On January 23, 2007, nine men were charged in what is being called a campaign of \u201cchaos and terror\u201d that saw at least three police killed from 1968 to 1973.\u00a0 Emphasis is being placed on official claims that most of these men were members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) when the police killings occurred.\u00a0 Eight of them were charged with the August 29, 1971 shotgun slaying of San Francisco police sergeant, John Young.<\/p>\n
Is it coincidence that the killings of a handful of police over 30 years ago have suddenly become a major concern to the Establishment?\u00a0 Whereas, typical of this very same Establishment is a blatant disinterest in pursuing and prosecuting the legions of police (state and federal) who\u2019ve wantonly murdered multitudes of New Afrikans across Amerika from that time period till today.\u00a0 Indeed, during those same years of targeted BLA activities (1968-1973), the U.S. government, in collaboration with local \u2018law enforcement\u2019 agencies, was involved in the murders of prominent Black political leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969), George Jackson (1971), and others.\u00a0 In each of these cases, the government\u2019s role in orchestrating, executing and covering up these assassinations has been exposed with unimpeachable proof.\u00a0 I\u2019ll elaborate later.<\/p>\n
In fact it was in response to this climate of raw fear, violence and murder of Blacks, that the BLA arose as a defensive arm of the New Afrikan communities.\u00a0 The BLA warriors had summed up from our historical experiences at the hands of white slave patrols, vigilantes, lynch mobs and police that the official \u2018enforcers\u2019 of the law could not be looked to for protection of Black lives.\u00a0 Instead, they were, for us, a principal source of violence, death and terror.\u00a0 Many of the BLA\u2019s members were victims of such official violence and assassination attempts, often carried out as part of government efforts to destroy the Black Panther Party (BPP), which arose in 1966 to serve poor, urban, Black communities in areas of survival and basic needs that the Establishment could not and would not.<\/p>\n
During that era, there was little “sugar-coating” the raw terror suffered by communities of color living under police occupation, and especially prominent was the open police violence displayed against leading political organizations like the Black Panther Party (BPP), who struggled to serve these communities.\u00a0 John Gerassi, a white journalist and author who lived in that era, witnessed this reality with his own eyes:<\/p>\n
[R]epression in the United States is worse than ever before and much, much harsher than the world\u2014or most Americans, for that matter\u2014is aware or told.\u00a0 In New Mexico, for example, the Alianza, led by Reies Tijerina, has been hounded relentlessly since 1966; its offices have been dynamited (by policemen at that), its leaders shot, its members jailed on such flagrantly outrageous charges that few Americans would believe\u2014even today\u2014the strictly factual story.\u00a0 At the time of writing, Tijerina himself was locked up for years and his Alianza was flagging.\u00a0 As for the Blacks, their repression is not less brutal, just more widespread.\u00a0 The whole primary and secondary leadership of the Black Panther Party has been jailed on obvious frame-ups.\u00a0 They have been beaten, tortured and murdered.\u00a0 Twice in Oakland, I saw with my own eyes, policemen in official cars zoom by a group of Panthers talking peacefully on a street and open fire at them.\u00a0 Three times I witnessed policemen arrest Panthers, handcuff them, and then pistol-whip them.\u00a0 In over a dozen cases, after seeing Panthers arrested, I have gone to see them in jail and found them bloodied from having \u201cfallen down the stairs\u201d or from having \u201cassaulted a policeman.\u201d\u00a0 And the whole world knows\u2014for this time it was reported in the press\u2014that on-duty Chicago policemen murdered Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their sleep.\u00a0 By the end of 1969, not a single policeman had been brought to justice for these acts of violence.\u00a0 On the other hand, all of white America\u2019s law enforcement agents, including federal marshals and the FBI, have gone out of their way\u2014and, often, out of their jurisdiction\u2014to arrest Panthers, without having warrants.\u00a0 Federal marshals have even refused to honor a court order not to remove Chairman Bobby Seale from California (which, legally, made the marshals kidnappers).\u00a0 By 1970, twenty-eight Black Panthers had been murdered by the police, some beaten to death after arrest (Charles Cox in Chicago), some in unprovoked police 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 policemen were never charged.\u00a0 It is little wonder, then, that the Browns and Blacks consider themselves colonized and imperialized, part of the same dominated world as Latin Americans, the Vietnamese, and the Congolese.<\/p>\n
-John Gerassi, The Coming of the New International<\/i> (World Publishing Co. 1971)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The BPP\u2019s deadly experiences were witnessed by the New Afrikan communities, and reported first hand by the Party itself.\u00a0 These experiences served to solidify the communities, raise the consciousness of Black people, and expose the true function of the police as violent oppressors of the poor and protectors of the wealthy ruling class.\u00a0 In the Harris Survey Yearbook of Public Opinion<\/i> (1970), it was found that 66% of Blacks took pride in the BPP and its strong example in supporting Blacks\u2019 basic rights and needs.\u00a0 But more telling is that 86% of Blacks in that survey answered \u201cyes\u201d to the question: \u201cEven if you disagree with the views of the Panthers, has the violence against them led you to believe that Black people must stand together to protect themselves?\u201d So there was an overwhelming consensus in the Black communities that Blacks must unite to resist violent police oppression.\u00a0 It was during the very same year that the Harris Survey<\/i> was taken, that many of the most trusted and committed BPP members were pushed out of the Party and went underground to join the BLA.<\/p>\n
