As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities—done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. 97 percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.

In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’ efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.

In her book, Hristov does make a convincing argument that Colombia’s notorious death squads are inherently linked to maintenance of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Particularly since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s that have increased poverty, Colombia’s poor continue to resist their oppression in many different ways. In response, state repression on a variety of levels is needed to terrorize unarmed social movements and other community groups and activists.

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. Hristov’s new book is a powerful tool for exposing who truly calls the shots.

Neoliberalism or Neopoverty?

Hristov asserts that “it is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled.” The scandalous epidemic of poverty in Colombia is key to understanding Colombian politics, and why the upper classes so fear political organizing among the poor, who could mount a formidable opposition to the status quo if allowed to organize unrestrained by state repression.

When neoliberal policies were adopted by the Colombian government in the 1990s, it dramatically increased poverty, and made an already terrible situation worse. Hristov writes that the “essential components of neoliberalism are trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Trade liberalization entails the removal of any trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. Privatization requires the sale of public enterprises and assets to private owners. Through the removal of government restrictions and interventions on capital, deregulation allows market forces to act as a self-regulating mechanism… Austerity requires the drastic reduction or elimination of expenditures for social programs and services.”

She argues that the “main cause that led to the official adoption of neoliberal policies by the developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere was the pressure to service their external debts in the late 1970s. In order to receive loans from the World Bank (WB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nations had to agree to a program of structural adjustment that included drastically reducing public spending in health, education, and welfare,” and much more.

Because Colombia had less debt than other Latin American countries, “major neoliberal restructuring did not begin until 1990, under President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-94), when the country began to receive massive amounts of US military aid…In addition to the significant social damage wrought by these policies, by the mid-1990s Colombia had to almost double its borrowing from the IMF because of the economic crisis brought on by the market liberalization,” writes Hristov.

These drastic reforms have intensified since current President Alvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. After the IMF loaned $2.1 billion in 2003 on the condition that the reforms be accelerated, Uribe “privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution. Uribe also closed down some of the country’s biggest public hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs, and denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors,” reports Hristov.

These are a few of the statistics compiled by Hristov, who writes that “in a country of 45 million, around 11 million people are unable to afford even one nutritious meal a day. According to statistics from 2005, 65 percent of Colombians are unable to regularly satisfy basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, the poverty rate is as high as 85 percent… In 2000 it was estimated that half a million children suffer from malnutrition and close to 2.5 million children between the ages of six and seventeen are forced to work… Furthermore, there has been a notable decline in school attendance, literacy, and life expectancy as well as access to child care and education over the past couple of years.”

Blood, Capital, and the State Coercive Apparatus

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov details many horrifying ways in which the rich are empowered by violence from what she identifies as the “state’s coercive apparatus” (SCA). She argues that “two intertwining motifs run throughout Colombia’s history: (1) social relations marked by inequality, exploitation, and exclusion and (2) violence employed by those with economic and political power over the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labor, and suppress or eliminate dissent.”

Dating back to the European conquest of the Americas, Hristov asserts that violence has been central to the creation of modern-day Colombia’s government and economy. She writes that “starting in the late 1500s, the conquerors began clearing the indigenous population from territories with desirable characteristics—mineral deposits, fertile soil, access to water, transportation routes, and so on. The separation of the indigenous from their means of subsistence allowed the formation of a local colonial elite who transformed what used to be the native inhabitants communal lands into large estates or haciendas. The creation of landless peasants facilitated the supply of labor for the Spaniards’ ventures, such as mining and agriculture.”

State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, “during the Kennedy administration,” the US “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” This “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine… not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game… the right to combat the internal enemy… this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.”

As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.

In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the “internal enemy.” Hristov writes that “the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.”

Hristov asserts that while the US handled the “financial and ideological aspects” of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. “It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.”

With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the “internal enemy,” the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.

The Paramilitarization of Colombia

The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries’ evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of “perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes… The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.”

The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Captain Gilberto Cardenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Uraba region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the Seventeenth Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cardenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities, “The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces…members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.”

The paramilitary system first began in the mid-1960s when the Colombian government passed legislation that authorized citizens to carry arms and assist the military in repression. Hristov argues that “paramilitary forces entered the scene to perform two main functions.” The first was to participate in combat at a local level, as described by the 1966 US Army Counterinsurgency Forces field manual, which stated: “paramilitary units can support the national army in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations when the latter are being conducted in their own province or political subdivision.” Second, Hristov writes that paramilitaries “were intended to monitor and gather intelligence on the rebels, their civilian supporters, and social organizations by establishing networks throughout the country.”

While these early paramilitaries did play some role in state repression, it would not be until the 1980s that they really began to increase in size and influence. Hristov writes that “the 1980s were the golden age of paramilitary development, as many new groups formed, expanded, and rapidly acquired financial and military strength… This second wave of creation enacted by large-scale landowners, cattle ranchers, mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business) and narco-lords took place in a particular context, characterized by five main features: a shift in the state’s (unofficial) policy toward the partial privatization of coercion; the state’s fusion with the elite; a legal framework that had set the ground for the design, training, equipping, and administration by the state military of armed bodies outside its institution; a prevailing anticommunist ideology; and militarized patches of the country that served as models to emulate.”

This second wave was given another boost in 1994 with the creation of the Community Rural Surveillance Associations (CONVIVIR) by current President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who was the governor of the department of Antioquia at that time. Hristov writes that Uribe made CONVIVIR into “a replica of the original paramilitary bodies designed in the 1960s. As it had thirty years ago, now the civilian counterpart of the SCA was to take on a central role in the Dirty War under a legal mantle. By the time CONVIVIR was outlawed, in 1999, most of the numerous paramilitary self defense bodies had united, attaining an organizational and military capacity unsurpassed by paramilitary forces in any other Latin American country.”

In August, 1998, just before the legislation supporting CONVIVIR was abolished, hundreds of members publicly announced that they would be joining the AUC paramilitary network, which became the most prominent paramilitary network in Colombia. The AUC had been created in 1997, mostly under the leadership of Carlos Castano and his paramilitary group, the ACCU, which became the largest group in the AUC federation. Others that operated in this loose confederation of paramilitary groups included Bloque Cacique Nutibara, the Bloque Central Bolivar, and the Bloque de Magdalena Medio.

Following official “peace negotiations” between the AUC and the Colombian government which began in 2002 with an official AUC ceasefire agreement, the AUC officially disbanded in February 2006, as part of an overall public disarmament of many paramilitaries throughout Colombia. However Hristov argues that “there are many factors challenging the legitimacy of the peace process. First, during the entire period of the cease-fire announced by the AUC, its groups regularly engaged in military actions against civilians, thereby committing human rights violations (and such activities continue to take place). Second, often those who claimed to be demobilizing were not the real paramilitary combatants but hired criminals, or drug dealers who had bought the AUC franchise. Third, large quantities of arms that should have been turned over were not. Fourth, fighters who are officially considered demobilized are in reality already active militarily in new organizations, where their skills of terrorizing the civilian population for economic gains are necessary and valued.”

Since 2006, there have been several government initiatives that give the formal appearance of the Colombian government working to combat paramilitaries. Hristov explains that “early in 2007 the Supreme Court began investigating numerous connections between paramilitaries and important state actors, such as senators, representatives, deputies, councilors, and mayors. As time went by, the public learned of more and more cases in which the legal (state officials with their political authority and legitimacy) and the illegal (paramilitary groups with their economic and military power) had entered into alliances to advance their mutual interests. Through mid-2008, 38 percent of members of Congress have been implicated in this parapolitica scandal.”

While Hristov recognizes some importance in these recent investigations, she feels that their real impact has been extremely limited. She argues that “despite all the cases that have been exposed, parapolitica is not likely to be eradicated from the Colombian political system. On the contrary, the flood of revelations about politicians’ connections to the paramilitary actually allows serious crimes, such as complicity in massacres, to get buried under waves of minor offenses, and eventually the entire issue becomes just another corruption scandal.”

In their 2009 report on Colombia, Human Rights Watch concluded that there are many “threats to accountability for paramilitaries’ accomplices,” reporting that “the Uribe administration has repeatedly taken actions that could sabotage the investigations. Administration officials have issued public personal attacks on the Supreme Court and its members, in some cases making accusations that have turned out to be baseless, in what increasingly looks like a campaign to discredit the court. In mid-2008 the administration proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have removed what are known as the ‘parapolitics’ investigations from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but it withdrew the proposal in November. The administration also blocked what is known as the ‘empty chair’ bill, which would have reformed the Congress to sanction parties that had backed politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

Hristov concludes that the centrality of paramilitaries to Colombian politics will not be disappearing anytime soon, mostly because repression has been necessary to enforce the country’s stark social/political/economic injustice. Hristov argues that the paramilitaries have become an essential tool of repression, and because Colombia’s poor majority will continue to resist this outrageous poverty, the paramilitaries’ repression will continue. Seen in this context, the recent demobilization process is only a tactical restructuring of paramilitaries and the SCA, similar to their restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s. Hristov sees this restructuring as an “adaptation response” to “assure its future survival” in the face of “the reality of resistance and opposition by numerous sectors of society against further dispossession,” with the state’s ultimate goal being “the institutionalization of paramilitarism and the legalization of capital accumulation through violence.”

War on Narco-terrorists?

