prisons. A system that, as the American Civil
Liberties Union has acknowledged, is more and more “dedicated to the
African American Community,”(6) and the underlying anti-Black
orientation of this system, which cannot be honestly denied.(7)
For many years I have been reporting and pursuing public exposure and
redress of the brutality, torture and abuses occurring inside these
institutions, and have supported and co-founded several groups and
organizations that also pursue these ends.
In 2005, I co-founded the New Afrikan Black Panther Party/White Panther
Organization, a non-violent, legal and above-ground party whose focus is
on promoting the interests and human rights, in strictly legal forms, of
sectors of the U.S. population whose needs and interests are ignored,
and who are not represented, by the ‘established’ political – economic
system – especially poor, working class and imprisoned Blacks.
The NABPP/WPO specifically opposes criminal activities, ‘street gang’
mentalities and behaviors, violence (except in the extremes of
self-defense), all forms of discrimination (racial, ethnic, gender,
sexual orientation, national, etc.) and all forms of oppression. We also
promote the right to free, open and honest speech. Our orientation,
ideologies, and views have been and are elaborated in our various
periodicals and publications; many of them I authored.(8)
Because U.S. social policies are not oriented towards serving or
promoting the needs, interests, rights and benefits of poor, working
class and ethnic people, while our Party’s orientation specifically is,
we are likely viewed as promoting views unpopular with and to the status
quo. As a result of this in general, and my role in these efforts in
particular, I have been and am targeted with those repressive methods
reserved in Amerika for independent Black leaders and activists.
One typical form that this targeting has taken is my being falsely
profiled by this prison as the leader of a criminal street gang or
Security Threat Group (STG), namely the NABPP/WPO. This tactic of
stigmatizing and consequently repressing Black political groups is
certainly not new or unique, and harks back to policies applied by U.S.
officials during periods when official racism was less veiled.(9) As
Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black pointed out:
“History should teach us… that… minority parties and groups which
advocate extremely unpopular social or governmental innovations will
always be typed as criminal gangs and attempts will always be made to
drive them out.”
Barenblatt v. U.S., 360 U.S. 109, ISO(1959)
(dissenting opinion)
So much for the facial validity of STG profiling.
I have persisted in seeking an explanation from this prisons’ and prison
system’s administration as to what the NABPP/WPO has done or promotes
that qualifies us for STG classification, besides the obvious reasons of
their own racial and political intolerance. To date my inquiries have
been evaded and I am told that I cannot formally grieve the matter
through the established grievance procedures.
It is of course a crime to be a member of, to recruit for, or to act in
furtherance of the goals of a criminal street gang. The criteria of what
constitutes a criminal street gang is defined by law.(10) Incidentally,
I might add, “street gang” implies groupings of people of color, since
it is generally recognized that, since the 1970s, ‘urban’ is basically
synonymous in Amerika with the Black population, over 90% of which lives
in urban communities. Yet another ‘legal’ embodiment of the race factor,
targeted at people of color selectively.
Moreover, to falsely impute criminal activities to one not duly
convicted is per se defamation and slander (11) – and one is presumed
innocent of crimes that they have not been thus convicted of.
This entire gang profiling of me and the NABPP/WPO here has been at the
instigation of this prison’s near-exclusively white staff and
investigator, (and admittedly conveyed to federal intelligence
agencies), who come from local, rural, race-segregated communities of
mountainous south-western Virginia and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee,
who harbor socially conditioned and culturally ingrained insensitivities
towards, and genuine ignorance of the views, values, history and
culture, of urban people of color.
Typical of the tendency of racists to stereotype groups of people, these
officials make no distinctions between Black political organizations and
indeed declare that “all Black groups that promote dissent” fit their
criteria of a gang or STG, as does any group or organization that
criticizes government and prison practices and policies.
Further, they lump together every group that has ever used the “Black
Panther” name (characterizing them all as generically, the “Black
Panther group,” or “Black Panther gang.”) Although, there have been a
great number of different organizations that have used the “Black
Panther” name or logo; none of which is the NABPP/WPO affiliated with.
