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> From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Jun 4 21:06:48 1995
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> Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 23:40:07 -0400
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> Subject: WV#624 article on Mumia COINTELPRO files
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> From: NY Spartacist <address withheld by request>
> To: Hank Roth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: WV#624 article on Mumia COINTELPRO files
>
> The following article is from the May 5 issue of Workers
> Vanguard, the Marxist working-class biweekly of the Spartacist
> League. A one year subscription to Workers Vanguard is $10.00
> (includes English-language Spartacist, Women and Revolution, and
> Black History and the Class Struggle). Make checks payable/mail
> to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.
>
> Cops/Media Escalate Vendetta to Kill Mumia Abu-Jamal
> International Labor Support for Jamal Growing
> South African Unions Join Campaign to Save Jamal
> "From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal": A Jaundiced
> "Eye on America"
>
>
> Mumia Abu-Jamal:
> The COINTELPRO Files
>
> As death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal fights for
> his life in the Greene "supermax" isolation facility in
> Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)
> and its allies in government and the media are accelerating their
> bloodthirsty campaign to execute this powerful spokesman for the
> oppressed. Governor Tom Ridge has been signing death warrants at
> a feverish pace since his inauguration in January, and the cops
> and their mouthpieces clamor for Jamal to be placed at the top of
> the list. They want to drown out the many thousands of voices
> around the world who demand, "Mumia Abu-Jamal must not die!" To
> do so, they have orchestrated a cynical propaganda barrage in
> recent weeks aimed at painting this compassionate and articulate
> black man as a vicious "cop killer." Never mind that Jamal is
> innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced to die, the
> killing of a Philadelphia cop in December 1981. This lynch mob
> wants to see Jamal dead for what he stands for: the cause of
> black emancipation.
> The sentence of death was passed on Mumia Abu-Jamal long
> before he ever appeared in a courtroom. At the age of 14, he was
> brutally beaten by racist thugs, including cops--and then
> arrested--for daring to protest at a Philadelphia election
> campaign appearance by Dixiecrat segregationist George Wallace in
> 1968. That same year, fanatical FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover
> declared, "The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to
> understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they
> will be dead revolutionaries." From the moment the young Mumia
> Abu-Jamal (then named Wesley Cook) joined the Black Panther
> Party, the chief target of Hoover's notorious "Counter-
> Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO), he became, in the eyes of the
> FBI and Philly cops, a dead man on leave. As the Partisan Defense
> Committee wrote in a special Jamal campaign issue of Class-
> Struggle Defense Notes (No. 10, April 1989):
> "The death sentence for Mumia is the long arm of COINTELPRO
> terror reaching into the courtroom. This time they got him.
> Mumia has been sentenced to death because of his political
> beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said,
> because of who he `associated' with--and because of who he
> is."
> The racist state vendetta against Jamal has now been
> confirmed by 700 pages of FBI files he recently obtained after
> almost three years of fighting for them. Even with much of the
> text blacked out and many documents withheld outright, these
> files make it clear that the FBI and cops were on a mission to
> use any "dirty trick" in their arsenal of extralegal terror to
> silence the man who would become known as the "voice of the
> voiceless" for his journalistic exposure of racist cop terror and
> oppression. From the moment Jamal appeared on the Philadelphia
> political scene as a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther
> Party, the cops, FBI and who knows which other government
> agencies had him in their gunsights. These files prove, beyond
> the shadow of a doubt, wide-ranging collusion between the FBI and
> the Philadelphia Police Department--particularly its Civil
> Disobedience Unit (CDU) and Intelligence Division "red squads"--
> extending to at least four other security agencies, including the
> Naval Investigative Service Office, Military Intelligence, Office
> of Special Investigation and the Secret Service.
> Using its wiretaps, its informants and police spies, the
> government tracked the teenage Jamal's every move, relentlessly
> pursuing him at demonstrations, newspaper sales, political
> meetings and fund-raisers--even at picnics. They knew when he was
> to leave town and when he was to return, intercepting him as he
> boarded a flight and engaging in "physical observation" of
> returning flights. They interrogated school officials, contacted
> employers, harassed Jamal's mother. And the FBI records are only
> the tip of the iceberg. During the 1960s and '70s, the Philly
> cops kept their own voluminous files--none of which have been
> made available--on some 18,000 people. What story do they tell?
> Even these expurgated FBI files show that Jamal was targeted
> for far more than surveillance. His name was placed on two
> government hit lists: the FBI's Security Index (SI) of those
> deemed a "threat" to "national security" and the Administrative
> Index (ADEX) of those to be rounded up and thrown into
> concentration camps in case of a "national emergency." Many of
> the documents bear the file notation "Smith Act," the notorious
> "thought crime" legislation under which first Trotskyists and
> then Communist Party members were sent to prison for "advocating"
> revolution.