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1989, US rhetorical justification for allying itself with and providing military aid to the Colombian government has shifted from fighting “communism” to fighting “narco-terrorism.” Hristov argues that official rhetoric may have changed but it’s still easy to expose this fraudulent war on narco-terrorism as actually being a war against poor people. Concerning the so-called war on terrorism, how can the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator fight terrorism? Then, similar to the absurd notion of a terrorist fighting terrorism, how can a government heavily complicit in the drug trade claim that it is fighting a war on drugs?

The Colombian government’s multi-faceted complicity in drug trafficking extends all the way to current President Uribe, who was listed by the Pentagon itself, as one of the most wanted international drug traffickers. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991, explicitly accused Uribe of being a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of Pablo Escobar. This report states further that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as ‘HIT MEN’ to assassinate individuals targeted by the ‘extraditables,’ or individual ‘narcotic leaders,’ and to perform terrorist acts against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

It’s not just the Colombian government! Hristov argues that the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) “has in reality been converted largely to an instrument of drug traffickers and paramilitaries.” To support this assertion, she cites a 2004 memorandum issued by a lawyer at the US Department of Justice named Thomas M. Kent, which accused the DEA of extreme misconduct. Kent states that strong evidence of misconduct is routinely ignored by the control agencies of the Department of Justice. Hristov summarizes key points made in Kent’s memorandum, including “to supplement their $7,000 monthly salary, some DEA agents have managed to negotiate with Colombian drug dealers… DEA personnel have been implicated in the killing of informants… Members of the AUC [paramilitaries] have been assisted by DEA agents in money laundering… DEA agents have participated in the extortion of drug traffickers awaiting extradition.”

On another note, Hristov makes the important point that drug trafficking and the rise of paramilitaries have both fed each other in two key ways. “First, the groups involved in trafficking needed to protect their laboratories, illegal cultivation, and clandestine airstrips in rural areas stimulated the emergence of local armed groups outside the state. Second, many drug dealers had begun to invest their capital in millions of hectares of the best agricultural land in the country… and they needed armed forces to protect their lands.” Hristov adds further that “the preexisting concentration of land ownership in the hands of the elite and the displacement of impoverished peasants was aggravated dramatically by this trend.”

To further expose this fraudulent “war on drugs,” it should be noted that the US government has a long history of complicity in drug trafficking, particularly in Latin America. While author William Blum has written the definitive short article on the topic, Alfred McCoy has written the most comprehensive book, titled The Politics of Heroin, documenting the CIA’s relationships with drug traffickers around the world, including in France, Italy, China, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, and throughout Latin America. In 1989, a Senatorial Committee chaired by Senator John Kerry documented that during the 1980s, while working with the anti-Sandinista “Contras,” the CIA and other branches of the US government were complicit in trafficking cocaine into the US from Latin America. The Kerry Committee concluded a three year investigation by stating in their report that “there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region… US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua… In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”

The Kerry Committee’s report and the story behind it has been analyzed well by authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book Cocaine Politics. In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News (later expanded and made into a book in 1999) which directly tied Contra cocaine traffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses (both protected by the US government) to Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, who played a key role in starting the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking Webb’s story that eventually caused even the Mercury News to denounce Webb. However, several prominent journalists came to Webb’s defense and challenged the mainstream media’s smear campaign, including Norman Solomon, Robert Parry, and Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unmasking The Unholy Alliance

The relationship between the US and Colombian elite is truly an unholy alliance. With US President Barack Obama praising the Colombian government and attempting to build several new military bases in Colombia, it is more important than ever to expose the truth about who supports death squads and why. Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov’s meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia.

Many components of NAFTA favored US corporate interests at the expense of Mexico’s general population, but the Zapatistas were particularly opposed to NAFTA’s rewriting of the Mexican Constitution, in order to eliminate the population’s biggest victory won during the Mexican Revolution fought years before, at the time of World War One. “The Mexican Revolution wrote into the national constitution the opportunity for a village to hold its land communally, in an ejido, so that no individual could alienate any portion of it,” writes Staughton Lynd,¹ co-author of the new book Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. Both Lynd (a Marxist from the US) and his co-author Andrej Grubacic² (an anarchist from the Balkans) are public supporters of the Zapatistas, who they argue have set a powerful example of revolutionary organizing that should influence anti-capitalists around the world. Much like the historical traditions of the Haymarket Martyrs and the ‘Wobblies’ (the Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States, Lynd and Grubacic argue that the Zapatistas have synthesized the best aspects of both the Marxist and anarchist traditions.

Based upon his research and his personal travels to the Zapatista communities in Chiapas where he met with historian Teresa Ortiz, Staughton Lynd identifies three key “sources of Zapatismo.” First, is the issue of land. Before NAFTA, the communal lands called ejidos made up more than half of Mexico’s land. The day of the 1994 uprising, the Zapatistas occupied formerly communal lands that had been appropriated. Directly citing the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas named themselves after Emiliano Zapata, an anarchist revolutionary who was a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, and whose popular slogan “Land and Liberty” is still heard today.

Second, Lynd identifies a form of Liberation Theology that is influenced by both Christian and Native American spirituality, with Bishop Samuel Ruiz being a key figure.

“The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to Teresa Ortiz was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo, ‘to lead by obeying’…When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional gatherings, they will be instructed delegates. If new questions arise, the delegates will be obliged to return to their constituents. Thus, in the midst of the negotiations mediated by Bishop Ruiz in early 1994, the Zapatista delegates said they would have to interrupt the talks to consult the villages to which they were accountable, a process that took several weeks. The heart of the political process remains the gathered residents of each village, the asemblea,” writes Lynd.

This anti-authoritarian tradition of mandar obediciendo was central to the Zapatista’s decision not to see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Lynd explains that “beginning in early 1994, Marcos said explicitly, over and over again: We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard and we don’t want to take power.” To support his argument, Lynd cites a variety of statements from Marcos, including his August 1994 statement at the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon Jungle. Here, Marcos proclaimed that the Zapatistas had decided “not to impose our point of view,” and that they had rejected “the doubtful honor of being the historical vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us…Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.”

Lynd, coming from the Marxist perspective, harshly criticizes the influence of vanguard politics on Marxist revolutionary movements, whereby these movements have adopted authoritarian and anti-democratic practices, with these abuses of power being justified by the argument that their particular group is the vanguard of the revolution, and is therefore entitled to lead the revolution as it sees fit. Lynd sees the Zapatista’s rejection of vanguard politics as representing a “fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions.” The Zapatistas, Lynd writes, “have given us a new hypothesis. It combines Marxist analysis of the dynamics of capitalism with a traditional spirituality, whether Native American or Christian, or a combination of the two. It rejects the goal of taking state power and sets forth the objective of building a horizontal network of centers of self-activity. Above all the Zapatistas have encouraged young people all over the earth to affirm: We must have a qualitatively different society! Another world is possible! Let us begin to create it, here and now!”

Wobblies and Zapatistas is highly recommended to both the seasoned fan of books about radical history and theory, and the reader who is just now becoming interested in radical politics. While rooted in the inspirational examples of both the Wobblies and the Zapatistas, this book uses refreshing language and an informal conversational format of Grubacic interviewing Lynd. Their dialogue provides a big picture of global struggles against capitalism, and all forms of oppression. I myself learned for the first time that in the US, both the Haymarket anarchists of the late 1800s, and the anarchist Wobblies of the early 1900s were heavily influenced by Marxism. I also learned that many Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, were themselves very critical of the anti-democratic and elitist consequences of the vanguard strategy of organizing that has been embraced by so many Marxists.

Lynd and Grubacic’s exploration of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism is played out through their examination of so many fascinating stories of popular rebellion throughout world history. Many of these stories are about workers’ rebellions, but Lynd emphasizes that while the role of workers in making revolution is very important, workers are only part of the big picture, and workers should not be prioritized over other parts of society, including prisoners, students, women, and racially oppressed groups. Lynd summarizes his theory for best making revolutionary change: “We are all leaders, not just as a collection of individuals, but as persons embedded in different kinds of institutions and communities of struggle. The framework with within which all these aspirations must be lodged is the collective action, not of taking state power, but of building down below a horizontal network of groups and persons that is strong enough to command the attention of whoever is in government office.”

To accompany this book review, I interviewed co-author Staughton Lynd, asking him these four questions below.

Hans Bennett: This decade in Latin America has seen so many successful poor people’s movements. Are you particularly inspired by any of these victories? How do these embody those traits that you spotlight as so positive regarding the Zapatista movement?

Staughton Lynd: As your question suggests, the most hopeful part of the earth during this past decade has been Latin America. The Zapatista movement seems the most significant effort, but I believe it is organically connected to movements in other countries that have elected Leftist governments. The Zapatistas speak of governing in obedience to those below, “mandar obediciendo.” The Zapatistas interpret these words to direct them not to try to take state power, but instead to create a horizontal network of self-governing communities sufficiently strong that the national government will have to pay attention to “the below” and be accountable to it. However, in Bolivia when Evo Morales became president, he said in his inaugural speech that he intended to “mandar obediciendo”: that is, he accepted the Zapatista formulation as to how it should be between elected officials and the electorate, and in his capacity as an elected official, he intended to try to live up to it.

HB: How can US organizers adopt the Zapatista’s approach?

