Who Are The Real Criminals?

Last year, 2007, began with the arrest of six Black elders, Panthers and community activists from the 1960s, on 36-year-old charges and the extradition from New York of two more Panthers already imprisoned for 34 and 36 years, respectively. I’m referring of course to the brothers known as the San Francisco 8.

As many of you know, this case is based on tortured confessions supervised by two San Francisco detectives Erdelatz and McCoy, never prosecuted for the criminal interrogations of John Bowman, Ruben Scott, and Harold Taylor in a New Orleans jail in 1973. (See http://www.freethesf8.org.)

The real criminals involved in all aspects of this case are FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover, all the enforcers of his illegal counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), as well as the agents provocateurs who infiltrated the Black Panther Party and provoked and instigated crimes. There were 67, not counting 700 informants nationwide.

Nine months later, in Jena, Louisiana, six young Black students were arrested and charged with crimes that should never have been brought in the first place. In fact, the real culprits, white students who hung nooses and attacked the Black youths have done so with impunity.

As our unjustly imprisoned brother, Mumia, noted in a recent commentary from Pennsylvania’s death row, “In a nation where whiteness is prized and Blackness is demonized, why are we surprised that conflict is the enduring story, while commonality is virtually ignored? Knowledge is power: but the converse is also true...'ignorance is powerlessness.’”

Mumia also alerted us to a new book by John Kelly Titled, "Crimes and Silence: The CIA's Criminal Acts and the Media's Silence.” This secretive agency commits thousands of crimes a year all over the world. Its Clandestine Service is the only part of the Intelligence Community where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world.

When a staff study proved such illegal actions occurred “several hundred thousand times a year,” the Senate Intelligence Committee’s response was a mass immunization bill that Kelly described a “the Nazi rationale, plain and simple.” Signed into law by Bill Clinton, the Intelligence Authorization Act allows the CIA to violate laws and treaties as long as they were following orders.

According to journalists, researchers and former CIA officials themselves, the agency has toppled governments, staged assassinations, supported terrorists who unleashed waves of violence, including bombings, against civilians, undermined national economies and democracies, and a host of other crimes - because they were told to do so.

This is only the tip if the iceberg when it comes to high-level criminality. The war in Iraq is illegal. The kidnapping of a duly elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, from Haiti was illegal. The invasion and occupation of other nations for the purpose of stealing their resources is illegal. Torture and human rights violations are illegal.

In short, the biggest criminals, purveyors of war and mass murders, are in Washington conspiring with their corporate crime partners like Halliburton and Blackwater to dominate the world largely by controlling its vital resources, such as oil. Blackwater mercenaries just got away with killing 17 Iraqi innocents in broad daylight.

To hear them tell it, the Bush regime (selected rather than elected in the first place) is bringing democracy to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. What a joke. We don’t even have one person, one vote here!

Moreover, when a democratically elected leader or candidate in countries occupied, colonized, or subjected to American hegemony doesn’t meet White House approval, he or she is attacked or removed. Haiti’s President Aristide is a perfect example: Elected twice with huge majorities in free and fair elections, he was twice removed by U.S. led forces.

Ismael Haniya, the Palestinian leader of Hamas was democratically elected in 2006 and subsequently, he and his people were attacked, sanctioned, isolated and virtually imprisoned by the U.S. and Israel.

Burma’s military junta cracked down brutally on peaceful protests led by the nation’s revered monks, jailing, shooting and arresting massive numbers of its citizens. Chevron and the U.S. corporate/government elite didn’t skip a beat in its business as usual.

The most ludicrous and absurd scenario is taking place in Pakistan. Here, the U.S. backs a military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. who seized power in a coup d’etat, has ruled Pakistan with an iron fist, and was provided $10 billion within this decade (your tax dollars at work). Washington withheld not one penny when the General declared martial law (so-called state of emergency), sacked Pakistan’s supreme court, jailed or placed under house arrest most of the country’s lawyers and judges, as well as political opposition. When the people protested these gross violations of civil rights, they were brutally beaten, murdered, tortured and incarcerated.

What is Musharraf’s main benefactor’s response? Bush tells him he has to remove his uniform. The General complies, puts on a suit, and calls himself President.