In fact, initially they claimed the NABPP/WPO and the New Black Panther
Party, which is led today by D.C.–based attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz,
were one and the same organization, whereas these two organizations have
no connection. Interestingly, however, they have stated in writing that
M. Shabazz – a federal lawyer – is the leader of a criminal gang also,
namely the NBPP.
Many of the organizations that have used the Black Panther name in fact
no longer exist, and had very different ideologies, agendas and
views.(12) In deed, the NBPP is a quasi-religious group connected to the
Nation of Islam, whose racial, political and economic views the
NABPP/WPO do not share. Fundamentally, this prison designated the
NABPP/WPO a gang and STG before even knowing what our views and
interests are, and subsequently have ignored them in order to preserve
this false criminal profile.
And using the generic, all-inclusive “Black panther” designation, they
systematically bar any and all information on any BP organization, past,
present, from possession by any prisoner, although most Black history
reference books and general encyclopedias have entries on the original
Black
Panther Party and its leaders. So in essence, the policy here is to
censor Black history while promoting the history and memories of white
Amerikan figures and political leaders who exterminated Indians, and
enslaved, brutalized and raped Blacks as an accepted political norm.(27)
Racial discrimination.
But of course this repression is not without precedent.
The original BPP, which was founded in Oakland, California in 1966 by
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, and destroyed by the U.S. government,
met with similar persecution. Indeed, its treatment by the U.S.
government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular, set the
standard on official hatred and smear-mongering against groups bearing
the BP name.
The original BPP was founded as a legal above-ground Black political
party that promoted the rights of urban Blacks to defend their
communities against crime and violence(13), and promoted community
service programs to meet the economic needs of desperately poor urban
Blacks that the government ignored; such as free breakfast programs for
children (this was before food stamps and free school meals were widely
available – in fact the government expanded food stamps and school meals
as a counter to the Panther’s programs), petition drives against police
brutality, free schools, free health clinics, free clothing and shoe
programs, free busing to prisons, free senior citizen service programs,
free sickle cell anemia research and testing, free pest control,
plumbing and maintenance, ambulance, day care, and news service
programs.(14)
Various surveys found the vast majority of the urban Black population
supported the BPP. The BPP was so popular that similar BP formations
sprang up in England, Israel, Bermuda, Australia and India. It also
aided in forming similar groups among whites (the White Panther Party),
the Mexicans (Brown Berets), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords Party), and
white college student groups, which it worked closely with as allies. As
Todd Gitlin of the Students for a Democratic Society noted, “at a time
when most other black [groups] donned dashikis and glowered at whites,
they [Panthers] welcomed white allies.” Eldridge Cleaver, the BP’s
Minister of Information pointed out:
“in reality there is no such thing as a black movement and a white
movement in the United States. These are merely categories of thoughts
that only have reality in terms of the lines that the ruling class
itself has drawn and is implementing amongst the people. The United
States is controlled by one ruling class…”
Solely because of its orientation toward uplifting and serving the Black
communities, and its influence on other poor and oppressed communities,
the BPP was viciously slandered and attacked by the government, violence
prone street gangs were incited by the FBI and police to attack and kill
BPP leaders and members(15); racial and anti-white stereotypes were
played up via the media; bogus letters were written by FBI agents and
sent to BPP members, the public, landlords, employers, spouses,
supporters, religious leaders, etc, to play the Black community,
Panthers and other religious leaders, etc. to play the Black community,
Panthers and other Black groups against each other: assassination raids
were conducted by FBI and police to murder Panthers; false arrests and
prosecutions of Panthers were conducted to stigmatize them as criminally
inclined and to harass them and deplete Party funds and resources on
defending members against false criminal charges and much more. All
orchestrated by the FBI’s covert action program, COINTELPRO (Counter
Intelligence Program). (16)
The derogatory and violence-prone image of the BPP was solely the
creation of a then openly racist and sexist FBI(16), led by J. Edgar
Hoover(17), and other agencies, at a period when Blacks and women were
refused employment with the FBI, and it was openly operating as an
agency opposed to Blacks and Black communities(18). The concededly
illegal and criminal methods used by the FBI against the BPP were
exposed and denounced by the U.S. Congress in 1976(5), and several
in-depth studies have been written on the FBI’s anti-BPP and anti-Black
crusade.(19)
While the FBI claimed, in the face of its exposure in the 1970s, that it
would end or limit future COINTELPROs (although it has not), the false
images it portrayed of the BPP continues and lives on in the white
Amerikan public mind.(20) Hence, the very mention of the name BP today
evokes images of a gun-toting Black version of the Ku Klx Klan.