SL: The fundamental problem is that unlike the Zapatistas we do not have communities that have existed for centuries, that make decisions by consensus, that designate many persons to undertake small tasks or “cargos” for the community, that understand the first obligation of an elected representative to be listening, not talking. Instead, “organizing” in the United States is invariably quasi-Alinskyan, that is, inspired by the methods of Saul Alinsky, who in turn modeled his work on trade union organizing in the 1930s. I was one of four original teachers at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute founded in 1968-1969, and am an historian of the labor movement in the 1930s, so I think I know whereof I speak. The Alinsky approach assumes that people are motivated by individual, short-term, primarily economic self-interest. “Solidarity unionism” instead encourages people to take small steps in the interest of the group as a whole: for example, in a layoff to share the pain equally rather than strictly applying seniority.

HB: Given that we’re living in the “belly of the beast,” how do you think we in the US can best support Latin America poor people’s struggles that are resisting both their local ruling class, and US influence/dominance?

SL: Support for radical or revolutionary movements in other countries is a tricky undertaking. The Left in the United States has over and over again fallen into the error of romanticizing foreign movements and regimes. Examples are: the Soviet Union, revolutionary Cuba, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and perhaps now, the Zapatistas. I believe what is helpful is to say, ‘The United States should cease to intervene in Country X,’ but not, ‘We unreservedly favor whatever insurgent movement exists there.’ We should have learned this from the period of the Vietnam war. As soon as the Vietnamese had driven out the United States they created “re-education camps” against which I, at least, felt obligated to protest. Similarly, when the Sandinista government was voted out of office in 1990, Margaret Randall exposed the fact that a handful of men had run everything, including AMNLAE, which presented itself as a women’s organization. So we in the US are better off when we support the withdrawal of US troops, closing of US military bases, the nationalization of US private investments, but do not try to control what happens next.

HB: Given today’s “global economy,” do you know of any examples of any US workers being involved with cross-border working class organizing?

SL: Cross-border organizing has been timid and bureaucratic. I would like to see, for example, General Motors workers in Mexico, Canada and the United States strike together. The demands of each national group of workers would be somewhat different, but so what? Instead, even reform movements in American trade unions acquiesce in chauvinism. Thus Teamsters for a Democratic Union tries to keep Mexican truck drivers from entering the United States, even though (a) NAFTA requires their admission, (b) simple solidarity would suggest that if Iowa corn farmers can take advantage of NAFTA to destroy the livelihoods of countless Mexican campesinos by exporting corn to Mexico without import duties, then truck drivers in the United States should meet with their Mexican counterparts and seek solutions that benefit all workers involved.

1. Staughton Lynd taught American history at Spelman College and Yale University. He was director of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. An early leader of the movement against the Vietnam War, he was blacklisted and unable to continue as an academic. He then became a lawyer, and in this capacity has assisted rank-and-file workers and prisoners for the past thirty years. He has written, edited, or co-edited with his wife Alice Lynd more than a dozen books.
2. Andrej Grubacic is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the author of Globalization and Refusal and the forthcoming titles: Hidden History of American Democracy and The Staughton Lynd Reader. A fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action movements, in particular Peoples’ Global Action, and a co-founder of Global Balkans Network and Balkan Z Magazine, he is a visiting professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.

The facts of the Abu-Jamal/Faulkner case are highly contested, but all sides agree on certain key points: Abu-Jamal was moonlighting as a taxi-driver on December 9, 1981, when, shortly before 4:00 a.m., he saw his brother, William “Billy” Cook, in an altercation with Officer Faulkner after Faulkner had pulled over Cook’s car at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets, downtown Philadelphia. Abu-Jamal approached the scene. Minutes later when police arrived, Faulkner had been shot dead, and Abu-Jamal had been shot in the chest. The bullet removed from Faulkner, reportedly a .38, was officially too damaged to match it to the legally registered .38 caliber gun that Abu-Jamal says he carried as a taxi driver, after he was robbed several times on the job. Further, Amnesty International has criticized the official “failure of the police to test Abu-Jamal’s gun, hands, and clothing” for gunshot residue, as “deeply troubling.” Abu-Jamal has always maintained his innocence, and today still fights the conviction from his death-row cell in Waynesburg, PA, where he also records weekly radio commentaries, and has now written six books.

Recently, Abu-Jamal had petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the US Third Circuit Court ruling of March, 27 2008, which rejected his bid, based on three issues, for a new guilt-phase trial. One issue was that of racially discriminatory jury selection, based on the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, on which the three-judge panel split 2-1, with Judge Thomas Ambro dissenting. Ambro argued that prosecutor Joseph McGill’s use of 10 out of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable African-American jurors, was itself enough evidence of racial discrimination to grant Abu-Jamal a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new trial. In denying Abu-Jamal this preliminary hearing, Ambro argued that the Court was creating new rules that were being exclusively applied to Abu-Jamal’s case. The denial “goes against the grain of our prior actions . . . I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents,” wrote Ambro.

In his new essay titled “The Mumia Exception,” author J. Patrick O’Connor argues that the Third Circuit Court’s rejection of the Batson claim and of the other two issues presented is only the latest example of the courts’ longstanding practice of altering existing precedent to deny Abu-Jamal legal relief. O’Connor cites many other problems, including the 2001 affidavit by a former court stenographer, who says that on the eve of Abu-Jamal’s trial, she overheard Judge Albert Sabo say to someone at the courthouse that he was going to “help” the prosecution “fry the nigger,” referring to Abu-Jamal. Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe rejected this affidavit on grounds that even if Sabo had made the comment, it was irrelevant as long as his “rulings were legally correct.”

The phrase “Mumia Exception” was first coined by Linn Washington, Jr., a Philadelphia Tribune columnist and professor of journalism at Temple University, who has covered this story since the day of Abu-Jamal’s 1981 arrest. Washington criticizes the Third Circuit’s ruling against Abu-Jamal’s claim that Judge Sabo had treated him unfairly at the 1995-97 Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) hearings, which was another issue the Circuit Court had considered. Citing “the mound of legal violations in this case,” Washington says “the continuing refusal of U.S. courts to equally apply the law in the Abu-Jamal case constitutes a stain on America’s image internationally.”

Launched Campaign Cites Withheld Evidence

The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal are responding to the March 2009 US Supreme Court ruling by launching a campaign calling for a federal civil rights investigation into Abu-Jamal’s case. The campaign’s supporters include the Riverside Church’s Prison Ministry, actress Ruby Dee, professor Cornel West, and US Congressman Charles Rangel, who is Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. In 2004, the NAACP passed a resolution supporting a new trial for Abu-Jamal, and campaign supporters will be gathering to publicize the civil rights campaign at the upcoming NAACP National Convention in New York City, July 11-16, and to pressure the NAACP to honor their earlier resolutions by actively supporting the current campaign seeking an investigation. Supporters will then be in Washington, DC on July 22 to lobby their elected officials, and in mid-September, they’ll return to Washington, DC for a major press conference.

Thousands of signatures have been collected for a public letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder, which reads: “Inasmuch as there is no other court to which Abu-Jamal can appeal for justice, we turn to you for remedy of a 27-year history of gross violations of US constitutional law and international standards of justice.” The letter cites Holder’s recent investigation into the case of former Senator Ted Stevens, which led to all charges against him being dropped: “You were specifically outraged by the fact that the prosecution withheld information critical to the defense’s argument for acquittal, a violation clearly committed by the prosecution in Abu-Jamal’s case. Mumia Abu-Jamal, though not a US Senator of great wealth and power, is a Black man revered around the world for his courage, clarity, and commitment, and deserves no less than Senator Stevens.”

Several campaigns seeking a civil right investigation into the Abu-Jamal case have been launched since 1995, at which time the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was one of many groups that publicly supported an investigation. In a 1995 letter written independently of the CBC, Representatives Chaka Fattah, Ron Dellums, Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, and John Conyers (now Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee) stated, “There is ample evidence that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s constitutional rights were violated, that he did not receive a fair trial, and that he is, in fact, innocent.” Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fois responded to the CBC’s request, and in a September 1995 rejection letter written to Congressman Ron Dellums, Fois conceded that even though there is a five-year statute of limitations for a civil rights investigation, the statute does not apply if “there is significant evidence of an ongoing conspiracy.”

One of the 2009 campaign’s organizers is Dr. Suzanne Ross, a spokesperson for the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition of New York City. Citing Andrew Fois’ letter, Ross argues that the “continued denial of justice to Mumia in the federal courts, as documented by dissenting Judge Thomas Ambro,” is evidence of an “ongoing conspiracy,” and thus merits an investigation. “Throughout the history of this case, we were always told ‘Wait until we get to the federal courts. They will surely overturn the racism and gross misconduct of Judge Sabo,’ but we never got even a preliminary hearing on the issue considered most winnable: racial bias in jury selection, the so called Batson issue.” Ross also criticizes the Third Circuit’s denial of Abu-Jamal’s claim that Judge Sabo was unfair at the 1995-97 PCRA hearings, and considers this denial to be further evidence of an “ongoing conspiracy.” Ross argues that the courts’ continued affirmation of Sabo’s rulings during the PCRA hearings, and Sabo’s ultimate ruling that nothing presented at the PCRA hearings was significant enough to merit a new trial, serves to legitimize numerous injustices throughout Abu-Jamal’s case.