The leading opponent and potential candidate for the presidency, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated reportedly by two shots fired at close range. The Pakistan government already tried to cover that up by contradicting the doctors’ and witness reports, saying she hit her head. So now that the opposition has been neutralized and Pakistan is in chaos, so-called free and fair elections are being scheduled for early 2008 – with the full blessings of Bush and virtually all of the presidential candidates. Unbelievable!

Bush and his goose-stepping Congress can spit and tell the American people it’s raining, and too many will grab an umbrella.

Once again, we’re stuck with another year of political campaigning, candidates from the two parties trying to win your vote for the House, Senate, or President. To date, according to http://www.opensecrets.org, they have already spent at least $776,302,844. That’s close to a billion dollars! These figures were tallied before the Iowa primary with another 11 months to go.

“The total price of the 2004 presidential and congressional elections was $4 billion (and perhaps a lot more), up from nearly $3 billion in 2000, $2.2 billion in 1996 and $1.8 billion in 1992”

The recent media consolidation will certainly impact the races’ results.

Funds for the 2008 elections are projected to double. Eight billion dollars is a lotta spaghetti – not to mention housing, education and health care. How many more years will we watch campaign-financing soar into the stratosphere while our people are dying of hunger and hypothermia?

Democracy is defined as “A country with a government that has been elected freely and equally by all its citizens.”

Jerry Fresia points out in his book, Toward an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions, "Never has a U.S. president been elected by a majority of the nation's adult citizens.”

Moreover, do we ever really have a choice? As George Jackson pointed out, “An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.”

In 2006, the American people voted overwhelmingly against the Iraq war, reinstating a Democratic congressional majority. We are still at war,” with even more money and troops sent to Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan. In fact, at least $611 billion has already been allocated, while nearly 4,000 U. S. troops have been killed, 60,000 wounded, 700,000 Iraqis killed and four million refugees.

We continue to back up Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation and siege of Gaza and the West Bank and ongoing building of illegal settlements -- at $10 million a day! Yet you won’t hear one candidate denounce Israel or stand up for the Palestinian people

We continue to incarcerate more people per capita than any other nation in the world for longer sentences than practically anywhere else, but you won’t hear one candidate advocate the release of prisoners or acknowledge political prisoners.

Even with a home mortgage crisis adding to the critical need for affordable housing, you won’t hear them address homelessness or commit to solving the problem.

This latest crisis saw losses totaling $100 billion, untold job losses, and devastating foreclosures effectively killing the dream of working-class home ownership in America. The economic fallout from this scandalous, unscrupulous sub-prime lending will continue to ripple throughout the globe. As The Guardian pointed out, “A succession of Wall Street banks have turned to sovereign funds in China, Singapore and the Middle East for injections of cash. The unraveling of events has been a stunning example of how interdependent the world economy has become.” In fact, had there not been those massive infusions of cash from other countries, the U.S. economy would probably be in a depression.

A growing legacy of greed has produced multi-billionaires along side massive homelessness, huge trade and budget deficits, environmental disaster, a sick, for-profit health care system that denies medical care to nearly 50 million people and under serves still more, unemployment and nonliving wages, grossly overcrowded prisons, and global misery.

A statement issued from the national office of the BPP in February,1970, read as follows:

“The Black Panther Party stands for revolutionary solidarity with all people fighting against the forces of imperialism, capitalism, racism, and fascism. Our solidarity is extended to those people who are fighting these evils at home and abroad. Because we understand that our struggle for our liberation is part of a worldwide struggle being waged by the poor and oppressed against imperialism and the world’s chief imperialist, the United States of America, we -- the Black Panther Party -- understand that the most effective way that we can aid our [Iraqi] brothers and sisters is to destroy imperialism from the inside, attack it where it breeds... for the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America as well.”

We need a new, nonexclusive political party that takes the same stand, recognizing the need for international unity in this global reality.

Think globally, act locally.

Free the San Francisco 8, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Hugo Pinell, Ruchell Magee, Leonard Peltier, Sundiata Acoli, Marilyn Buck, Chip Fitzgerald, the Angola 3, and countless more political prisoners here and around the world. Free ‘em all.