But let there be no mistake about it, the BPP was not an exception to
the rule in the application of these methods against Black political
activists and leaders. As the Church Committee Congressional
investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies exposed, all Black leaders
and groups were targeted, even such groups and leaders as the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., all under
FBI labeled of their being “violence prone” “Black Nationalist Hate
Groups.”(9) Just like the criminal gang label is thrown around today.
As a recent in-depth expose by attorney William F. Pepper, and a
wrongful death lawsuit he successfully prosecuted on behalf of the King
family in 1999 revealed, the FBI, in collaboration with other U.S. civil
and military intelligence agencies, were King’s actual killers.(21)
King’s widow, the late Coretta Scott King, had this to say about
Pepper’s book:
“For a quarter of a century, Bill Pepper conducted an independent
investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He opened
his files to our family, encouraged us to speak with the witnesses, and
represented our family in the civil trial against he conspirators. The
jury affirmed his findings, providing our family with a long-sought
sense of closure and peace, which had been denied by official
disinformation and cover-ups. Now the findings of his exhaustive
investigation and additional revelations from the trial are presented in
the pages of this important book. We recommend it highly to everyone who
seeks the truth about Dr. King’s assassination.”
Yet today, the U.S. government pretends to respect the memory and work
of this man that it murdered, with a national holiday.(22)
The object, then as today, is to destroy independent and influential
Black political leaders and replace them with ones “approved” by U.S.
officials to mislead us.(23) To continue the oppressive and steadily
deteriorating conditions within, and to divide, the U.S. Black
communities.
As the Church Committee report revealed, assistant FBI director William
C. Sullivan, promoted a COINTELPRO in which the FBI would hand-pick a
“new national leader,” once King was eliminated.(24) Sullivan’s overall
strategy, which he wrote in 1964, was to simultaneously destroy
Dr. King, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. He wrote:
“…when this is done, and it can and will be done, obviously much
confusion will reign, particularly among the Negro people… The Negroes
will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling
personality to steer them in the proper direction…”(25)
Sullivan recommended Black corporate lawyer Samuel R. Pierce, Jr as
King’s replacement.
Yesterday it was a corporate lawyer, today it is an ex-law professor –
Barack Obama.
We of course know that COINTELPRO is alive and well. The repressions I
face are classic COINTELPRO methods. Also, three years ago FBI director
Robert Mueller announced before a Senate subcommittee the implementation
of a new “Threat Assessment Program” (TAPS). A modern COINTELPRO
targeted specifically at U.S. prisoners who are politically active,
under the cover, as always, of professing to prevent potential violence.
The same self-serving rationale used to justify the ongoing persecution
and ultimate murder of Dr. King, and targeting all other Black political
groups, leaders and activists.(26) TAPS involves the FBI, along with
Homeland Security and other agencies, working in collaboration with
various prisons and prison systems nationwide to identify, profile,
disrupt, repress and neutralize prisoner activists (groups and
individuals), being mindful that several influential Black political
leaders like Malcolm X and George Jackson developed inside of prison. I
have been informed that I have been and am a target of TAPs.
Methods that I have been targeted with include the
following:
Frequent interception and destruction of my
mail;
Systematic obstruction of all articles I write or artwork I
create from coming into the prison;
Obstructions of my ability to
collaborate with outside editors and contacts to have my articles and a
book I wrote published;
Blocking nearly all of my periodicals from
reaching me;
Repeated targeting with trumped-up disciplinary
reports;
Repeated indictments on trumped up violent crimes that have
been each dismissed in turn – the last one with prejudice where I
conducted my defense pro se (abuse of process);
Habitually
disappearing my incoming mail or rejecting it as in violation of prison
policy without explanation;
Barring my contacts with various
attorneys who’ve attempted to assist me;
Rejecting, opening and
delaying my legal mail – even from the ACLU – outside my
presence;
Hampering my contacts with the courts in anticipated and
pending litigations;
Frequent destructions and thefts of my legal
property which I’ve had to obtain court orders to have
returned;
Barring my visitors and telephone use and blocking the
telephone numbers of loved ones and others;
Targeting me with
threats, attempts and actual acts of violence by guards and their white
supremacist inmate lackeys, etc.