Specifically referring to the issue of withheld evidence, that was central to the case of former Senator Ted Stevens, organizer Suzanne Ross identifies five key instances in Abu-Jamal’s case, where “evidence was withheld that could have led to Mumia’s acquittal.” The DA’s office withheld two items from Abu-Jamal’s defense: the actual location of the driver’s license application found in Officer Faulkner’s pocket; and Pedro Polakoff’s crime scene photos. Then, at the request of prosecutor McGill, Judge Sabo ruled to block three items from the jury: prosecution eyewitness Robert Chobert’s probation status and criminal history; testimony from defense eyewitness Veronica Jones about police attempts to solicit false testimony; and testimony from Police Officer Gary Waskshul.

DA Suppresses Evidence About Kenneth Freeman

In their recent books, Michael Schiffmann (Race Against Death: The Struggle for the Life and Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2006) and J. Patrick O’Connor (The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2008) argue that the actual shooter of Officer Faulkner was a man named Kenneth Freeman. Schiffmann and O’Connor argue that Freeman was an occupant of Billy Cook’s car, who shot Faulkner in response to Faulkner having shot Abu-Jamal first, and then fled the scene before police arrived.

Central to Schiffmann and O’Connor’s argument was the presence of a driver’s license application for one Arnold Howard, which was found in the front pocket of Officer Faulkner’s shirt. Abu-Jamal’s defense would not learn about this until 13 years later, because the Police and DA’s office had failed to notify them about the application’s crucial location. Journalist Linn Washington argues that this failure was “a critical and deliberate omission,” and “a major violation of fair trial rights and procedures. If the appeals process had any semblance of fairness, this misconduct alone should have won a new trial for Abu-Jamal.” More importantly, Washington says, “this evidence provides strong proof of a third person at the scene along with Faulkner and Billy Cook. The prosecution case against Abu-Jamal rests on the assertion that Faulkner encountered a lone Cook minutes before Abu-Jamal’s arrival on the scene, but Faulkner got that application from somebody other than Cook, who had his own license.”

At the 1995 PCRA hearing, Arnold Howard testified that he had loaned his temporary, non-photo license to Kenneth Freeman, who was Billy Cook’s business partner and close friend. Further, Howard stated that police came to his house early in the morning on Dec. 9, 1981, and brought him to the police station for questioning because he was suspected of being “the person who had run away” from the scene, but he was released after producing a 4:00 a.m. receipt from a drugstore across town (which provided an alibi) and telling them that he had loaned the application to Freeman (who Howard reports was also at the police station that morning).

Also pointing to Freeman’s presence in the car with Cook, O’Connor and Schiffmann cite prosecution witness Cynthia White’s testimony at Cook’s separate trial for charges of assaulting Faulkner, where White describes both a “driver” and a “passenger” in Cook’s VW. Also notable, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff’s book (Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2003) features an interview with Cook’s lawyer Daniel Alva, in which Alva says that Cook had confided to him within days of the shooting that Freeman had been with him that morning.

Linn Washington argues that, “this third person at the crime scene is consistent with eyewitness accounts of the shooter fleeing the scene. Remember that accounts from both prosecution and defense witnesses confirm the existence of a fleeing shooter. Abu-Jamal was arrested at the scene, critically wounded. He did not run away and return in a matter of seconds.” Eyewitnesses Robert Chobert, Dessie Hightower, Veronica Jones, Deborah Kordansky, William Singletary, and Marcus Cannon all reported, at various times, that they saw one or more men run away from the scene. O’Connor writes that, “some of the eyewitnesses said this man had an Afro and wore a green army jacket. Freeman did have an Afro and he perpetually wore a green army jacket. Freeman was tall and burly, weighing about 225 pounds at the time.” Then there’s eyewitness Robert Harkins, whom prosecutor McGill did not call as a witness. O’Connor postulates that the prosecutor’s decision was because Harkins’ account of a struggle between Faulkner and the shooter that caused Faulkner to fall on his hands and knees before Faulkner was shot “demolished the version of the shooting that the state’s other witnesses rendered at trial.” O’Connor writes further that “Harkins described the shooter as a little taller and heavier than the 6-foot, 200-pound Faulkner,” which excludes the 6’1”, 170-lb Abu-Jamal.

Linn Washington’s 2001 affidavit states that he knew Freeman to be a “close friend of Cook’s,” and that “Cook and Freeman were constantly together.” Washington first met Freeman when Freeman reported his experience of police brutality to the Philadelphia Tribune, where Washington worked. Washington says today that, “Kenny did not harbor any illusions about police being unquestioned heroes due to his experiences with being beaten a few times by police and police incessantly harassing him for his street vending.”

Regarding the police harassment and intimidation of Freeman, which continued after the arrest of Abu-Jamal, Washington adds: “It is significant to note that the night after the Faulkner shooting, the newsstand that Freeman built and operated at 16th and Chestnut Streets in Center City burned to the ground. In news media accounts of this arson, police sources openly boasted to reporters that the arsonist was probably a police officer. Witnesses claimed to see officers fleeing the scene right before the fire was noticed. Needless to say, that arson resulted in no arrests.” Dave Lindorff argues that the police clearly “had their eye on Freeman,” because “only two months after Faulkner’s shooting, Freeman was arrested in his home, where he was found hiding in his attic armed with a .22 caliber pistol, explosives and a supply of ammunition. At that time, he was not charged with anything.” O’Connor and Schiffmann argue that police intimidation ultimately escalated to the point where police themselves murdered Freeman.

The morning of May 14, 1985, Freeman’s body was found: naked, bound, and with a drug needle in his arm. His cause of death was officially declared a “heart attack.” The date of Freeman’s death is significant because the night before his body was found, the police had orchestrated a military-style siege on the MOVE organization’s West Philadelphia home. Police had fired over 10,000 rounds of ammunition in 90 minutes and used a State Police helicopter to drop a C-4 bomb (illegally supplied by the FBI) on MOVE’s roof, which started a fire that destroyed the entire city block. The MOVE Commission later documented that police had shot at MOVE family members when they tried to escape the fire: in all, six adults and five children were killed.

As a local journalist, Abu-Jamal had criticized the city government’s conflicts with MOVE, and after his 1981 arrest, MOVE began to publicly support him. Through this mutual advocacy, which continues today, Abu-Jamal and MOVE’s contentious relationship with the Philadelphia authorities have always been closely linked. Seen in this context, Schiffmann argues that “if Freeman was indeed killed by cops, the killing probably was part of a general vendetta of the Philadelphia cops against their ‘enemies’ and the cops killed him because they knew or suspected he had something to do with the killing of Faulkner.” O’Connor concurs, arguing that “the timing and modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme act of police vengeance.”

DA Suppresses Pedro Polakoff’s Crime Scene Photos

On December 6, 2008, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, where Pam Africa, coordinator of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, spoke about the newly discovered crime scene photos taken by press photographer Pedro Polakoff. Africa cited Polakoff’s statements today that he approached the DA’s office with the photos in 1981, 1982, and 1995, but that the DA had completely ignored him. Polakoff states that because he had believed Abu-Jamal was guilty, he had no interest in approaching the defense, and never did. Consequently, neither the 1982 jury nor the defense ever saw Polakoff’s photos. “The DA deliberately kept evidence out,” declared Africa: “someone should be arrested for withholding evidence in a murder trial.”

Advocacy groups called Educators for Mumia and Journalists for Mumia explain in their fact sheet, “21 FAQs,” that Polakoff’s photos were first discovered by German author Michael Schiffmann in May 2006, and published that Fall in his book, Race Against Death. One of Polakoff’s photos was first published in the US by The SF Bay View Newspaper on Oct. 24, 2007. Reuters followed with a Dec. 4, 2007 article, after which the photos made their television debut on NBC’s Dec. 6, 2007 Today Show. They have since been spotlighted by National Public Radio, Indymedia.org, CounterPunch, The Philadelphia Weekly and the new British documentary In Prison My Whole Life, which features an interview with Polakoff.

Since May, 2007, www.Abu-Jamal-News.com has displayed four of Polakoff’s photos, making the following points:

Photo 1: Mishandling the Guns — Officer James Forbes holds both Abu-Jamal’s and Faulkner’s guns in his bare hand and touches the metal parts. This contradicts his later court testimony that he had preserved the ballistics evidence by not touching the metal parts.

Photos 2 & 3: The Moving Hat — Faulkner’s hat is moved from the top of Billy Cook’s VW, and placed on the sidewalk for the official police photo.

Photo 4: The Missing Taxi — Prosecution witness Robert Chobert testified that he was parked directly behind Faulkner’s car, but the space is empty in the photo.

The Missing Divots — In all of Polakoff’s photos of the sidewalk where Faulkner was found, there are no large bullet divots, or destroyed chunks of cement, which should be visible in the pavement if the prosecution scenario was accurate, according to which Abu-Jamal shot down at Faulkner — and allegedly missed several times — while Faulkner was on his back. Also citing the official police photo, Michael Schiffmann writes: “It is thus no question any more whether the scenario presented by the prosecution at Abu-Jamal’s trial is true, because it is physically impossible.”

Pedro P. Polakoff was a Philadelphia freelance photographer who reports having arrived at the crime scene about 12 minutes after the shooting was first reported on police radio, and at least 10 minutes before the Mobile Crime Detection Unit that handles crime scene forensics and photographs. In Schiffmann’s interview with him, Polakoff recounted that “all the officers present expressed the firm conviction that Abu-Jamal had been the passenger in Billy Cook’s VW and had fired and killed Faulkner by a single shot fired from the passenger seat of the car.” Polakoff bases this on police statements made to him directly, and from his having overheard their conversations. Polakoff states that this early police opinion was apparently the result of their interviews of three other witnesses who were still present at the crime scene: a parking lot attendant, a drug-addicted woman, and another woman. None of those eyewitnesses, however, have appeared in any report presented to the courts by the police or the prosecution.