Every honest witness to and participant of that period acknowledges that the BLA was forced<\/b> into existence in response to the brutal police murders and attacks on Black political organizations, leaders, and everyday people.\u00a0 But today, after decades of the corporate entertainment media\u2019s romanticizing the roles of police, the image of these occupying forces has been given something of a face-lift to all except the youth of urban communities of color, who still see the same oppressive face of policemen as did our communities of the 1960\u2019s and 70\u2019s.\u00a0 as Comrade Sundiata Acoli has pointed out, this ongoing media effort to clean up the police image was a product of the BPP\u2019s exposing to New Afrikans across Amerika the real<\/b> face of our occupiers:<\/p>\n
One singular indication, although there are others, of the effectiveness of BPP propaganda techniques is that even today, over a decade later, a large part of the programs shown on TV are still \u2018police stories\u2019 and many of the roles available to Black actors are limited to police roles.\u00a0 A lot of this has to do with the overall process of still trying to rehabilitate the image of police from its devastating exposure during the Panthers era, and to prevent the true role of the police in this society from being exposed again.<\/p>\n
– Sundiata Acoli, A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and its Place in the Black Liberation Movement<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But let me return to my original question, whether the recent charges against those nine men are coincidence.\u00a0 I think not.\u00a0 First, let\u2019s consider the timing, which is interesting.<\/p>\n
Only once a year is there an official commemoration of any Black personality in Amerika.\u00a0 That would be January 21st<\/sup>, Martin Luther King\u2019s birthday.\u00a0 Those charges were issued two days after<\/b> the King holiday.\u00a0 Then, there\u2019s only one time of year that Black history is even acknowledged in Amerika\u2014although not \u2018officially\u2019 recognized.\u00a0 That would be Black History Month. The charges issued just a week before the commencement of Black History Month.\u00a0 Hmmm\u2026<\/p>\n
In the context of Black History Month, no honest account of Amerika can avoid the fact that ours has been a history of continued suffering and resistance. And the Amerikan Establishment has been both at the root of our suffering and a fierce opponent of our resistance.\u00a0 The latter is demonstrated in its trumping up charges nearly 40 years old to vilify the BLA and its symbol of resistance against brutal national oppression of New Afrikans.\u00a0 This is political persecution plain and simple.<\/p>\n
And what of Martin Luther King?\u00a0 Our brotha who was also murdered by government forces, the very same government that was venomously opposed to making his birthday a national holiday.\u00a0 These facts are now beyond<\/b> dispute, although the mainstream media refuses to report them. Like the BPP, King was a target of the vicious government covert action program called COINTELPRO (the FBI\u2019s Counter Intelligence Program).\u00a0 This program, as described in an internal FBI memorandum dated August 25, 1967, was calculated:<\/p>\n
…to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.<\/p>\n
The pernicious background of such groups, their duplicity, and such publicity will have a neutralizing effect. Efforts of the various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated.\u00a0 No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leadership of the groups and where possible an effort should be made to capitalize upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organizations.\u00a0 When an opportunity is apparent to disrupt or neutralize black nationalist, hate-type organizations through the cooperation of established local news media contacts or through such contact with sources available to the Seat of Government, in every instance careful attention must be given to the proposal to insure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited through the publicity and not merely publicized.<\/p>\n
Intensified attention under this program should be afforded to the activities of such groups as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Revolutionary Action Movement, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Nation of Islam.\u00a0 Particular emphasis should be given to extremists who direct the activities and policies of revolutionary or militant groups such as Stokley Carmichael, H. \u201cRap\u201d Brown, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Another internal FBI memorandum dated March 9, 1968, made clear the Bureau\u2019s meaning and intentions in proposing to \u201cneutralize\u201d those who promoted fundamental changes in the living conditions of the poor and oppressed nationalities.\u00a0 It urged that, \u201cthe Negro youths and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before his assassination, King was a major target of subversion at the hands of the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, including Military Intelligence Groups.\u00a0 FBI memoranda show orders given to \u201cneutralize\u201d King as late as one month before his death.\u00a0 A lengthy discussion of some of the many illegal actions against King can be found in the Church Committee\u2019s Congressional Report of 1976, entitled Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans<\/i>, Books II and III, especially Book III, pp. 79-184.\u00a0 The report points out that:<\/p>\n
[T]he \u201cneutralization\u201d program continued until Dr. King\u2019s death.\u00a0 As late as March 1968, FBI agents were being instructed to neutralize Dr. King because he might become a \u201cmessiah\u201d who could \u201cunify, and electrify the militant black nationalist movement, \u201cif<\/b> he were to abandon his supposed \u2018obedience\u2019 to \u2018white liberal doctrines\u2019 (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.\u201d\u00a0 Steps were taken to subvert the \u201cPoor People\u2019s Campaign\u201d which, Dr. King was planning to lead in the spring of 1968.\u00a0 Even after King\u2019s death, agents in the field were proposing methods for harassing his widow, and Bureau officials were trying to prevent his birthday from becoming a national holiday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