I should add that further conditions exist at this prison, and within
this prison system, which are openly race-motivated or otherwise
unlawful, e.g. the censorship of Black - and Brown – oriented cultural,
political and historical publications as STG materials; while no such
measures are applied to mainstream and white publications and media;
censorship of all media and publications that in any way critique U.S.
government, prison and economic policies and practices; censorship of
publications and media by or about grassroots Black historical figures
and leaders such as Huey P. Newton and Harry Haywood, while publications
about racist, murderous and criminally oppressive white historical
figures like Adolph Hitler, Geroge Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Christopher Columbus, etc., etc. are stocked in the prison library and
accessible to all prisoners; promoting, protecting and hiring of staff
at the prison who are members and affiliates of white supremacist groups
and gangs; repression of prisoners who are “documented members” of
actual Black and Brown street gangs while officials protect and give
free reign to members of white supremacist gangs and use them as hit men
against disliked prisoners of color (29), removing all television
stations from the prison’s closed circuit television system that aired
Black programs and refusing channels that air Spanish-language Brown
programs; harassing local radio stations and programs that play Black
music and allow call-ins to prisoners from friends, family and
supporters; subjecting Black and Brown prisoners to the harshest and
highest security levels and conditions while maintaining white prisoners
in minimum security with extensive privileges and benefits, making
security level classifications along blatantly racial lines, frequent
targeting of Black and Brown prisoners with abuse, violence, denied
meals, etc.; deliberately engineering and facilitating violent conflicts
between and against prisoners of color, particularly between prisoners
documented as members of rival Black and Brown street gangs (28),
populating these remote prisons that are staffed nearly-exclusively by
rural whites with predominantly non-white prisoners, etc., etc.
That the FBI and other intelligence and executive agencies are more
racially diverse today than during the 1960s and 70s in no way
invalidates their anti-Black policies. Indeed it was a Black Chicago
policeman – Gloves Davis – that shot two sleeping BPP leaders, Fred
Hampton and Mark Clark, in the heads at point blank range in December
1969, in an FBI orchestrated assassination raid. It was today’s FBI that
assassinated Puerto Rican grassroots leader Filberto Ojeda Rios in
September 2005, sparking protests across Puerto Rico, which spanned
everyday civilians to government leaders.(30) Also the most brutal
violence against South Afrikan Blacks during openly racist apartheid was
often carried out by Black soldiers and police(31). We see Black and
Brown police involved as viciously as white ones in unprovoked and
unjustified violence and murders of urban youth of color today, in
Amerika.
Furthermore, the National Security council (NSC), which is chaired by
the U.S. President, and whose enforcement arm is the CIA, implemented
NSC memorandum #46 in 1978. The stated goals of which were/are to ensure
the permanent demise and destruction of the U.S. Black liberation and
civil rights movements(32). In its own words, NSC-46 devised to ensure
that there would never evolve another independent Black leader or
organization that could unite the U.S. Black populations; to play white
working class people against Blacks; to divide the Black community and
political groups; to bring more Blacks into established political
institutions so they could be controlled and used to mislead the Black
population; and to destroy all aspirations then prevailing among Blacks
to develop an independent Black political party.
So we see an overall historical continuum till today of targeting Black
leaders and activists for destruction who are not “approved” by the
Establishment, and deliberately maintaining the urban Black communities
in crisis. And the same old tactics are being used.
Officials at this prison have conceded working with the FBI and DHS in
“intelligence sharing” – government speak for inter-agency repressive
covert actions against targeted individuals and groups.
Of course, none of what I’ve touched on herein related to the history
and designs of this country’s intelligence and policing agencies is
unknown to the various recipients of this letter, it’s your M.O. and
S.O.P. It’s the general public that’s kept oblivious of it. Moreover,
I’ve only skimmed that surface, just enough to place my issues in their
proper context, and to satisfy my burden of placing each of you on
notice of my issues before pursuing redress in other forums, and to
afford you the opportunity to address/redress these matters.