It is undisputed that Abu-Jamal approached from across the street, and was not the passenger in Billy Cook’s car. Schiffmann argues that Polakoff’s personal account strengthens the argument that the actual shooter was Billy Cook’s passenger Kenneth Freeman who, Schiffmann postulates, fled the scene before police arrived.

Robert Chobert’s Legal Status Withheld From Jury

At prosecutor Joseph McGill’s request, Judge Albert Sabo blocked Abu-Jamal’s defense from telling the 1982 jury that key prosecution eyewitness, taxi driver Robert Chobert, was on probation for throwing a molotov cocktail into a school yard, for pay. Sabo justified this by ruling that Chobert’s offense was not crimen falsi, i.e., a crime of deception. Consequently, the jury never heard about this, nor that on the night of Abu-Jamal’s arrest, Chobert had been illegally driving on a suspended license (revoked for a DWI). This probation violation could have given him up to 30 years in prison, so he was extremely vulnerable to pressure from the police. Notably, at the later 1995 PCRA hearing, Chobert testified that his probation had never been revoked, even though he continued to drive his taxi illegally through 1995.

At the 1982 trial, Chobert testified that he was in his taxi, which he had parked directly behind Faulkner’s police car, and was writing in his log book when he heard the first gunshot and looked up. Chobert alleged that while he did not see a gun in Abu-Jamal’s hand, nor a muzzle flash, he did see Abu-Jamal standing over Faulkner, saw Abu-Jamal’s hand “jerk back” several times, and heard shots after each “jerk.” After the shooting, Chobert stated that he got out and approached the scene.

Damaging Chobert’s credibility, however, is evidence suggesting that Chobert may have lied about his location at the time of Faulkner’s death. As noted earlier, the newly discovered Polakoff crime scene photos show that the space where Chobert testified to being parked directly behind Officer Faulkner’s car was actually empty. Yet, even more evidence suggests he lied about his location. While prosecution eyewitness Cynthia White is the only witness to testify seeing Chobert’s taxi parked behind Faulkner’s police car, no official eyewitness reported seeing White at the scene. Furthermore, Chobert’s taxi is missing both from White’s first sketch of the crime scene given to police (Defense Exhibit D-12), and from a later one (Prosecution Exhibit C-35). In a 2001 affidavit, private investigator George Michael Newman says that in a 1995 interview, Chobert told Newman that Chobert was actually parked around the corner, on 13th Street, north of Locust Street, and did not even see the shooting.

Amnesty International documents that both Chobert and White “altered their descriptions of what they saw, in ways that supported the prosecution’s version of events.” Chobert first told police that the shooter simply “ran away,” but after he had identified Abu-Jamal at the scene, he said the shooter had run away 30 to 35 “steps” before he was caught. At trial, Chobert changed this distance to 10 “feet,” which was closer to the official police account that Abu-Jamal was found just a few feet away from Officer Faulkner.

Nevertheless, Chobert did stick to a few statements in his trial testimony that contradicted the prosecution’s scenario. For example, Chobert declared that he did not see the apparently unrelated Ford car that, according to official reports, was parked in front of Billy Cook’s VW. Chobert also claimed that the altercation happened behind Cook’s VW (it officially happened in front of Cook’s VW), that Chobert did not see Abu-Jamal get shot or see Officer Faulkner fire his gun, and that the shooter was “heavyset” — estimating 200-225 lbs (Abu-Jamal weighed 170 lbs).

In his 2003 book Killing Time, Dave Lindorff wrote about two other problems with Chobert’s account. While being so legally vulnerable, why would Chobert have parked directly behind a police car? Why would he have left his car and approached the scene, if in fact, the shooter were still there? Lindorff suggests that “at the time of the incident, Chobert might not have thought that the man slumped on the curb was the shooter,” because “in his initial Dec. 9 statement to police investigators, Chobert had said that he saw ‘another man’ who ‘ran away’. . . He claimed in his statement that police stopped that man, but that he didn’t see him later.” Therefore, “if Chobert did think he saw the shooter run away, it might well explain why he would have felt safe walking up to the scene of the shooting as he said he did, before the arrival of police.”

The Attempts to Silence Veronica Jones

Veronica Jones was working as a prostitute at the crime scene on December 9, 1981. She first told police on December 15, 1981 that she had seen two men “jogging” away from the scene before police arrived. As a defense witness at the 1982 trial, Jones denied having made that statement; however, later in her testimony she started to describe a pre-trial visit from police, where “They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that.” Jones then explicitly testified that police had offered to let her and White “work the area if we tell them” what they wanted to hear regarding Abu-Jamal’s guilt.

At this point, Prosecutor McGill interrupted Jones and moved to block her account, calling her testimony “absolutely irrelevant.” Judge Sabo agreed to block the line of questioning, strike the testimony, and then ordered the jury to disregard Jones’ statement.

The DA and Sabo’s efforts to silence Jones continued through to the later PCRA hearings that started in 1995. Having been unable to locate Jones earlier, the defense found Jones in 1996, and (over the DA’s protests) obtained permission from the State Supreme Court to extend the PCRA hearings for Jones’ testimony. Sabo vehemently resisted — arguing that there was not sufficient proof of her unavailability in 1995. However, in 1995 Sabo had refused to order disclosure of Jones’ home address to the defense team.

Over Sabo’s objections, the defense returned to the State Supreme Court, which ordered Sabo to conduct a full evidentiary hearing. Sabo’s attempts to silence Jones continued as she took the stand. He immediately threatened her with 5-10 years imprisonment if she testified to having perjured herself in 1982. In defiance, Jones persisted with her testimony that she had in fact lied in 1982, when she had denied her original account to police that she had seen two men “leave the scene.”

Jones testified that she had changed her version of events after being visited by two detectives in prison, where she was being held on charges of robbery and assault. Urging her to both finger Abu-Jamal as the shooter and to retract her statement about seeing two men “run away,” the detectives stressed that she faced up to 10 years in prison and the loss of her children if convicted. Jones testified in 1996 that in 1982, afraid of losing her children, she had decided to meet the police halfway: she did not actually finger Abu-Jamal, but she did lie about not seeing two men running from the scene. Accordingly, following the 1982 trial, Jones only received probation and was never imprisoned for the charges against her.

During the 1996 cross-examination, the DA announced that there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Jones on charges of writing a bad check, and that she would be arrested after concluding her testimony. With tears pouring down her face, Jones declared: “This is not going to change my testimony!” Despite objections from the defense, Sabo allowed New Jersey police to handcuff and arrest Jones in the courtroom. While the DA attempted to use this arrest to discredit Jones, her determination in the face of intimidation may, arguably, have made her testimony more credible. Outraged by Jones’ treatment, even the Philadelphia Daily News, certainly no fan of Abu-Jamal, reported: “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing. Sabo has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness.”

Jones’ account was given further credibility a year later. At the 1997 PCRA hearing, former prostitute Pamela Jenkins testified that police had tried pressuring her to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner. In addition, Jenkins testified that in late 1981, Cynthia White (whom Jenkins knew as a fellow police informant) told Jenkins that she was also being pressured to testify against Abu-Jamal, and that she was afraid for her life.

As part of a 1995 federal probe of Philadelphia police corruption, Officers Thomas F. Ryan and John D. Baird were convicted of paying Jenkins to falsely testify that she had bought drugs from a Temple University student. Jenkins’ 1995 testimony in this probe, helped to convict Ryan, Baird, and other officers, and also to dismiss several dozen drug convictions. At the 1997 PCRA hearing, Jenkins testified that this same Thomas F. Ryan was one of the officers who attempted to have her lie about Abu-Jamal.

More recently, a 2002 affidavit by former prostitute Yvette Williams described police coercion of Cynthia White. The affidavit reads: “I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it . . .Whenever she talked about testifying against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the police were making her lie, she was nervous and very excited and I could tell how scared she was from the way she was talking and crying.” Explaining why she is just now coming out with her affidavit, Williams says “I feel like I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown over keeping quiet about this all these years. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. I was afraid of the police. They’re dangerous.” Williams’ affidavit was rejected by Philadelphia Judge Pamela Dembe in 2005, the PA Supreme Court in February 2008, and in October 2008, by the US Supreme Court.

Further supporting the contention that police had made a deal with White, author J. Patrick O’Connor writes, “Prior to her becoming a prosecution witness in Abu-Jamal’s case, White had been arrested 38 times for prostitution . . . After she gave her third statement to the police, on December 17, 1981, she would not be arrested for prostitution in Philadelphia ever again even though she admitted at Billy Cook’s trial that she continued to be ‘actively working.’” Amnesty International reports that later, in 1987, White was facing charges of armed robbery, aggravated assault, and possession of illegal weapons. A judge granted White the right to sign her own bail and she was released after a special request was made by Philadelphia Police Officer Douglas Culbreth (where Culbreth cited her involvement in Abu-Jamal’s trial). After White’s release, she skipped bail and has never, officially, been seen again.