King was indeed questioning his earlier assumptions and moving towards a more radical perspective:<\/p>\n
By 1964, King was not only firmly established as a preeminent civil rights leader, but was beginning to show signs of pursuing a more fundamental structural agenda of social change.\u00a0 Correspondingly\u2026the [FBI]\u2019s intent had crystallized into an unvarnished intervention into the domestic political process, with the goal of bringing about King\u2019s replacement with someone \u201cacceptable\u201d to the FBI.<\/p>\n
– Ward Churchill, et al., The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI\u2019s Secret Wars Against the Dissent in the United States (Boston; South End, 1990), p. 97<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Military surveillance of King began far earlier than the FBI operations against him:<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s interest in Dr. King went considerably beyond \u201csnooping,\u201d however, to constitute one of the most prolonged surveillances of any family in American history.\u00a0 In the early years of the [20th<\/sup>] century, Lieut. Col. Ralph Van Deman created an Army Intelligence network targeting four prime foes: the Industrial Workers of the World, opponents of the draft, Socialists and \u201cNegro unrest.\u201d\u00a0 \u2026Van Deman was much preoccupied with the role of black churches as possible centers of sedition.<\/p>\n
By the end of 1917, the War Department\u2019s Military Intelligence Division had opened a file on Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and first president of the Atlanta NAACP.\u00a0 King\u2019s father, Martin Sr., William\u2019s successor at Ebenezer Baptist, also entered the army files.\u00a0 Martin Jr. First shows up in these files, (kept by the 111th<\/sup> Military Intelligence Group at Fort McPherson in Atlanta), in 1947, when he attended Dorothy Lilley\u2019s Intercollegiate school; the army suspected Lilley of having ties to the Communist Party.<\/p>\n
Army intelligence officers became convinced of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s own Communist ties when he spoke in 1950 at the 25th<\/sup> anniversary of the integrated Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.\u00a0 Ten years earlier, an army intelligence officer had reported to his superiors that the Highlander school was teaching a course of instruction to develop Negro organizers in the Southern cotton states.<\/p>\n
By 1963, so Tennessee journalist Stephen Tompkins reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal<\/i>, U-2 planes were photographing disturbances in Birmingham, Alabama, capping a multilayered spy system that by 1968 included 304 intelligence offices across the country, \u201csubversive national security dossiers\u201d on 80,731 Americans, plus 19 million personal dossiers lodged at the Defense Department\u2019s Central Index of Investigations.<\/p>\n
A more sinister thread derives from the anger and fear with which the army high command greeted King\u2019s denunciation of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967.\u00a0 Army spies recorded Stokley Carmichael telling King, \u201cthe man don\u2019t care you call ghettoes concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the 1967 Detroit riots, 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the army\u2019s psychological operations group, dressed as civilians.\u00a0 It turned out King was by far the most popular black leader.\u00a0 That same year Maj. Gen William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, observing the great antiwar march on Washington from the roof of the Pentagon, concluded that the empire was coming apart at the seams.\u00a0 There were, Yarborough reckoned, too few reliable troops to fight in Vietnam and hold the line at home.<\/p>\n
In response, the army increased its surveillance of King.\u00a0 Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying landing zones and potential sniper sites in major US cities.\u00a0 The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th<\/sup> Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama as a subsidiary intelligence network.\u00a0 The army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis.<\/p>\n
In his fine investigation, Tompkins detailed the increasing hysteria of Army Intelligence chiefs over the threat they considered King to pose to national security.\u00a0 The FBI\u2019s J. Edgar Hoover was similarly obsessed, and King was dogged by spy units through early 1967.\u00a0 A Green Beret special unit was operating in Memphis on the day he was shot.\u00a0 He died from a bullet from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store, a murder for which James Earl Ray was given a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison.\u00a0 A court-ordered test of James Earl Ray\u2019s rifle raised questions whether it in fact had fired the bullet that killed King.<\/p>\n
-Alexander Cockburn et al., Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press<\/i> (Versco, NY 1999)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But more revealing of the government\u2019s role in King\u2019s murder are the findings of attorney William F. Pepper, based on his 25-year extensive investigation of King\u2019s death and the government cover-ups that followed.\u00a0 His findings and the results of a wrongful death lawsuit he filed and won in 1999 on behalf of the King family concerning Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination are exhaustively reported in his 2003 book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King<\/i>.\u00a0 King\u2019s wife, the late Coretta Scott King, had this to say about Pepper\u2019s book:<\/p>\n
