Solidarity with Assata! Continue the struggle!

On May 2, the Trenton NJ off ice of the FBI and the New Jersey State Police held a press conference to announce the continuation of war against Black Liberation and imprisoned or liberated political prisoners.

At the press conference, the FBI announced a one million dollar reward for the capture of Black Freedom Fighter, Assata Shakur. The New Jersey State Police already have a one million dollar reward for the capture of Shakur, whose slave name is JoAnn Chesimard. The FBI also placed Assata on the 10 Most Wanted Terrorist list. According to research reports, In May 1973 Shakur was involved in an incident on the New Jersey Turnpike, during which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and Black Liberation Army member Zayd Malik Shakur were killed and Assata was injured. Between 1973 and 1977, Shakur was indicted in relation to six other alleged criminal incidents—charged with murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping—resulting in three acquittals and three dismissals. In 1977, she was framed up for the death of Forrester. She was imprisoned in New Jersey, along with fellow freedom fighter, Sundiata Acoli, who also was involved in the New Jersey Turnpike incident in 1973.

With the help of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, Assata was liberated from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba in political asylum since 1984.

At the core of the Anarchist Black Cross movement is work to support and defend political prisoners from the legal lynching they receive at the hands of the USA judicial system. The imprisonment of Assata, Sundiata and all other political prisoners from the Black Liberation Movements, is result of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Civil rights organizations such as the Operation PUSH, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and other more militant Black groups were the victims of FBI infiltration of their organizations, spying against members of their organization, and organizing the murders of their members. One important FBI inspired murder was the killing of Black Panther Chairman, Fred Hampton, in Chicago. The FBI’s designation of Assata as a domestic terrorist is ironic, as US government documents prove that the FBI and other government have committed bloody war against the progressive and revolutionary movements. It is ironic that the FBI chose Aaron Ford, an African American who is the Special Agent for New Jersey, to make the May 2, 2013 announcement. Ford, an African American spoke with the echo of long deceased FBI leader, J. Edgar Hoover, who considered the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.

The danger in this situation is not from Assata. The danger is from the FBI and the national security state. When the FBI comes on national television and declares the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and all who fight for freedom and liberation from the centuries of oppression of the US government, when the FBI makes such announcements, their words of oppression must receive determined calls for Freedom Now! By Any Means Necessary!, as in the words of Malcolm X.

The Anarchist Black Cross movement distinguishes itself by its unswerving support for political prisoners from the Black freedom movement, from the Native People’s movement, the Environmental Justice movement, the movement against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the Chicano Mexicano movements. We organize letter writing campaigns to support our locked down sisters and brothers. We do not forget those who are imprisoned because of their work for a world free of national, gender, class and caste oppression.

Because of our stance as an organization who supports those who the FBI now has characterized as domestic terrorists, we must clarify this matter. Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoil, Zayd Shakur, and all who have fought and who will fight and stand for their freedom, these peoples are not terrorists. They are freedom fighters and must be recognized as such.

Denver ABC calls upon all supporters of human rights, justice, and social liberation to call for the removal of Assata Shakur from the Most Wanted Terrorist list. Denver ABC calls upon all freedom loving people of the world to demonstrate, to organize, and to fight back against this government-led offensive against the Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Movement and all who fight and struggle for freedom.

Is the FBI attempting to snitch-jacket Richard Aoki?

A refutation of a previous article we posted about Richard Aoki being an FBI informant
By Fred Ho

FRED HO REFUTES THE CLAIM THAT RICHARD AOKI WAS AN FBI INFORMANT August 21, 2012

I knew Richard Aoki from the period of the late 1990s to the end of his life in 2009. Prior to the publication of Diane Fujino’s book, SAMURAI AMONG PANTHERS (University of Minnesota Press), I probably was the main person who had published the most about Aoki (c.f., Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, AK Press).

In fact, Richard Aoki and I spoke on the telephone a day or two
before he killed himself. During the Spring of 2009 we were in regular contact via telephone (as he was in the Bay Area and I in New York City) as I had undergone another surgery in the cancer war I have been fighting since 2006, and he was facing major illness and deterioration, hospitalized during this time. Richard regularly contacted me as he was very concerned about my dying, and I was concerned for him as well.

We had a very special relationship that allows me to easily, comfortably and assertively rebut the claims made by the two proponents of the accusation that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant.

What was our special relationship? Richard was exasperated at how creative, revolutionary ideology had seriously waned, both from Panther veterans and from the younger generation stuck in the Non-Profit Industrial Complex mode of organization and their “activistism” (or what I humorously proffer as “activistitis”, the political tendency to be tremendously busy with activism but failing to have a revolutionary vision guide and dominate that activism). As Fujino remarks, Aoki viewed me as someone with creative revolutionary ideology and he sought me out and we shared many discussions and a special closeness. (Note: Aoki did not know the brilliant political prisoner, Russell Maroon Shoatz, someone who now at age 68, could go toe-to-toe ideologically with Richard Aoki!)