I am therefore presenting this letter of complaint to all named agencies
and officials, requesting that such racially and politically motivated
persecution and abuses cease, that the false gang/STG profiling of me
and the NABPP/WPO at this prison and anywhere else be rescinded with an
apology for this defamation, and that all the illegal, discriminatory
and retaliatory treatments and conditions mentioned herein be abolished.
If I hear nothing from you all within 20 days, I will proceed to seek
both public and judicial exposure and redress of these and other
practices against those official hereby notified, via copy of this.
Notes and supplementary commentary:
- See, e.g. Theodore Allen,
The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verse, 1997); Steve
Martinof, The Rule of
Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University press, 2003).
In 1676 Afrikan and English slaves and indentured servants, (who enjoyed
equal statuses and conditions of brutality and abuse), came together
under a rebellious young planter, Nathaniel Bacon, in an united revolt
that overthrew the colonial government in Virginia, and burned down the
capitol of Jamestown (Bacon’s Rebellion). Six months into the revolt
Bacon died of influenza, and without its leader the revolt was defeated
by colonial forces. Subsequently, the colonial government instituted a
policy designed to prevent any similar revolt from occurring again, by
dividing the society of poor workers against each other along racial
lines. In 1682 laws were passed creating the “Negro” and “white” races
and making slavery an hereditary and permanent status for Afrikans.
(see, William W. Hening,
Statues at Lorge: The Laws of Virginia (Richmond, 1809), pp. 492
ff). In 1705 the “race line was further clarified by laws that defined
as “Negro” anyone having “one drop” of Afrikan blood. Slavery and
servitude of whites was phased out, and they were brought together under
the concept of being a “superior” race, religiously ordained to enslave
Blacks under the Biblical “curse of canaan.” The entire white society
was mobilized as a united force (slave patrols) to police and brutally
repress Blacks, whom they were indoctrinated to hate and fear. This
politically manufactured system gave birth to white racism, that
persists till today, and was exported from the Virginia colonies to all
areas where Europeans came into contact with and sought to conquer the
lands and seize the wealth and labor power of people of color. And is
preserved in multitudes of ways by today’s capitalist political-economic
systems, which deliberately pits whites, Blacks and other races against
each other.
- “The purity of democratic institutions was, in the historical
debates around Manifest Destiny, an extension of the purity concept of
whiteness. And in the evolution of the two-party system, a further
extension of the structure of racialization expressing itself. The force
driving U.S. political process toward a two-party system historically
was none other than the question of slavery and the disenfranchisement
of the black voter….
“The disenfranchisement of the black voter has
been a major issue throughout U.S. history. It was hotly debated right
after the Revolution, imposed in most states before the civil war,
imposed by means of paramilitary operations during and after
reconstructions, and flaunted in the face of constitutional guarantees
of the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The drive to
disenfranchise black people continues today through massive felony
incarceration for misdemeanors and victimless crimes, for which they
lose suffrage. According to Paul Haygood, more than 13% of potential
black voters are currently disenfranchised (Ryan Paul Haygood, Black Commentator June 10,
2004. According to Haygood, of the 4.7 million people disenfranchised by
felony conviction in the U.S., 1.4 million are black males, or 13% of
the adult black population this does not count black
females).”
-Steve Martinot, Socialism and Democracy,
“Mexico, Iraq, and the Two-party system: Studies in White Supremacy,”
Vol. 19, No 1, March 2005, pp 129-30.