For a quarter of a century, Bill Pepper conducted an independent investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 He opened his files to our family, encouraged us to speak with the witnesses and represented our family in the civil trial against the conspirators.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now the findings of his exhaustive investigation and additional revelations from the trial are presented in the pages of this important book.\u00a0 We recommend it highly to everyone who seeks the truth about Dr. King\u2019s assassination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From the jacket of the book comes this summary of its contents:<\/p>\n
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a worker\u2019s strike.\u00a0 By the end of the day, top-level army snipers were in position to knock him out if ordered.\u00a0 Two military officers were in place on the roof of a fire station near the Lorraine Motel, to photograph the events.\u00a0 Two black firemen had been ordered not to report to duty that day and a black Memphis Police Department detective on surveillance duty in the fire station was physically removed from his post and taken home.\u00a0 Dr. King\u2019s\u00a0 room at the motel was changed from a secluded, ground-floor room to number 306 on the balcony.\u00a0 Lloyd Jowers, owner of Jim\u2019s Grill, which backed onto the motel from the other side of the street had already received $100,000 in cash for his agreement to participate in the assassination.\u00a0 He was to go out into the brush area behind the grill with the shooter and take possession of the gun immediately after the fatal shot was fired.\u00a0 When the dust settled, King had been hit, and a clean-up procedure was immediately set in motion.\u00a0 James Earl Ray was effectively framed, the snipers dispersed, and witnesses who could not be controlled were killed, and the crime scene was destroyed.<\/p>\n
William Pepper, attorney and friend of Dr. King and the King family, became convinced after years of investigation that not only was Ray not the shooter, but that King had been targeted as part of a larger conspiracy to stop the anti-war movement, and to prevent King from gaining momentum in his promising Poor People\u2019s Campaign.\u00a0 Ten years into his investigation, in 1988, Pepper agreed to represent Ray.\u00a0 While he was never able to successfully appeal the sentence before Ray\u2019s death, he was able to build an airtight case against the real perpetrators.\u00a0 In 1999, Lloyd Jowers and co-conspirators were brought to trial in a wrongful death civil action suit on behalf of the King family.\u00a0 Seventy witnesses set out the details of a conspiracy in a plot to murder King that involved J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Richard Helms and the CIA, the military, the local Memphis police, and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis.\u00a0 The evidence was unimpeachable.\u00a0 The jury took an hour to find for the King family.\u00a0 But the silence following these shocking revelations was deafening.\u00a0 Like the pattern during all the investigations of the assassination throughout the years, no major media outlet would cover the story.\u00a0 It was effectively buried.<\/p>\n
Until now, the details, evidence, and personalities of all these nefarious characters have gone unreported.\u00a0 In An Act of State<\/i>, you finally have the truth before you\u2014how the United States government effectively shut down one of the most galvanizing movements for social change by stopping its leader dead in his tacks.<\/p>\n
The very government that is concerned today with prosecuting the killings of a few anonymous policemen, is the same one that continues to effectively whitewash its own role in the assassination of one of Amerika\u2019s most well known Black political and religious leaders, and whose memory it pretends to respect and promote.\u00a0 But the sad irony and bitter contradiction in the entire King affair is toward the end of his life, King acknowledged that, \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.\u201d\u00a0 Yet, while denouncing Black self-defense such as that symbolized by the efforts of the BLA, he looked to the very same violent<\/b> government\u2014indeed the very government that killed him\u2014to defend him against its own violence.\u00a0 So, no, it is no coincidence that just as New Afrikans are commemorating and remembering the birthday of this slain Black civil rights leader and our rich history of struggle and resistance against institutionalized oppression, that the government has instituted show trial proceedings to vilify and persecute the example of New Afrikans who took courage in hand and rose to the challenge of defending us against the \u201cgreatest purveyor of violence\u201d against people of color.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And what about the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969?\u00a0 Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP and Mark Clark, Defense Captain of the Peoria Chapter of the BPP were both assassinated on December 4, 1969 by Chicago police in cooperation with the FBI.\u00a0 Both Comrades Hampton and Clark had been drugged by FBI agent provocatuer and informant William O\u2019Neal and were, as a result, asleep in bed when police shot them at point blank range.\u00a0 Both Illinois state Attorney General Edward Hanrahan and David Goth, the cop who led the raid, were exposed as having given false statements to the media about the raid.\u00a0 A civil suit was filed and won on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families, but none of the involved federal agents and police were ever punished.\u00a0 Yet, today the FBI is heading a witch-hunt against former BLA members.<\/p>\n