> The files prove that, years before he was framed in the
> death of a Philadelphia cop, the feds repeatedly tried to set
> Jamal up on serious felony charges--including murder--without any
> basis. This was S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) in the
> government's COINTELPRO war on black militants, as the FBI
> instructed its agents that since the "purpose...is to
> disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate
> the charge" (Brian Glick, War at Home [1989]). The lies range
> from the absurd--the photo appended to the files is not of Jamal-
> -to the outlandishly sinister. When the governor of Bermuda was
> assassinated in 1973, the feds tried to link the killing to
> Jamal, who had never been anywhere near Bermuda. They also
> falsely sought to paint him as an "urban guerrilla" associated
> with the Black Liberation Army, marking him to be assassinated by
> the cops the way BLA leader Zayd Shakur was.
> Jamal came of age politically as 38 of his Panther comrades
> were gunned down and hundreds of others jailed on frame-up
> charges in the FBI's deadly vendetta. He himself was clearly a
> major target in this murderous crusade. The files repeatedly
> noted that Mumia was an effective and articulate spokesman and
> writer for the Black Panther newspaper, who "made the BPP look
> good because his approach was very positive." Indeed, not one
> among the steady stream of reports to FBI headquarters on Jamal's
> Panther activities, which were compiled at the rate of virtually
> one a week, indicated that he was ever engaged in anything other
> than public speaking and writing. Yet despite the FBI's
> acknowledgement that Jamal "has not displayed a propensity for
> violence" and was not once found with a gun throughout this
> period of intense surveillance, the files regularly labeled him
> "Armed and Dangerous"--a license for the cops and G-men to shoot
> first and ask questions later.
> And they finally did shoot him, on the night of 9 December
> 1981. The subsequent trial, conviction and death sentence was a
> political frame-up pure and simple--like the Haymarket martyrs,
> Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs--the culmination of years of
> efforts to "neutralize" Jamal. To send Jamal to death row,
> prosecutor Joseph McGill told the nearly all-white jury that
> Jamal's Panther past showed that he had been planning to kill a
> cop "all the way back then." Even in their skeleton form, these
> documents reveal that since "all the way back then" the state has
> been out to get Jamal. In them you can see the threads leading to
> the 1982 frame-up which sent Jamal to death row.
> FBI's Racist Vendetta
> Of 293 COINTELPRO operations against black groups, 233 were
> against the Panthers. Vast resources, at every level of
> government, were expended in a ruthless effort to smash this
> group which adamantly proclaimed the right of armed self-defense
> against racist terror and attracted young militants with its
> revolutionary rhetoric against the racist capitalist system. Even
> with all their deletions and omissions, the files on Jamal offer
> a glimpse of the overwhelming arsenal of state repression which
> was deployed against the Panther Party and its members.
> The feds decided to open a dossier on the young Jamal when
> he participated in a 1 May 1969 demonstration at the Pennsylvania
> State Office Building demanding freedom for imprisoned BPP leader
> Huey Newton. From that day on a steady stream of "airtels,"
> "nitels," memoranda and letters between FBI headquarters and its
> field agents tracked Mumia's every political move. For example,
> in one typical four-week period in the summer of 1969, the FBI
> files include: a memorandum dated August 11 reporting that Jamal
> spoke at a Hiroshima Day rally in Philadelphia; a CDU report on
> the same rally, also dated August 11; two "Airtels" to the FBI
> director, dated August 14; an August 14 "FBI Notice"; an August
> 19 "Government Memorandum," again on the Hiroshima Day rally; and
> a September 4 FBI report on a Socialist Workers Party campaign
> rally where Mumia "spoke against the `pigs'" followed by a cover
> note dated September 5 specifically identifying "Wesley Cook, aka
> Wes Mumia."
> The files are replete with clippings of Black Panther
> articles written by Jamal and reports of his public speeches. It
> was Jamal's noticeable talent as a young revolutionary journalist
> and propagandist which attracted so much FBI attention. Such
> skills made him particularly dangerous in the eyes of the
> capitalist authorities. From the days of the slavocracy, the
> racist rulers have always feared literate and articulate black
> people as a challenge to their power. A 24 October 1969 FBI
> report on Jamal urged that he be placed under high-level
> surveillance because:
> "In spite of the subject's age (15 years), Philadelphia
> feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in
> the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia
> Branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and
> speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included
> on the Security Index."
> Already by then, the young Panther activist knew firsthand
> what it meant to be on the receiving end of the state's murderous
> "counterintelligence" operations. A 6 October 1969 "airtel"
> reported on "simultaneous hits" several weeks earlier by FBI and
> Philadelphia CDU and "Intelligence Squad" agents on the Philly
> Panther offices and the nearby Webb's Bar, which was frequented
> by BPP members. In an autobiographical memoir included in his new
> book, Live from Death Row, Jamal recalls how he found himself at
> the time facing "a .38 special close enough to touch," while a
> cop screamed: "If you fuckin' blink, I'll blow your black goddamn
> head off your shoulders!"