At the 1997 PCRA hearing, the DA announced that Cynthia White was dead, and presented a death certificate for a “Cynthia Williams” who died in New Jersey in 1992. However, Amnesty International reports, “an examination of the fingerprint records of White and Williams showed no match and the evidence that White is dead is far from conclusive.” Journalist C. Clark Kissinger writes, a Philadelphia police detective “testified that the FBI had ‘authenticated’ that Williams had the same fingerprints as White.” However, Kissinger continues, “the DA’s office refused to produce the actual fingerprints,” and “the body of Williams was cremated so that no one could ever check the facts! Finally, the Ruth Ray listed on the death certificate as the mother of the deceased Cynthia Williams has given a sworn statement to the defense that she is not the mother of either Cynthia White or Cynthia Williams.” Dave Lindorff reports further that the listing of deaths by social security number for 1992 and later years does not include White’s number.

Gary Wakshul’s Testimony Blocked

On the final day of testimony, Abu-Jamal’s lawyer discovered Police Officer Gary Wakshul’s official statement in the police report from the morning of Dec. 9, 1981. After riding with Abu-Jamal to the hospital and guarding him until treatment for his gunshot wound, Wakshul reported: “the negro male made no comment.” This statement contradicted the trial testimony of prosecution witnesses Gary Bell (a police officer) and Priscilla Durham (a hospital security guard), who testified that they had heard Abu-Jamal confess to the shooting, while Abu-Jamal was awaiting treatment at the hospital.

When the defense immediately sought to call Wakshul as a witness, the DA reported that he was on vacation. Judge Sabo denied the defense request to locate him for testimony, on grounds that it was too late in the trial to even take a short recess so that the defense could attempt to locate Wakshul. Consequently, the jury never heard from Wakshul, nor about his contradictory written report. When an outraged Abu-Jamal protested, Judge Sabo replied: “You and your attorney goofed.”

Wakshul’s report from December 9, 1981 is just one of the many reasons cited by Amnesty International for their conclusion that Bell’s and Durham’s trial testimonies were not credible. There are many other problems that merit a closer look if we are to determine how important Wakshul’s 1982 trial testimony could have been.

The alleged “hospital confession,” in which Abu-Jamal reportedly shouted, “I shot the motherf***er and I hope he dies,” was first officially reported to police over two months after the shooting, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (February 9, 1982), police officer Gary Wakshul (February 11), officer Gary Bell (February 25), and officer Thomas M. Bray (March1). Of these five, only Bell and Durham were called as prosecution witnesses.

When Durham testified at the trial, she added something new to her story that she had not reported to the police on February 9. She now claimed that she had reported the confession to her supervisor the next day, on December 10, making a hand-written report. Neither her supervisor, nor the alleged handwritten statement was ever presented in court. Instead, the DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning with a suspicious typed version of the alleged December 10 report. Sabo accepted the unsigned and unauthenticated paper despite both Durham’s disavowal (because it was typed and not hand-written), and the defense’s protest that its authorship and authenticity were unproven.

Gary Bell (Faulkner’s partner and self-described “best friend”) testified that his two-month memory lapse had resulted from his having been so upset over Faulkner’s death that he had forgotten to report it to police.

Later, at the 1995 PCRA hearings, Wakshul testified that both his contradictory report made on December 9, 1981 (”the negro male made no comment”) and the two-month delay were simply bad mistakes. He repeated his earlier statement given to police on February 11, 1982 that he “didn’t realize it [Abu-Jamal’s alleged confession] had any importance until that day.” Contradicting the DA’s assertion of Wakshul’s unavailability in 1982, Wakshul also testified in 1995 that he had in fact been home for his 1982 vacation, and available for trial testimony, in accordance with explicit instructions to stay in town for the trial so that he could testify if called.

Just days before his PCRA testimony, undercover police officers savagely beat Wakshul in front of a sitting Judge, in the Common Pleas Courtroom where Wakshul worked as a court crier. The two attackers, Kenneth Fleming and Jean Langen, were later suspended without pay, as punishment. With the motive still unexplained, Dave Lindorff and J. Patrick O’Connor speculate that the beating may have been used to intimidate Wakshul into maintaining his “confession” story at the PCRA hearings.

Regarding Abu-Jamal’s alleged confession, Amnesty International concluded: “The likelihood of two police officers and a security guard forgetting or neglecting to report the confession of a suspect in the killing of another police officer for more than two months strains credulity.”

Conclusion: the DA Still Wants to Execute

“The urgent need for a civil rights investigation is heightened because the DA is still trying to execute Mumia,” emphasizes Dr. Suzanne Ross, an organizer of the campaign seeking an investigation. This past March, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new guilt-phase trial, but the Court has yet to rule on whether to hear the appeal made simultaneously by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, which seeks to execute Abu-Jamal without granting him a new penalty-phase trial.

In March, 2008, the Third Circuit Court affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision “overturning” the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Albert Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and that therefore jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence. According to the 2001 ruling, affirmed in 2008, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial. In such a penalty hearing, new evidence of Abu-Jamal’s innocence could be presented, but the jury could only choose between execution and a life sentence without parole.

The DA is appealing to the US Supreme Court against this 2008 affirmation of Yohn’s ruling. If the court rules in the DA’s favor, Abu-Jamal can be executed without benefit of a new sentencing hearing. If the US Supreme Court rules against the DA’s appeal, the DA must either accept the life sentence for Abu-Jamal, or call for the new sentencing hearing. Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal has never left his death row cell.

How You Can Help

Actions are being organized throughout the summer to support the campaign for a federal civil rights investigation, including at the upcoming NAACP convention in New York City, July 11-16. Organizers are focusing particularly on July 13, the day that Attorney General Holder will address the convention. Supporters will then be in Washington, D.C., on July 22 to lobby their elected officials and, in mid-September, they’ll return to Washington, D.C., for a major press conference.

For more information on how you can support the campaign for a federal civil rights investigation, and to sign the online letter and petition to Attorney General Holder, please visit: http://freemumia.com/civilrights.html.

* This article was first published by the SF Bay View Newspaper on June 16, 2009.

Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.

Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?

Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when four people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions — and that’s what we did this summer. We spent three days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had five people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.

HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?

AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.

In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.

HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?

AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia — respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases — reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.

After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge seven-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.

HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that, “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?

AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States — and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies — from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.

Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers — and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.

HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled “Colombia Solidarity Work,” and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.

AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract — although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.

In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.

Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation — but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.

In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán — but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.

HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?

AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.

Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations — Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.

The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine — and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy — the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.

HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?

AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky — because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region — people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.

Unions in Colombia — especially those in the coal mines — are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.

In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.

HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?

AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects — from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers — and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction — like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”

There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBYism [i.e., “not in my back yard”] — we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.

This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water — thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes — we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away — all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!

HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?

AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests” — which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations — in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.

There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish — neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.

Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose — or be forced — to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors — the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources — could contribute to some real changes.

HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?

AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.

* This interview was first published at UpsideDownWorld.org on June 15, 2009.

A longtime critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor to Z Magazine since its founding in 1988. He is the author of numerous books, including his 1979 book, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I, and Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

The Washington Connection has an interesting history. When Chomsky and Herman wrote its precursor, they found their analysis of U.S. foreign policy unwelcome by the corporate media establishment. Warner Modular Publications (at that time a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate) was set to release it, but when the parent company learned about the book in the fall of 1973, it condemned its “unpatriotic” scholarship. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, explained why the book upset him so much, citing the book’s “unpatriotic” argument that “the leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the most important single instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.”

As a result, Chomsky and Herman explain in The Washington Connection’s introduction that:

Although 20,000 copies of the monograph were printed, and one (and the last) ad was placed in the New York Review of Books, Warner Publishing refused to allow distribution of the monograph at its scheduled publication date. Media advertising for the volume was cancelled and printed flyers that listed the monographs as one of the titles were destroyed. The officers of Warner Modular were warned that distribution of the document would result in their immediate dismissal.

Following this, Warner backed down a little, and formally agreed to not suppress the book: reaching a compromise with the lower-level publisher (who struggled for distribution of the monograph). However, before the compromise could be enacted the publishing house was shut down, with Warner selling the house’s “stocks of publications and contracts to a small and quite unknown company” effectively killing the book.

Taking a closer look at the book’s content, Chomsky and Herman argue that the “ideological pretense…that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective” has been constructed to mask: “the basic fact…that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.”

Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Chomsky and Herman argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights. They write:

The proof of the pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the “stability” of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers or others who threaten “order,” and at best indifferent to the mass of the population, have been accommodating to large external interests. In an important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client state are functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers and the U.S. government, playing their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice and plan.

Chomsky and Herman cite official statements by State Department planner George Kennan, to illustrate the mindset behind US policy in Latin America and around the world. In 1948, Kennan wrote Policy Planning Study 23, stating that if the U.S. wanted to maintain (and expand) its position of world dominance, it could not truly respect human rights and democracy abroad. The document said:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only about 6 percent of its population…In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity…To do so we will have to dispense with sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.

Kennan elaborated on this concept in a 1950 briefing of U.S. ambassadors to Latin American countries. Of prime importance was to prevent the spreading of the idea “that governments are responsible for the well being of their people.” To combat the proliferation of this idea, Kennan argued that “we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government…It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal one if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communist.”

VIDEO: Dec. 6 Intl. Week of Solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal–a report from Philadelphia

VIDEO: Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal presentation at 13th and Locust crime scene

On Friday, December 19, 2008, death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal filed his appeal to the US Supreme Court, asking it to consider his case for a new guilt-phase trial. One month before, the Philadelphia District Attorney filed its separate appeal to the US Supreme Court asking to have Abu-Jamal executed without a new sentencing-phase trial.