And what about Comrade George L. Jackson, murdered by San Quentin prison guards in August 1971, which triggered prison uprisings around the country culminating in the Attica rebellion?\u00a0 The facts of the government plot to kill him are set out in the investigative study by Eric Mann in Comrade George: An Investigation into the Official Story of His Assassination<\/i>\u00a0 (1972).\u00a0 Again no prosecutions are being pursued.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the tragedy of the MOVE family, whose Philadelphia, PA headquarters was bombed on May 13, 1985 by police, who also fired over 10,000 rounds into the MOVE house.\u00a0 As a result, six adults and five children were murdered.\u00a0 Those who attempted to flee the fire were shot at and only two MOVE members escaped the blaze.\u00a0 Again no police were charged or convicted, however, Ramona Africa, the only adult who survived the fire, was charged and convicted of riot and conspiracy, and was imprisoned for seven years. Upon her release she filed and won a lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia.\u00a0 But no amount of money recovered from litigation can replace the lives of our slain leaders and comrades.<\/p>\n
The pattern is unmistakable\u2026<\/p>\n
It has always been the case in Amerika, (since racial divisions were first created in the 1600\u2019s by the wealthy ruling class to divide poor white against poor Black, and to empower the whites to violently repress Blacks and other peoples of color), that the lives of poor Blacks have no value in the eyes of those who hold power.\u00a0 From the white slave patrols, to the Klan, to the modern police and even military; deadly violence against the dark faces at by the hands of the armed thugs of the ruling class is part and parcel of the U.S. social contract.\u00a0 However, counter-violence against<\/b> the same forces in defense<\/b> of the lives of their Black victims is unacceptable.\u00a0 Just as the routine rape of Black wimyn by white men in the South throughout U.S. history was the expected norm, against which Blacks were forbidden to resist.\u00a0 It took a nationwide campaign to win the acquittal of Joann Little who was charged with murder, for killing a white Washington, NC sheriff deputy in August 1974, who entered her jail cell and attempted to rape her at knife point.<\/p>\n
This completely lopsided power dynamic and the resultant police violence and injustice against Black life, provoked most every major urban Black uprising in Amerika.\u00a0 Many of the major revolts of 1964 through 1958 were provoked by incidents of police violence against or murders of Blacks.\u00a0 Major uprisings followed the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X.<\/p>\n
Malcolm X was another of our leaders murdered with government complicity and even now the government refuses to release most of its over 50,000 pages of intelligence files on Malcolm. The 1991 uprisings in Los Angeles and other cities were incited by the videotaped brutal beatings of Black motorist Rodney King by police.\u00a0 The 2002 uprising in Benton Harbor, Michigan was triggered by the police killing of Black motorcyclist Terrance Shern.\u00a0 The 2005 uprising in Toledo, Ohio was triggered by the earlier murder of a Black man by police electrocuting him nine times with a taser and the subsequent violent protection by police of a Nazi demonstration, and so on.\u00a0 The cycle repeats, the power imbalance continues, and Black self-defense is vilified and criminalized.<\/p>\n
Many of us choose to ignore or forget, some of us simply don\u2019t know and most have been wooed by shows like Cops, CSI, America\u2019s Most Wanted, and so on, into denying the real<\/i> role that the political police have played in and against the New Afrikan nation in Amerika.\u00a0 They have had a hand in persecuting all of our genuine leaders and in the murders of each one who\u2019s died a violent death; they\u2019ve created<\/i> and continue the infrastructural deterioration and internal implosion of our communities with narcotics infestations, and they\u2019ve instigated armed violence amongst our youth. With minimal success, Black congressperson Maxine Waters has been trying for years, from within established channels, to expose and compel action against the CIA\u2019s role in creating and continuing the urban crack cocaine epidemic, and arming and instigating major armed gang violence beginning in the early 1980\u2019s; they\u2019re the enforcers of the genocidal policy of depopulating our communities, through arrests and imprisonments, of massive numbers of Black males, thereby undercutting our ability to reproduce, and removing Black fathers and role models from Black social life; they\u2019ve operated inside our communities as an occupying army with their training, postures and methods becoming more and more militaristic every year; and they murder, beat, brutalize and slander us with impunity and total immunity from \u201clegal\u201d challenge.\u00a0 Essentially, they are the hired guns of the wealthy ruling class whose function is that of repressing and containing the poor, marginalized and oppressed lower class sectors.<\/p>\n
But nowhere was the repressive function of the police, and<\/i> U.S. military, shown more blatantly within Amerika, in modern times, than in the neglect and violence against stranded, sick, hungry dehydrating and terrified poor Blacks in the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina.\u00a0 Outrage over those events spanned the globe.\u00a0 Even the usually apolitical Black entertainers, (who otherwise know enough to keep their mouths closed about Amerika\u2019s duplicitous politics on race, poverty and the brutality of Black life in Amerika), spoke out.\u00a0 In the context of New Afrikan struggle and resistance, that situation is worthy of close scrutiny.<\/p>\n
For those that recall, the Louisiana governor declared a \u201cshoot to kill\u201d martial law in New Orleans, upon claims that looting and violence were sweeping the city.\u00a0 Blacks were \u201clooting,\u201d but whites doing the same were simply \u201cfinding\u201d food and basic needs for survival.\u00a0 Specifically referred to\u2014as the final incident that triggered the need for martial intervention\u2014were claims that some \u201cblack gang bangers\u201d on an overpass had fired on the US Army Corps of Engineers while busy doing repair work. \u00a0The army supposedly returned fire, killing several of these youths.\u00a0 Images of these dead youth were beamed into homes across Amerika by the corporate news media.\u00a0 It was declared that under these dangerous circumstances, \u201crescue and relief\u201d operations, (which the police\u2014federal and state\u2014were not much involved in anyway), would be terminated and martial law declared to restore order against the unruly Black population.<\/p>\n