Why would an FBI agent do this, almost 50 years past the hoorah days of the Sixties? It is implied by the calumnious assertions by journalist Seth Rosenfeld (whose book is opportunistically coming out today: Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicalism, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) that Aoki was probably still an agent even to the time of his death, though, like the rest of the “evidence” or assertions by Rosenfeld, never substantiated or clearly documented.

That is because Aoki NEVER was an agent, and unlike many of the prominent Panthers (notably Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton), remained a revolutionary for life and never degenerated into self-obsession and egomania. To the end of his life, Aoki could go toe-to-toe with any revolutionary intellectual, theorist or organizer on the complexities and challenges of revolutionary theory, including the U.S. “national question,” socialism, etc.

Occupy This: Crazy Tom the FBI Provocateur

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

“Anyone who remembers the sixties wasn’t really there.”
George Carlin

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana

s weird as the 1960s became, Crazy Tom stood out. He set fires and started fights on the Stanford campus, supplied guns and explosives to fellow militants, and staged hold-ups “to support the Revolution.” He also created a secret mountain-top training camp and bomb factory to groom would-be urban guerrillas, from young, mostly white Maoists to the secret Black Panther army trying to free Soledad Brother George Jackson from San Quentin Penitentiary. Then, in February and March 1971, Crazy Tom Mosher put on a suit and tie, brushed down his wispy blond hair, and testified in secret before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. According to his sworn testimony, the revolutionary terrorist had worked all along for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its state counterpart, the California Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification (CII).

In his testimony, Mosher warned of a growing campaign of revolutionary sabotage, terror, and guerrilla war, which had already left a trail of violence and murder across Northern California. The Senate published his tale at taxpayers’ expense, while Reader’s Digest ran a first-hand account of his experiences, “Inside the Revolutionary Left.” As Mosher and the senators told it, he had been an informant, passively watching the illegal violence of the Left and reporting to the authorities to help them enforce the law. As those of us who knew him had seen for ourselves, he had created much of the terrorist violence he now condemned.

At the time, I was an anti-war activist at Stanford, increasingly burned-out, cynical, and without too many lingering liberal illusions. Yet I would never have suggested that the FBI or other police agencies had paid Crazy Tom to shoot guns on campus, set fires, or run a guerrilla training camp. More likely, I figured, he had created his own chaos, while selling his handlers whatever bullshit he could get them to buy.

Last CoIntelPro trial 40 years ago by the FBI against the Omaha two examined

Omaha Two story:  An explanation

The Omaha Two are Edward Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice).  Both men are imprisoned at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln where they are serving life sentences for the August 17, 1970 bombing murder of an Omaha police officer.

Both Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa deny any involvement in the death of patrolman Larry Minard, Sr.  Minard, a 29 year-old father of five young children, was killed instantly when he handled a booby-trapped suitcase in a vacant house.

Minard had been lured with seven other officers to the vacant house on Ohio Street in Omaha by a false 911 emergency call reporting a woman screaming at the residence.  Police immediately suspected the local Black Panther chapter, called the National Committee to Combat Fascism, of the crime and focused their attention on the Panthers.

Full story

February 17: COINTELPRO 101 Screening at Naropa University, Boulder, CO

COINTELPRO 101 Film Screening
Thursday, February  17th 8-10pm
Naropa University Main Campus
Goldfarb Student Center (2130 Arapahoe Ave.)
Boulder, Colorado

by Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info

Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center

The Freedom Archives
& the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
Students for Peace & Justice
Popcorner Film Series 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.”Martin Luther King Jr.

During the Civil Rights era of the 50s, 60s and 70s, the F.B.I, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, waged a covert war against minority peoples and progressive movements referred to as, COINTELPRO.

Richard Brown: The SF8 and FBI Repression

Video by Angola 3 News

In this video, Richard Brown, of the San Francisco Eight, speaks at a protest outside the US Federal Court Building in San Francisco on January 25, 2011. Brown urges the public to support the 23 anti-war activists that were subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury that day. All activists refused to testify and can now be criminally charged for not testifying. Learn more, please visit: http://www.stopfbi.net

Richard Brown contextualizes the recent subpoenas with how the SF8 were similarly called before a Grand Jury, and were imprisoned because they refused to testify. Cisco Torres, the last of the SF8 still facing charges, has a court hearing in San Francisco on March 2 that supporters are being urged to attend. Learn more at: http://www.freethesf8.org

–Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is http://www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

CoIntelPro never went away: FBI File Reveals Discussion of Discrediting Animal Rights Activists by Planting Rumors

From Green is the new Red:
The FBI and a previously-unknown informant in the animal rights movement discussed, among other topics, how to disrupt political activism, according to FBI documents. The topics discussed echo COINTELPRO-era tactics of the 1960s, including the possibility of discrediting activists through planting rumors.