> Seven months later, Jamal was set up for another attempted
> "hit," as he boarded a flight for San Francisco in March 1970 to
> work at the Bay Area BPP headquarters. According to a 2 April
> 1970 report, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tony Lombardio "advised he
> would authorize the arrest of Cook for violation of the Crime
> Aboard Aircraft statute." More than one Panther activist was shot
> dead by the cops with the subsequent claim that they had been
> armed and "resisted arrest." But in this instance, the FBI was
> frustrated in its attempt to get Jamal, as the report concluded:
> "Cook was searched by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of
> Investigation prior to boarding Trans World Airlines, Flight 15;
> however, no weapon was located."
> By 1970 the BPP was being torn apart through a combination
> of government terror and internal factionalism between the Huey
> Newton wing and Eldridge Cleaver, who espoused a militant-
> sounding guerrillaist strategy from his exile in Algeria. Jamal
> left the Panthers shortly after the Revolutionary Peoples
> Constitutional Convention held at Philadelphia's Temple
> University in September 1970, but he remained in the government's
> cross hairs. That fall, Mumia was arrested along with seven other
> high-school students for demonstrating and distributing
> literature calling for "black revolutionary student power."
> Hearing that Jamal had started a publication called National
> Black Liberation News, FBI headquarters instructed its field
> agents to determine "if the paper is to be published in
> Philadelphia" and to submit "complete details concerning its
> staff, printing, distribution, financing and other pertinent
> details" ("Airtel," 19 November 1970).
> A 9 December 1971 memorandum from FBI headquarters reported
> the decision to include Mumia on the ADEX list: "Subject is being
> placed in Category II since he has now actively aligned himself
> with the Cleaver Faction of the Black Panther Party." Again it
> was Jamal's writing that particularly irked the feds, as they
> noted that he was Philadelphia correspondent for the pro-Cleaver
> newspaper Babylon and "that Cook in the past has made public
> speeches and has written ultramilitant articles on the BPP." The
> following year, the cops tried to put Jamal away on a weapons
> charge, as the CDU reported to the FBI that he "was arrested
> while in the possession of a six inch bladed Exacto knife." The
> charges were dropped. Jamal was working as an artist at the time,
> and had carried the Exacto knife with him from work to attend the
> trial of another black militant.
> Among the most spectacular revelations in Jamal's FBI files
> is a clumsy plot--foreshadowing the later frame-up in 1981--to
> stick him with the double murder of Bermuda governor Sir Richard
> Sharples and his aide. This was based solely on Jamal's presence
> in 1972 at Vermont's Goddard College--where he was taking courses
> in the Third World Studies Department--while it had supposedly
> been visited by "a leading black extremist in Bermuda." A 13
> March 1973 letter from the FBI Acting Director sought to link
> Jamal to the murders:
> "Because of Cook's black extremist background, his possible
> involvement in the urban guerrilla activities of the Black
> Liberation Army, and his attendance at Goddard College which
> attracts black extremists from Bermuda, the investigation to
> locate him should be intensified and efforts should be made
> to determine if he had been out of the country over the
> weekend of March 9-11, 1973."
> This report was a tissue of lies and innuendos from
> beginning to end. The feds well knew that Jamal was a journalist
> and public speaker, not an "urban guerrilla." He had no
> connection to the BLA. Yet were it not that his employer at Bell
> Telephone in Philadelphia confirmed that Jamal had been at work
> during that time, the state might have sent him up for murder
> long before the 1981 killing of Philly cop Daniel Faulkner.
> Paper Trail of a Frame-Up
> Mumia Abu-Jamal survived the rulers' onslaught against the
> Black Panther Party in the late '60s and early '70s. He was not
> assassinated in his sleep in the dead of night like Chicago
> Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He was not then railroaded
> into a prison hellhole like Los Angeles Panther leader Geronimo
> ji Jaga (Pratt), who has spent the last 25 years of his life
> buried alive for a crime that the government knows he did not
> commit--because they had wiretaps proving his innocence. But the
> feds and the Philly cops did not call off their vendetta against
> Jamal with the demise of the Panther Party. They continued to
> hate him for his eloquent and impassioned defense of black
> rights, and particularly because he remained defiant and unbowed
> in the face of state repression and racist oppression. The FBI
> files indicate time and again that they could entertain no hopes
> that Jamal would turn informant and desert the cause for which he
> fought. As one such report remarked: "Although he is only 16
> years old and has no informant potential, he possesses much
> intelligence and evidentiary information if he will talk."