At this critical stage in Abu-Jamal’s case, supporters organized a week of global solidarity actions that began on December 6, the day of the large protest in Philadelphia, almost 27 years after Abu-Jamal was arrested for the December 9, 1981 shooting death of white police officer Daniel Faulkner, and later convicted in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty".

There were solidarity actions inside the US and around the world, including Mexico, Venezuela, Germany, France, England, Switzerland. Several US events screened the new DVD video titled Fighting for Mumia’s Freedom: a report from Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, over 200 protesters gathered outside the District Attorney’s office across the street from City Hall. Journalists for Mumia’s new video report from the demonstration features an interview with persecuted Civil Rights Lawyer Lynne Stewart, and footage of Pam Africa speaking outside the DA’s office about the newly discovered crime scene photos taken by press photographer Pedro Polakoff, and the DA’s role in hiding them from the defense. The coordinator of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Pam Africa cited Polakoff’s statements today that he approached the DA’s office with the photos in 1981/82 and 1995, but was completely ignored by them. Subsequently, Polakoff’s photos were never seen by the 1982 jury, or by the defense. Africa presented the evidence to Philadelphia PD Civil Affairs Captain William Fisher to deliver to DA Lynne Abraham.

Protesters marched from the DA’s office to the Federal Court Building where Abu-Jamal had oral arguments on May 17, 2007. The march stopped at the 13^th and Locust crime scene where Journalists for Mumia gave a presentation focusing on the photo by Polakoff that shows a blank space where key prosecution witness Robert Chobert testified to being parked in his taxi as he allegedly observed Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner.  An online video of the presentation is available alongside the special presentation flyer.

That week, Journalists for Mumia was featured by Philadelphia’s independent news website GeoClan.com. I argued in the interview that “those advocating Mumia’s execution show a disturbing lack of concern about the undeniable problems of racism (and all documented police/DA/judicial misconduct) throughout. At the most fundamental level, the ‘Fry Mumia’ campaign’s lack of concern is racist… The FOP is appealing to a racist lynch mob mentality that has long infected the US, so calling this a ‘legal lynching’ is no exaggeration.”

In Mexico City, Mexico, supporters organized a week of actions, including a protest rally outside the US Embassy. Linking Mumia’s case to repression and political prisoners in Mexico, speakers at the US Embassy included ex-Atenco prisoners Edith Rosales and César del Valle, as well as a guitar performance by Atenco survivor Jorge Salinas, whose arms were temporarily paralyzed and hands fractured when he was almost killed by police at Atenco. Survivors Mariana, Edith y Norma who courageously told their story of being raped at Atenco. Solidarity statements were read from Mexican political prisoners Gloria Arenas Agis and her husband Jacobo Silva Nogales, and from the Atenco political prisoners in the Molino de Flores prison at Texcoco, México.

Braulio Alvarez, a member of the Venezuelan parliament and leader of the farmers struggle in Venezuela said in his message written for the week, that Venezuelan supporters had decided “to go the American embassy in Caracas to hand to the ambassador a letter to the governor of Pennsylvania, demanding that he immediately liberate Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

Berlin, Germany’s, week of solidarity culminated in a demonstration where hundreds  marched to the US Embassy with slogans like "Freiheit für Mumia Abu-Jamal – Weg mit der Todesstrafe überall" ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal – Abolish the death penalty everywhere").

Also demonstrating the international interest in this case, the new British documentary film about Abu-Jamal, titled In Prison My Whole Life, premiered December 8 on the Sundance Channel. Previous interviews with William Francome, and Livia Giuggioli Firth, revealed that In Prison features an interview with Abu-Jamal’s brother Billy Cook, and the newly discovered crime scene photos. Officially endorsed by Amnesty International, Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen said: "We hope that the film’s viewers will back our call for a fair retrial for Mumia Abu-Jamal–and also support our work opposing the death penalty in the US and around the world."

Appealing to the US Supreme Court

(Illustration by Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany)

Both the DA and Abu-Jamal are asking the US Supreme Court to consider their appeals of the March 27, 2008 rulings by the US Third Circuit Court, when the court denied Abu-Jamal a new guilt-phase trial but ruled that there must be a new sentencing- phase trial if the DA still wants the death penalty. Therefore, Abu-Jamal is appealing for a new guilt-phase trial, while the DA is appealing to execute him without a new sentencing-phase trial. On October 6, 2008, the US Supreme Court rejected an unrelated appeal from Abu-Jamal.

On March 27, 2008 the US Third Circuit Court’s three-judge panel of Thomas Ambro, Anthony Scirica, and Robert Cowen ruled against three different appeal issues, refusing to grant either a new guilt-phase trial or a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new guilt-phase trial for Abu-Jamal. However, on the issue of racist jury selection, also known as the Batson claim, the three judge panel of split 2-1, with Ambro dissenting.

Abu-Jamal filed his appeal of this ruling with the US Supreme Court today, Dec. 19. Arguably the key issue will be the 1986 Batson v. Kentucky ruling established the right to a new trial if jurors were excluded on the basis of race. At the 1982 trial Prosecutor McGill used 10-11 of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable black jurors, yet the court ruled that there was not even the appearance of discrimination. In his dissenting opinion, Judge Ambro wrote that the denial of a preliminary Batson hearing "goes against the grain of our prior actions…I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents."

Separately, the DA is appealing to execute without a new sentencing-phase trial, having filed their brief on November 14, 2008.  Abu-Jamal’s deadline to respond to this is January 21, 2009.

On March 27, the three-judge panel unanimously affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision "overturning" the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence.

According to this ruling, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial where new evidence of Mumia’s innocence can be presented. However, the jury can only choose between a sentence of life in prison without parole or a death sentence.

The DA is appealing this 2001/2008 ruling to the US Supreme Court, so if the court agrees to consider the DA’s appeal and rules in their favor, Mumia can then be executed without benefit of the new sentencing trial. However, if the court upholds the 2001 and 2008 rulings, then the DA will either request a new sentencing trial or accept life in prison without the chance of parole.

Notably, at the DA’s request, during the post-2001 appeals, Mumia has never left his death row cell or been given general population "privileges" such as contact visits with family.

Reacting to the DA’s Appeal

Following news that the DA was appealing to execute without a new sentencing trial, I spoke with Dave Lindorff,  J. Patrick O’Connor,  and William Francome.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: An investigation into the death row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. He says that “the obsession of a string of Philadelphia district attorneys, beginning with current Governor Ed Rendell and ending with current DA Lynn Abraham with killing Mumia Abu-Jamal, despite his now having spent 26 years in the living hell of Pennsylvania’s death row, is truly repulsive and inhuman. It has ruined the live of Daniel Faulkner’s widow whose life has become a pathetic campaign of vengeance. It has cost the taxpayers of Philadelphia and of the state of Pennsylvania untold millions of dollars. And meanwhile, there is every reason to believe that Abu-Jamal was wrongly convicted of first degree murder and should never have been sentenced to death in the first place. The obsession to kill him, which began from the moment police first arrived on the scene in December, 1981, has led to a decades long travesty of and insult to the principles of justice, which is continuing to this day.”

William Francome, from the British film In Prison My Whole Life says that this “shows again the political nature of this case. It is my opinion that their office would not like to have to go through with another sentencing phase of the trial, with the attention that it would receive. They wish that this case would just disappear and that Mumia would be quiet, yet they do not want to face the Fraternal Order of Police who would be outraged if the DA wasn’t pushing for a death sentence…The sad thing is that amongst the political battles, a man’s life is at stake and I find the attempt at reinstating the death sentence (which is a completely irreversible and inhumane practice), to be abhorrent.”

J. Patrick O’Connor is the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Despite several book tours and an important NY Times article when Framing was released in May 2008, it has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. O’Connor argues that the DA’s appeal is “without merit and represents pure gamesmanship by outgoing D.A. Lynne Abraham…The last thing the Philadelphia DA’s Office wants to conduct is a new sentencing hearing, an event it continues to put off by filing this latest appeal. That’s really what this latest appeal is all about.”

The Power of the People

At the December 6 protest, Pam Africa stressed that the DA is trying to execute Abu-Jamal despite the strong evidence of both an unfair trial and innocence. Not having any faith in the court system, she argued that justice will only come from popular pressure, and made an urgent plea for supporters to do all they can at this critical hour. In his message recorded for the international week of solidarity, Abu-Jamal thanked his supporters and decried the recent denial of a new guilt-phase trial: “As you’ve seen, the law is but politics by other means, and the judges but politicians in judges’ robes. It doesn’t matter what the cases say. It doesn’t matter what the so-called rules say. They’ve never followed them from day one. What matters is what you say. What matters is what you do. So I thank you all for being there, for fighting for what’s right, for fighting for life, for fighting for liberty. I thank you all and I love you all.”