- Exposes on the protection and employment of Nazi war criminals by
the U.S. and British governments are legion. See for example,
Christopher Simpson, Blowback:
America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War
(New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) (on Rauff, the inventor and
administrator of the gas truck execution program which murdered
approximately 250,000 people, see pp. 92-94, on Gehlen, Hitler’s most
senior intelligence office on the brutal Eastern Front, see pp. 70-72,
248-263, 279-283, on Barbie, the Gestapo’s “Butcher of Lyons,” see
pp. 185-195); see also, Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen’s the CIA
Connection (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1990);
Erhard Dubringhaus
Klaus
Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the US Used this Nazi War Criminal as
an Intelligence Agent – a First Hand Account (Washington:
Acropolis, 1984); John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York:
Knopf, 1982) ch. 5; Tom Bower,
Klaus Barbie: The “Butcher of Lyons” (New York: Pantheon, 1984);
Kai Hermann, “A Killer’s Career,” Stern (Germany), May 10 and
following, 1984 (six part series based upon declassified U.S. government
documents and interviews conducted in Bolivia); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States
Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990
(New York, St. Martin’s, 1991); Alexander Cockburn, et al. Whitehout: The CIA, Drugs and the
Press (London, Vergo, 1990) chs 6 and 7; Eugene J. Kolb, [former
U.S. counterintelligence corps officer and chief of operations in the
Augsburg region of Germany) “Army Counterintelligence’s Dealings with
Klaus Barbie,” Letter, New York Times, July 26, 1983, p. A20 (defending
the employment of Barbie); Michael McClintock, Instruments of statecraft: U.S.
Guerilla Warfare Counter-Insurgency and Counter-terrorism, 1940-1990
(New York: Pantheon, 1992), especially ch 3 (important study of
U.S. intelligence’s absorption of Nazi methods and practitioners into
U.S. special warfare doctrine after World War II.
- Charles Higham, Trading
with the Enem: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot
(NewYork: Delacorte, 1983). George Bush is certainly not an exception
among prominent U.S. government officials with direct lines of descent
from major Nazis. Karl Roves grandfather helped run the Nazi party and
build the Birkenau Death camp, and California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s Austrian father was a Nazi SA volunteer and became a
ranking officer. See, The Free
Press , October 6, 2003.
- See Church Committee, U.S. Congressional Report: Intelligence
Activities and the Rights of Americans, 94th Congress, 2nd Section,
Report No 94-755 (1976) (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office),
Books II and III.
- ACLU, Cracks in the
System: Twenty Years of the Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law
(October 2006)
- Harvard Law Review,
“Developments in the Law-Race and the criminal Process.” Vol 101,
Nov 7, May 1988, pp. 1973-1641 (comprehensive dissection of racial
discrimination in the ‘criminal justice’ system, determining that
discrimination exists at every stage of the ‘criminal justice’ process);
Steven R. Donziger, ed, The
Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice
Commission (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), especially ch4,
Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect
– Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995)
- Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, The
Don’t Shank the Guards Handbook: Legal Resource to Guards Brutality,
Harassment and Rape (2003); On the Question of Race and
Racism (2006), “Wimyn hold up half the sky” (2008), etc.
- Op Cit. note 5, book III, p. 4 9The FBI’s “covert action” programs
were generally targeted at any Black political and other groups. “The
Black Nationalist Program, according to its supervisor, included ‘a
great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as
black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black. Indeed, the
nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a
Black Nationalist ‘Hate Group’.”)
- In Virginia where I am incarcerated for example, the criminal laws
defining and governing “Criminal street gangs,” are set out under VA
Code sections 18.2 – 466.1 through 18.2-46.3:3, which parallel similar
federal criminal laws under Title 18 of the U.S. Code.
- For defamation law in Virginia governing false imputations of crime,
see for example, Zayre of VA,
lac. V. Gowdy, 207 Va. 47, 147 S. E. 2d 710 (1966); [Shupe v. Rose’s stores, Inc.
213 Va. 374, 192 S.E. 2d 766 (1972). But see especially, Schnupp v. Smith, 249 Va. 353,
457 S. E. 2d 42 (1995) (words that impute the commission of a crime that
is punishable by imprisonment in a state or federal institution are
actionable defamation and slander per se). Accord, VA Code Section 8
01-45.
- The various Black organizations that have used the Black Panther
name, past and present, include, the original Black Panther party (U.S.
1966-1982), the Black Panther movement (England), the Black Panther
Party of Israel, Black Panther Party (Australia), Dalit Panthers
(India), New Black Panther Party (U.S., 1990-present), New Black Panther
Vanguard Movement (U.S., 1994-present), Black Panther Collective (U.S.
1994-present), the National Alliance of Black Panthers (U.S.), Anarchist
Black Panthers (U.S.), the NABPP/WPO (U.S.,. 2005 – present), etc.
13.As Huey Newton pointed out in a February 11, 1973 interview with
William Buckley, on Public Television: Firing Line, “we were very
careful to follow city ordinances, gun regulations, state law, and our
constitutional rights.”