The FBI file is dated May 12, 2005, by the FBI’s Johnson City Resident Agency, which is part of the Knoxville  field office. It is based on conversations between an FBI agent and “Source,” who is only identified as someone who was involved in “direct actions” and is willing to share information with the government in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

The result is an FBI agent’s notes that offer a rare glimpse of how the government is targeting its “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

Prison Interview with Ed Poindexter

From The Examiner:

Ed Poindexter is serving a life sentence at the Nebraska State Penitentiary for the 1970 murder of an Omaha policeman.  Poindexter’s co-defendant, Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) has also been imprisoned 40 years.  Both men were leaders of the Black Panthers in Omaha and targets of the clandestine Operation COINTELPRO and deny any involvement in the killing.

Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover conducted a massive, illegal and secret war on domestic political activists codenamed COINTELPRO that targeted thousands of groups and individuals around the nation for years.  Hoover went after the Black Panthers with lethal ferocity.

Hoover had been pressuring the Omaha FBI office to get the Panther leadership off the streets for nearly a year before the August 1970 bombing death of Larry Minard.  Poindexter had been targeted for harassment and had been the victim of a slanderous anonymous phone call campaign by FBI agents, the target of anonymous letters, and constant surveillance before the death of Minard gave Hoover his chance to pin the crime on the two Panthers.

Hoover ordered the withholding of evidence, a FBI crime lab report on the identity of the 911 caller that lured Minard to his death, and the jury that convicted Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa never got to hear the voice of the killer nor did they know anything about the COINTELRO crimes committed by the FBI agents.

Ed Poindexter tells what it was like as a COINTELPRO target.

“Part of the COINTELPRO project was to harass party members around the clock, seven days a week.  Never let up, try to break us or cause us to snap or drop out under the pressure, or start shooting at them to give them a reason to shoot at us.  But they didn’t need a reason because there were forty-some members killed nationwide.”

“At no time not a single day went by that the police didn’t threaten to kill us.  I can remember always keeping in the back of my mind be careful about what you eat, what you drink, who prepares it.  Fred Hampton was drugged.  Where I spent the nights to lay my head and sleep, I would be careful not to be at the same place every night, to be so predictable that they could pull that same stunt on me.”

“What I did was establish myself about a half-dozen crash pads and every night I would sleep at a different place and every week I would alter them around so they couldn’t establish a pattern.”

“One of the hottest and muggy Augusts I can recall was in 1969.  I’d left headquarters on 24th Street but decided to vary my usual route to my mother’s house.  Since it was unusually quiet that evening in terms of police harassment, I decided to walk north on 24th Street instead of cutting through alley ways as usual.  As I got two blocks away from headquarters a cop car cruised by and looked at me with surprise.  I instantly knew there was going to be some stuff, pity the soul caught alone on a side street with no witnesses.  What was going to happen was they would shoot me or beat me senseless.”

“About half way up the street I looked back to see the patrol car screech around the corner in pursuit of me.  I ducked between two houses and cut through an alley.  This left me about a half-block from home.  Out of immediate sight, I heard the patrol car halt, the door open and slam shut, and the familiar but frightening sound of a riot pump shotgun lock and load.”

“I waited for the cops to pass.  Moments later the patrol car cruised slowly past the house with its search light passing over the hedges and house.  That was the longest ten seconds of my entire life.”

Permission granted to reprint

Write:  Ed Poindexter, #27-767, P.O. Box 2500, Lincoln, NE  68542

Washington, DC: Film about FBI repression and political prisoners projected on FBI headquarters

Iowa: 2008 FBI Documents made public

David Goodner, a former member of the University of Iowa’s Antiwar Committee, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for files associated with an FBI surveillance of groups in Iowa City prior to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. What he discovered was the investigation was far more extensive than previously known.

Now, Goodner has turned over the files he received from the FBI exclusively to The Iowa Independent for publication.

As the documents show, the investigation into activities of peace groups in Iowa City involved staking out homes, secretly photographing and video taping members, digging through garbage and even planting a mole to spy on the peace activists up close. Known as the Wild Rose Rebellion, the protesters were described by the FBI as an “anarchist collective.” In an interview with The Des Moines Register, the FBI defended its actions.

Full story and documents are available here.