In the words of Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard\u2019s Joint Task Force, as quoted by the Army Times<\/i>, \u201cthis place is going to look like Little Somalia, we\u2019re going to go out and take this city back.\u00a0 This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.\u201d<\/p>\n
This call to official violence against a desperate, hungry, sick and already officially neglected population is problematic.\u00a0 Not because it departs from the way Black folk in Amerika are already <\/b>treated, but because of the level of violence called forth and the fabricated justifications made for declaring martial law.\u00a0 First let\u2019s look at the justifications.<\/p>\n
Reporter Jeremy Scahill gives a very different account of what happened on that overpass near the Ninth Ward.\u00a0 According to his report, private mercenaries from the Alabama-based company, Bodyguard and Tactical Services (BATS) killed those youth and then casually told both US Army forces and state police, who showed up later, what they\u2019d done.\u00a0 No reports were filed, no questions asked, the army and troopers went their way as did the BATS mercenaries.\u00a0 No one cared that the mercs could\u2019ve been lying about why they shot those Black youth.\u00a0 And it seems the U.S. Army decided later to take responsibility.\u00a0 Someone<\/b> would have to explain the bodies of several Black youth riddled with .223 rounds, which is the standard caliber bullet of U.S. military assault rifles.\u00a0 Scahill\u2019s report, entitled \u201cBlackwater Down,\u201d was printed in the October 10, 2005 issue of The Nation<\/i>.<\/p>\n
This account of the merc\u2019s conduct and the subsequent military bailout, is consistent with the observations of the behaviors of such mercs made by Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd<\/sup> Infantry Division in charge of security in Baghdad.\u00a0 He stated in September 2005 of such mercenaries operating in Iraq: \u201cThese guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff.\u00a0 There\u2019s no authority over them, so you can\u2019t come down on them hard when they escalate force\u2026They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath.\u00a0 It happens all over the place.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what about Brig. Gen. Gary Jones\u2019 remarks that New Orleans would be turned into a \u201cLittle Somalia,\u201d that martial law meant not policing the city, but a \u201cmilitary operation\u201d?\u00a0 of course we know that Somalia is an Afrikan country, so Jones\u2019 point of comparison between Somalia and the stranded Black New Orleans population in this regard is obvious.\u00a0 But let\u2019s look at Somalia.\u00a0 What was it that the U.S. military did in Somalia during the 1992 US\/UN invasion that he was saying would be repeated in New Orleans?<\/p>\n
There were times when [US troops] shot at everything that moved, took hostages, gunned their way through crowds of men and women, finished off any wounded who were showing signs of life.\u00a0 Many people died in their homes, their tin roofs ripped to shreds by high-velocity bullets and rockets. Accounts of the fighting frequently contain such statements as this: \u201cOne moment there was a crowd, and the next instant it was just a bleeding heap of dead and injured.\u201d\u00a0 Even with a degree of restraint on the part of the gunners, the technology deployed by the US Army was such that carnage was inevitable.<\/p>\n
– Alex de Waal, \u201cU.S. War Crimes in Somalia,\u201d New Left Review<\/i>, No. 230, July\/August 1998, p. 143<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A December 8, 1993 New York Times<\/i> article reported that the U.S. government estimated \u201c6,000 to 10,000 Somali casualties in four months last summer\u201d alone, with \u201ctwo-thirds\u201d of these being women and children, compared to 26 U.S. soldiers killed.\u00a0 Also, a July 1993 report Somalia: Human Rights Abuses by the United Nations Forces<\/i> reported atrocities committed by U.S. and UN soldiers, including shooting into crowds of protesters, attacking a hospital and bombarding political meetings.<\/p>\n
To present date, no one knows what the joint martial forces did in New Orleans under martial law.\u00a0 There were reports of combat raids and explosions, but reporters were kept out and recording equipment was often confiscated and smashed by soldiers and mercs.\u00a0 No account has been given or even sought of the total death toll in the Gulf region, nor the causes<\/b> of these deaths (whether a result of drowning, illness, dehydration, or official violence). I suspect that autopsies would find many Black bodies riddled with shrapnel and .223 rounds.\u00a0 But, of course, no investigations or inquiries are being made. Yet, the FBI, in collaboration with various local police departments, is pursuing criminal proceedings of alleged BLA activities from over 30 years ago.<\/p>\n
Scahill\u2019s report closed with a warning quote from one of the mercs in New Orleans, stating, \u201cThis is a trend.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.\u201d<\/p>\n
This reality is even more ominous when we look at who<\/b> most of these mercs are; that is, where<\/b> they come from. The vast majority of these paramilitaries are past members of the U.S. military\u2019s special operations units, like army Rangers (Green Berets), Delta Force, Navy Seals, Force Recon, etc. These units are largely manned by a closed society of white supremacist and racist white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).<\/p>\n
Stan Goff, a retired career Special Operations soldier, spanning from the Vietnam era through the 1990\u2019s, describes the special brand of anti-Black racism that pervades this community of Amerika\u2019s most highly trained ground combat forces:<\/p>\n
In the world of Military Special Operations, I have seen Anti-Africanism function as the litmus test for assimilation of non-WASP soldiers. Asians, Europeans, Jews, American Indians, Polynesians, Latinos, all can be legitimized in the eyes of their peers by sharing in the Special Ops contempt for African Americans. This is my experience. Black people have a special place in Special Operations\u2014the bottom.<\/p>\n