- Charles E. Jones, et al, “Don’t believe the Hype: Debunking the
Panther Mythology,” The Black
Panther Party Reconsidered Baltimore, MD, Black Classic, 1998)
pp29-31.
- op. cit. note 5, book III p42, one of many examples was where the
FBI sent “[a]n anonymous letter…to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers,
a Chicago gang” to whom violent type activity, shooting, and the like,
are second nature” advising him that “the brothers that run the Panthers
blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed to be a hit out
for you.” The letter was intended to ‘intensify the degree of animosity
between the two groups’ and cause ‘retaliatory action which could
disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against its leadership’.”
- op.cit, note 6, book III pp. 185-224, section titled “the FBIs
Covert Action program to Destroy the Black Panther Party” “[R]ecently a
reporter’s Freedom of Information Act investigation into COINTELPRO
files found that the American government had done everything possible to
infiltrate the Black Panthers and other lesser-known activist groups,
then had its ‘agents lead the groups into violent gestures that would
divide them, undermine their credibility and bring down the full weight
of the state’ on the leaders’ heads.” William Hinton, Through A Glass Darkly (New
York, Monthly Review, 206).
“[R]epression in the United States is worse than ever before and much,
much harsher than the world – or most Americans, for that matter – is
aware or told. In New Mexico, for example, the Alianza led by Reies
Tijerina, has been hounded relentlessly since 1966, its offices have
been dynamited (by police at that), its leaders shot, its members jailed
on such flagrantly outrageous charges that few Americans would believe –
even today – the strictly factual story. At the time of writing,
Tijerian himself was locked up for years and his Alianza was flagging.
As for the Blacks, their repression is not less brutal, just more
widespread. The whole primary and secondary leadership of the Black
Panther Party has been jailed on obvious frame-ups. They have been
beaten, tortured, and murdered. Twice in Oakland, I saw with my own
eyes, police in official cars come by a group of Panthers talking
peacefully on a street and open fire at them. Three times I witnessed
police arrest Panthers, handcuff them, and then pistol-whip them. In
over a dozen cases, after seeing Panthers arrested, I have gone to see
them in jail and found them bloodied from having “fallen down the
stairs” or from having “assaulted a policeman.” And the whole world
knows – for this time it was reported in the press – that on-duty
Chicago policemen murdered Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their
sleep. By the end of 1969, not a single policemen had been brought to
justice for these acts of violence. On the other hand, all of white
America’s law enforcement agents, including federal marshals and
America’s law enforcement agents, including federal marshals and the
FBI, have gone out of their way – and, often, out of their jurisdiction
– to arrest Panthers, without having warrants. Federal marshals have
even refused to honor a court order not to remove Chairman Bobby Seale
from California (which, legally, made the marshals kidnappers.) By 1970,
twenty-eight Black Panthers has been murdered by the police, some beaten
to death after arrest (Charles Cox in Chicago), some in unprovoked
assaults (seventeen year-old Bobby Hutton in Oakland, Hampton and Clark
in Chicago), most in front of scores of witnesses, who could never
testify, as the police were never charged.”
John Gerassi, The Coming of the New
International (World Publishing Co. 1971) pp. 552-553.
- See, Curt Gentry, J. Edgar
Hoover: The Man and his Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1991)
- Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial
Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (Now
York: Free Press, 1989).
- Id.; Ward Churchill et al. , Agents of Repression: The FBI’s
Secret Wars on the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement
(Boston: South End, 1988); etc.
- “The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public’s perception
of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory in formation to
the press, either anonymously or through “friendly” contacts.” Joy
James, Shadow Boxing
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) p. 112, see also op. cit. note 5.
- William F. Pepper, An Act
of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (London: Verson,
2003).
- “Even after King’s death, [FBI] agents in the field were proposing
methods for harassing his widow, and Bureau officials were tring to
prevent his birthday from becoming a national holiday.” Op. cit. note 5,
book I, p. 223.
- Ward Churchill, et al, The
COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent
in America (Boston: South End, 1990), p. 97.
- op. cit. note 5, book III, p.136
- Ibid.