> There was clearly extensive collusion between the FBI and
> Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia Police Department. One notable entry
> in the FBI files is a reference to Jamal's arrest at the age of
> 14 at the 1968 Wallace protest. The FBI report noted that "Cook
> was 14 years of age and, therefore, not criminally charged."
> Indeed, because Jamal was a minor at the time and the charges
> were dismissed, any record of his arrest was supposed to have
> been destroyed. Clearly Rizzo's thugs were keeping tabs on the
> young, articulate opponent of racist and cop terror even before
> he joined the Black Panthers and were sharing that information
> with the feds. Without doubt Jamal, identified in the FBI files
> as one of the top three leaders in the Philadelphia BPP, was a
> prime target of Frank Rizzo's racist thugs in blue. Document
> after document in the FBI files lists as its source unidentified
> cops from the CDU or Intelligence Division. According to S.A.
> Paolantonio, biographer of Philly police commissioner and, later,
> mayor Frank Rizzo, the Philadelphia CDU led by George Fencl:
> "had a steady stream of informers paid by the Federal Bureau
> of Investigation. In fact, when the FBI began its
> counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the agency used
> Fencl's CD squad as a model. Before Rizzo was sworn in as
> police commissioner, the Philadelphia Police Department was
> working closely with his hero, J. Edgar Hoover. Rizzo
> accelerated that relationship."
> And Rizzo and his cops had it in for Jamal. The FBI files
> are replete with references to Jamal's denunciations in speeches
> and articles of the notoriously racist Philly cops and Rizzo in
> particular. Jamal incurred their wrath yet again in 1978, when as
> a prominent black radio journalist he came to the defense of the
> MOVE organization after a mammoth police siege of their Powelton
> Village home, in which one of the cops ended up being killed by a
> bullet from another cop's gun. At a press conference, then-mayor
> Rizzo ominously looked at Jamal as he blamed the officer's death
> on the "new breed of journalism," warning:
> "They believe what you write, what you say. And it's got to
> stop. And one day, and I hope it's in my career, that you're
> going to have to be held responsible and accountable for
> what you do."
> Four years later, on 9 December 1981, Jamal was shot in the
> chest by the cops on a Philly street and left nearly bleeding to
> death. An officer found wounded nearby died an hour later. The
> police, having failed to get Jamal so many times before,
> concocted a frame-up and railroaded him onto death row. Jamal's
> FBI files are filled with references to the BPP's use of Mao
> Zedong's Little Red Book and especially of the quote "political
> power grows out of the barrel of a gun." This citation, uttered
> by Mumia in a 4 January 1970 interview in the Philadelphia
> Inquirer (which is conspicuously missing from the 700 pages of
> FBI files, despite the inclusion of numerous other newspaper
> clippings), was the prosecutor's key argument a dozen years later
> in demanding that Jamal be sentenced to die on the basis of his
> political beliefs.
> Another notorious travesty in Jamal's trial was the cross-
> examination of character witness Sonia Sanchez, a renowned poet.
> Pointing to an introduction Sanchez had written for a book about
> BLA activist Assata Shakur, who narrowly escaped an execution
> attempt by New Jersey state troopers only to be framed for the
> killing of one of her would-be assassins, the prosecution labeled
> Sanchez a "friend of cop killers"--suggesting that Jamal must be
> a "cop killer" as well. What led the prosecution to make a
> connection between Jamal and Shakur? A 26 September 1973 FBI
> report said that Jamal's name and phone number had been "located
> among names and telephone numbers found in notebook number 1
> which was obtained from BLA member (deleted) at the time of her
> (deleted) arrest by NJ State Police."
> These files tell only a small part of the story of the
> government's vendetta against Mumia Abu-Jamal. We do know that
> despite FBI protestations that COINTELPRO ended in the mid '70s,
> state harassment of leftist political activists has continued
> unabated, not to mention the deadly workings of the Philadelphia
> police. (In fact, the FBI continued to spy on Jamal even on death
> row: a 1991 entry absurdly sought to link a prison visit to Jamal
> by a German human rights activist with a "machine gun attack of
> American Embassy" in Bonn!) In the 1970s, when Jamal was active
> as a journalist, Rizzo's cops were gunning down unarmed
> "suspects" at a rate 37 times higher than even New York's cops.
> And the collusion between the FBI and the racist Philly cops did
> not stop with Jamal and the Panthers. When the Philadelphia
> police dropped a bomb on the MOVE home in 1985--killing eleven
> men, women and children and destroying an entire city block--it
> was the FBI which supplied the explosives.
> The fight to save Jamal and to abolish the racist death
> penalty is part of the struggle for black equality in America. It
> will take a workers revolution to put the capitalist state's
> machinery of death out of business once and for all and bring to
> justice the hired thugs who have committed untold crimes against
> the working class and minorities in the name of "law and order."
> Only then will the records of the government's secret police
> agencies be opened for all to see. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish
> the racist death penalty!
>
>
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