– Stan Goff, Hideous Dreams: A Soldier\u2019s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti<\/i> (Soft Skull: Canada, 2000)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Goff pointed out how (and why) Blacks are systematically and quite deliberately weeded out of the elite Special Operations community, and increasingly reduced in the less combat capable conventional ground forces.\u00a0 Goff\u2019s observations bear quoting at length:<\/p>\n
When I was in Vietnam, I never saw two Black soldiers greet each other without givin\u2019 up dap. White officers were clearly uncomfortable with it, and some Black NCOs were pressured to put a stop to these elaborate improvisational handshakes.<\/p>\n
It never worked. Dap was as much a part of Black GI culture as Motown.<\/p>\n
And make no mistake.\u00a0 It was oppositional culture. White officers were right to feel uncomfortable with it. It was an open display of Black solidarity by Negroes with guns<\/i>. When African American GIs spoke with one another, they referred to one another as \u201cBlack\u201d with the same frequency guys call each other \u201cman\u201d (another vestige of Black oppositional culture, as opposed to \u201cblack ops\u201d).<\/p>\n
This new, super-elite, \u201cblack ops\u201d unit\u2019s \u201coperators\u201d will have hardly a Black face to be seen. In the U.S., \u201cblack ops\u201d is always done by white operators. No one is going to teach large numbers of African Americans these clandestine skills.<\/p>\n
Every time in the history of the United States that Black soldiers have fought in wars, there has been an outbreak of Black resistance afterward. Surely this is no surprise.<\/p>\n
I referred earlier to Odoacer, a mercenary in the service of Rome, leader of the Germanic soldiers in the Roman army, who deposed the western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, in 476 AD, and thereby terminated the Western Roman Empire.<\/p>\n
There is a limit to how much an oppressed people within a state will take. Rumsfeld and his ilk know this. You can bank on it.<\/p>\n
When the Bush regime made the claim that the US was attacked by people who hate freedom and democracy, the irony was not likely lost on African Americans or any other oppressed nationality.<\/p>\n
I stress African Americans here because Black people are the very embodiment of white ruling class fear, especially in the military.\u00a0 Three out of ten soldiers in the Army today are African American, as is one out of ten officers. Until you look at Special Operations.<\/p>\n
Negrophobia, and not generalized racism, is characteristic of special ops units, and the more rarefied the unit, the whiter it gets\u2014with a few honorary Aryans from Hispano-Latina and Pacific Islander ranks. There are special places for Black Soldiers in Special Operations: kitchens, supply rooms, personnel offices, and motor pools.<\/p>\n
This lack of \u201cminority\u201d participation as \u201coperators\u201d in Special Operations began to leak some years ago. In 1999, the Rand Corporation released a report that attempted to describe Barriers to Minority Participation in Special Operations Forces<\/i> (SOF), which attempts to put an empirical mask over SOF racial exclusion, even repeating many of the urban myths within SOF about why Black soldiers are so vastly under-represented there. \u201cThey can\u2019t swim,\u201d and so forth.<\/p>\n
Horse shit.<\/p>\n
When we put two and two together, we will likely end up with four.\u00a0 I saw Special Operations schools’ cadre use every available opportunity, particularly those\u00a0 numerous aspects of periodic evaluations that are subjective, to weed out Black soldiers. Not all of the cadre did it, but there were enough spread out over the process to ensure the \u201ccorrect\u201d result.<\/p>\n
Conventional ground forces were to be held back for any but the most banal military tasks: mop-up and guard duty. The new emphasis on using SOF for any decisive ground combat tasks is partly predicated on the Powell Doctrine fear of US casualties. Interestingly enough, in an article for the Spring 2003 Color Lines<\/i>, Glen Ford, a veteran of the Vietnam era 82nd<\/sup> Airborne Division, showed how conventional combat arms units are now being systematically loaded up with southern whites and Latinos, and lowering Black participation. No reason to take any chances.<\/p>\n
The secret fear is BPCSSD. Black post-combat social stress disorder. Not to be confused with PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n
Black troops who go to war, especially if they are required to fight become restive and uncooperative when they get home. They ask embarrassing questions, like, \u201cwhere\u2019s ours?\u201d BPCSSD.<\/p>\n
Let there be no doubt that the American white terror of Black rebellion still haunts the psyches of our pale ruling class. The U.S. Army has a disproportionate number of Black troops. Having too many of them crossing the psychological barrier against squeezing triggers on human targets can\u2019t strike the Man as a very good idea<\/p>\n
Vietnam taught the white U.S. ruling class a lot of lessons about the military conscript force of many oppressed nationalities and expose them to combat for colonial objectives, when their lives at home mirror the conditions against which their ostensible enemy is fighting.<\/p>\n
Open and violent rebellion in the form of armed confrontations and fraggings by Black soldiers were common in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
By 1973, as U.S. forces were well along in a phased withdrawal from Vietnam, the U.S. Armed Forces were dumping the draft.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t want citizen-soldiers any more. They wanted mercenaries. Do what you\u2019re told and collect your check.<\/p>\n