- The Church Committee summed up the limits on law enforcement
agencies methods of “preventing violence”:
“The prevention of
violence is clearly not, in itself, an improper purpose; preventing
violence is the ultimate goal of most law enforcement. Prosecution and
sentencing are intended to defer future criminal behavior, not only of
the subjct but also of others who might break the law. In that sense,
law enforcement legitimately attempts the indirect prevention of
possible violence and, if the methods used are proper raises no
constitutional issues. When the government goes beyond traditional law
enforcement methods, however,
and attacks group membership and advocacy , it treads on ground
forbidden to it by the constitution. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 v.s.
444 (1969), the Supreme Court held that the government is not permitted
to ‘forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or law violation
except where such advocacy is directed toward inciting or producing
imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.’
In the absence of such clear and present danger, the government cannot
act against speech nor presumably against association.”
Op. cit.,
note 5, book III, p6.
- David E. Stannard,
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). An excerpt, p. 120:
“[T]he surviving Indians later referred to [President George]
Washington by the name “Town Destroyer,” for it was under his direct
orders that at least 28 of the 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the
Mohawk River had been totally obliterated in a period of less than five
years, as had all the towns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onondaga,
and the Cayuga. As one Iroquoi’s told Washington to his face in 1792: ’t
o this day, when that name is heard, our women folk look behind them and
turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their
mothers.”
“[President Thomas] Jefferson … in 1807 instructed his
Secretary of war that any Indians who resisted American expansion into
their lands must be met with “the hatchet.” “And…if ever we are
constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,” he wrote, “we will
never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond
the Mississippi.’ Continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us, we
shall destroy all of them’ Indeed, Jefferson’s writings on Indians are
filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be
given a simple choice – to be ‘extirpate[d] from the earth’ or to remove
themselves out of the Amerikans’ way. Had these same words been
enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed as European Jews,
they would be engraved in modern memory.”
In fact Hitler based his genocidal methods on study of the U.S.
treatment of Native Americans. See, John Toland Adolf Hitler (New York,
Doubleday, 1976). P. 702 (“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as
well as the practicability of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his
studies of English and United States history. He admired the Camas for
Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west, and
often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s
extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who
could not be tamed by captivity.”); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1973), p.214 (Hitler’s “continental war of conquest” was modeled
“with explicit reference to the United States.”); Richard Rubenstein,
“Afterword: Genocide and Civilization,” Isidor Walliman, eds, et al,
Genocide and the Modern Age:
Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (westport, CT,
Greenwood, 1987), p 288 9”Hitler saw the settlement of the New World and
the concomitant elimination of North American’s Indian population by
white European settlers as a model to be followed by Germany on the
European continent.”)
On Columbus, see Samuel Elliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner
(Boston: Little, Brown 1955), p. 129.
“By 1508 a census showed 60,000 of the estimated 1492 population of
250,000 [on Hispaniola] still alive, although the Bahamas and Cuba had
been raided to obtain more slaves. Fifty years later, not 500 remained.
The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successor
resulted in complete genocide.”
Furthermore, Washington and Jefferson were two of the largest
slave-owners of their day. Jefferson, in fact, raped and sired a child
by a 14-year-old slave girl, Sally.
28/29. Prison officials’ inciting and facilitating violent conflicts and
“gladiator fights” between rival racial groups of prisoners is a common
trend in U.S. prisons, as the 1997 documentary expose film Maximum Security University
revealed.
- The Nation, “The
killing of Filiberto Ojeda Rios,” October 7, 2005.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/jiminez
31. Kurt Campbell, “Marching for Pretoria,” Boston Globe Magazine. Marh 1,
1987, pp 161.
- The National Security Act of July 26, 1947, which created the NSC
and CIA, limits the powers of these agencies to political and military
matters outside of the U.S.
I
am writing in regards to the constant discrimination we face here at Red
Onion State Prison. We are allowed to order magazines, but when they get
here we usually receive a notice stating that the publication has been
disapproved. This is very discouraging and has caused me to stop
subscribing to XXL and I soon will cancel my subscription to Vibe. These
two publications seem to be the most targeted. Out of 12 XXL magazines I
only received 7 issues. Out of 14 Vibes I have only received 7 issues. I
recently had a King disapproved, but that was the first time since I
have been subscribed.