And now, with the immense expense of the new higher-tech War Department, whose cost will tear the frayed carpet from under the U.S. working class, with workers of oppressed nationalities hitting bottom first, they sure don\u2019t want a bunch of Negroes with guns coming home with role conflicts.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t need any BPCSSD. In Iraq today, against all Rumsfeld\u2019s calculations, there are thousands of Black folk doing Uncle Sam\u2019s wet work, even as Rumsfeld\u2019s military is attempting to minimize their numbers in combat arms. As they are obliged to occupy Iraq, many come from communities that are occupied by the police at home. BPCSSD will be returning from Iraq, soon, at a station near you.<\/p>\n
– Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century<\/i> (NY: Soft Skull, 2004)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Taken together, the foregoing should be unsettling in the extreme to any Black in Amerika with even a fraction of common sense. Let\u2019s summarize what we have to consider.<\/p>\n
\n
- New Afrikans in Amerika have suffered and continue to suffer brutal political, economic, social and cultural oppression at the hands of the Establishment.<\/span><\/li>\n
- The Establishment\u2019s political police operate as the most direct violent oppressors of New Afrikans.<\/span><\/li>\n
- Every genuine effort of New Afrikan leaders and common people to speak out against and challenge our oppressor, and to seek the most basic respect of our human rights and improvement of our political and economic conditions, has been met with official persecution, violence and murder. The Establishment then replaces out slain leaders with ones it deems \u2018acceptable.\u2019<\/span><\/li>\n
- While the Establishment has wantonly murdered New Afrikans and our genuine leaders, it criminalizes and vilifies our efforts to defend our people and selves against its murderous violence.<\/span><\/li>\n
- At the same time that the Establishment is stepping up its militaristic posture and preparedness against New Afrikan communities, it is <\/span>decreasing<\/i> the presence of Blacks in its military ground combat forces, <\/span>excluding<\/i> us from any operational training in the combat skills of its most elite ground combat forces, and <\/span>nourishing<\/i> the spread of anti-Black racist sentiment within its military combat rank and file.<\/span><\/li>\n
- The role of mercenaries who harbor anti-Black sentiments is expected to see increased involvement in \u2018control\u2019 of urban unrest\u2014the same sort of \u2018unrest\u2019 which is repeatedly provoked by police abuse and murder of Blacks.<\/span><\/li>\n
- The Establishment\u2019s police forces do not act in the interest of Black people, nor does it effect any positive changes in our communities in relation to \u201ccrime control\u201d or \u201cnarcotics control,\u201d nor social stability in general. The police operate instead as an occupying army in our communities and facilitate the spread of crime and dope to keep our communities divided and unstable and thus unable to unite and organize.<\/span><\/li>\n
- The Establishment can and will <\/span>manufacture<\/i> false justifications for declaring open war (namely martial law) against New Afrikan communities, and setting loose mercenaries and soldiers who nurture desires to engage Blacks in a genocidal race war.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
COINTELPRO is alive and well. The political police are as active as ever in repressing dissent and the liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities within Amerika. Puerto Rican independista leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios was assassinated on September 23, 2005 by FBI snipers, provoking outrage across Puerto Rico. Last year, FBI director, Robert Mueller, appeared before a senate subcommittee to announce the FBI\u2019s \u201cthreat assessment\u201d program; a modern COINTELPRO focusing on subverting the political education of U.S. prisoners, under the pretext of protecting Amerika from possible violent acts of radical prisoners returning to society. This is the very same FBI that targeted Martin Luther King, an avowed pacifist, with the claimed motive of preventing his potential violence. Our political leaders continue to be persecuted. Indeed one of the men charged on January 23, 2007 for alleged BLA actions against police, is our New Afrikan comrade and political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim (aka Anthony Bottom) who recently authored a book on New Afrikan liberation, We Are Our Own Liberators<\/i>.<\/p>\n
We must pay close heed to the words of comrade George Jackson, which are as vital to our survival today as when he first wrote them over 35 years ago:<\/p>\n
[I]t should never be easy for them to destroy us. If you start with Malcolm X and count all<\/i> of the brothers who have died or been captured since, you will find that not even one of them was really prepared<\/i> for a fight. No imagination or fighting style was evident in any one of the incidents. But each one that died professed to know the nature of our enemies. It should never be easy for them. Do you understand what I\u2019m saying? Edward V. Hanrahan, Illinois State Attorney General, sent fifteen pigs to raid the Panther headquarters and murder Hampton and Clark. Do you have any idea what would have happened to those fifteen pigs if they had run into as many Viet Cong as there were Panthers in that building. The VC are all little people with less general education than we have. The argument that they have been doing it longer has no validity at all, because they were doing it just as well when they started as they are now. It\u2019s very contradictory for a man to teach about the murder in corporate capitalism, to isolate and expose the murderers behind it, to instruct that these madmen are completely without stops, are licentious, totally depraved\u2014and then not to make adequate preparations to defend himself from the madman\u2019s attack. Either they don\u2019t really believe their own spiel or they harbor some sort of subconscious death wish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Any questions why we need our own independent Community Security Forces and a New Afrikan National Guard? BPCSSD.<\/p>\n
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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