Upset by Monday’s news, Dr. Suzanne Ross, Co-Chair of The NYC Free Mumia Coalition argued: “The courts, from Judge Albert Sabo’s outrageously biased rulings and court decorum; to Pamela Dembe’s ridiculous rulings, including her disregard of the significance of Sabo’s infamous ‘I’m going to help them fry the Nigger’ remark; to the PA Supreme Court’s rubber stamping of Sabo’s and Dembe’s rulings; to Judge William Yohn’s refusal to examine the question of innocence, to the Third Circuit’s ‘topsy turvy’ violations of their own precedents in considering the Batson issue so that they could deny Abu-Jamal the trial he is entitled to, have all shown a callous disregard for the life of a man who is obviously innocent, and have done everything in their power to assure that Mumia Abu-Jamal will never see the light of day from other than the twisted prism of a prison. This last decision is yet another outrageous chapter in a 27 year history of a conspiracy to imprison, kill, and silence Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

With the court’s PCRA rejection, Abu-Jamal’s upcoming appeal to the US Supreme Court of the Third Circuit decision (the filing of this appeal is due by Oct. 20 unless a 60-day extension is requested) is now more important than ever, because this is now his last chance for a new guilt-phase trial. Fortunately, this crucial moment for Abu-Jamal coincides with two new media projects that expose injustice in his case that extends well beyond the narrow issues being considered by the courts: the British film In Prison My Whole Life and the book The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor.

Both projects merit extensive coverage from the mainstream media, and are being utilized as tools by Abu-Jamal’s supporters for both education and fighting what they see as a long history of mainstream media bias against Abu-Jamal. Supporters are currently organizing for a major demonstration in Philadelphia on December 6, organized in solidarity with other actions around the world.

The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor

Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn has written that “J. Patrick O’Connor’s new book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal is based on a meticulous review of 12,000 pages of court transcripts, legal briefs, police records and an exhaustive examination of the constitutional violations perpetrated by America’s criminal ‘justice’ system. His evidence makes a powerful case that Mumia Abu-Jamal should be granted a new trial, and having been cruelly kept on death row for 26 years, he should be immediately freed.”

In Framing, O’Connor criticizes the media, who he says “bought into the prosecution’s story line early on and has never been able to see this case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and peace loving man.” As explained in a recent interview, O’Connor argues that the actual shooter was a man named Kenneth Freeman, who was Billy Cook’s business partner and who O’Connor argues was a passenger in Cook’s car when it was pulled over by Officer Daniel Faulkner the morning of Dec. 9, 1981. Freeman was mysteriously found dead in a Northeast lot (reportedly naked, gagged, hand-cuffed, and with a drug needle in his arm) the day after the infamous May 13, 1985 police bombing of MOVE, leading O’Connor to conclude that “the timing and modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme act of police vengeance.”

Despite the importance of Framing, and a timely NY Times article that spotlighted the book’s release in May, the mainstream media has virtually ignored O’Connor’s book. Supporters of Abu-Jamal are fighting back against this media blackout, and on October 3, author J. Patrick O’Connor began a week-long book tour in the SF Bay Area, which followed his tour of New York City and Philadelphia in June. Click here for a compilation of radio shows, interviews with, and articles by & about O’Connor — including this video interview at Philadelphia City Hall on the day of the book’s release (WATCH PARTS 1, 2, and 3).

The Sundance Channel Acquires New British Film About Mumia

Scheduled to premiere on The Sundance Channel on December 8, 2008, the new film, titled In Prison My Whole Life has been officially endorsed by Amnesty International, who in 2000 published a major report calling for a new trial. Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen said: “It’s shocking that the US justice system has repeatedly failed to address the appalling violation of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fundamental fair trial rights. . . . We hope that the film’s viewers will back our call for a fair retrial for Mumia Abu-Jamal — and also support our work opposing the death penalty in the US and around the world.”

In Prison character and filmmaker, William Francome was born on the night of Mumia’s 1981 arrest. Responding to the Sundance acquisition, he said: “Mumia’s case and the issues surrounding it are still highly important and need to be analyzed . . . It is so important that a trusted high quality broadcaster like Sundance has taken up the film, putting it at the fingertips of millions of Americans.”

On October 10, there is a special press conference, reception, and screening of In Prison at Theatre Pathe Vaise in Lyon, France, featuring the former French First Lady, Madame Daniele Mitterrand, producers Colin Firth & Livia Giuggioli-Firth, Abu-Jamal’s lead attorney Robert R. Bryan, representatives of Amnesty International, and a message from Mumia to be read to the audience. In Prison has already been shown at many prestigious film festivals including The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival and Rome’s International Film Festival in 2007, The Sundance Film Festival, in January, 2008, and this September at NYC’s Urbanworld Film Festival, and at the CR10 prison abolitionist conference in Oakland, CA.

An October, 2007 interview with Francome, and a September, 2008 interview with co-producer Livia Giuggioli Firth, revealed that In Prison features 1) the first interview ever with Billy Cook, and 2) a presentation of the crime scene photos recently aired on NBC’s Today Show, featuring an interview with the photographer Pedro Polakoff, and the German author that recently discovered them, Michael Schiffmann.

Mumia’s brother Billy Cook was at the scene on Dec. 9, 1981, after Officer Faulkner pulled Cook’s VW car over. Interviewed in the film, Cook denies the accusation that he struck Faulkner in the face, from which he allegedly instigated the documented beating by Faulkner. Cook shows In Prison’s interviewers the scars from the beating, which are still on his head today. “They arrested me for assaulting him, but I never laid a hand on him. I was only trying to protect myself,” says Cook, who also reports that before he was beaten bloody with the police flashlight, Faulkner “was kind of vulgar and nasty. And if I remember correctly he threw a slur in . . . ‘Nigger’ get back in the car.”

In Prison features the first interview with press photographer Pedro Polakoff, along with German author, Dr. Michael Schiffmann (University of Heidelberg), who discovered Polakoff’s photos (never seen by the 1982 jury) and featured them in his new German book Race Against Death, published in Fall, 2006. William Francome argues that the photos “were purposefully ignored by the prosecution and the DA’s Office,” because the DA knew that the photographs “could have done their case some damage in court.” (For more on the photos, go to Journalists for Mumia’s website: Abu-Jamal-News.com)

Appealing The Third Circuit Ruling to The US Supreme Court

On July 22, the Third Circuit Court ruled against Mumia’s en banc appeal requesting that the entire court hear his appeal, instead of just the three-judge panel of Thomas Ambro, Anthony Scirica, and Robert Cowen, who previously ruled against a new guilt-phase trial on March 27, 2008. Ruling against three different appeal issues, the court refused to grant either a new guilt-phase trial or a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new guilt-phase trial for Mumia. However, on the issue of racist jury selection, also known as the Batson claim, the three judge panel of split 2-1, with Ambro dissenting.

The 1986 Batson v. Kentucky ruling established the right to a new trial if jurors were excluded on the basis of race. At the 1982 trial Prosecutor McGill used 10 of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable black jurors, yet the court ruled that there was not even the appearance of discrimination. In his dissenting opinion, Ambro wrote that the denial of a preliminary Batson hearing “goes against the grain of our prior actions . . . I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents.”

Mumia will be filing an appeal of this ruling with the US Supreme Court by the deadline of Oct. 20, unless he applies for a 60-day extension. The District Attorney has the same Oct. 20 deadline to appeal the Third Circuit ruling regarding the ‘overturning’ of the death sentence, if they choose to do so.

On March 27, the three-judge panel unanimously affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision overturning the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence.

Now, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial where new evidence of Mumia’s innocence can be presented. However, the jury can only choose between a sentence of life in prison without parole or a death sentence.

Or, the DA can appeal this ruling to the US Supreme Court by the deadline of Oct. 20. The DA has not stated whether or not it will: (1) appeal this to the US Supreme Court, or (2) accept the Third Circuit ruling and either request a new sentencing trial or accept life in prison without the chance of parole.

US Supreme Court Rejects Mumia Abu-Jamal’s PCRA Appeal

On Monday, October 6 (in a ruling unrelated to the above-mentioned appeal of the 3rd Circuit ruling), the US Supreme Court rejected Mumia’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) appeal, which was asking the courts to hear newly discovered testimony from Kenneth Pate and Yvette Williams (read the affidavits here). The appeal had been filed in July, after it was rejected by the PA Supreme Court in Feb, 2008, and in 2005 by Philadelphia Judge Pamela Dembe.

Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time, an independent investigation into the Abu-Jamal case. Responding on Monday to the US Supreme Court ruling he said: “One of the travesties that is part of American death penalty jurisprudence, and that contributes to the inescapable conclusion that it can never be fair or foolproof, is that the bar for getting a new hearing based upon new evidence is set almost impossibly high. So for example, even though we have in these two affidavits evidence that a key witness at trial to an alleged confession had been pressured or lured into lying on the stand, and that a second alleged eye-witness had been pressured and induced into claiming she was a witness when she actually wasn’t one, the US Supreme Court rules that it will not even review the matter or order a lower court to do so. And so it is possible that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a man who could in fact be innocent of murder, will either die or be left to rot in jail for the rest of his life while he could be the victim of police witness tampering and prosecutorial misconduct.”

Another Philadelphia journalist was dismayed by Monday’s ruling, and hopes it is not an indication of how the court will respond to the upcoming, separate appeal of the 3rd Circuit ruling. Having covered this story since 1981, Temple University professor and Philadelphia Tribune columnist Linn Washington, Jr. argues that, “the Williams revelation by itself at least deserves a formal hearing . . . as does the jury selection discrimination issue. However, state and federal courts continue with the pattern in the Abu-Jamal case of circling the wagons to shut-out any evidence exposing the major flaws of the 1982 trial and that jury’s guilty verdict.”

Let’s take a closer look at these two rejected affidavits that shed light on the broader issue of fabricated evidence used to convict Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Kenneth Pate’s Affidavit and the Fake “Hospital Confession”

Kenneth Pate is the step-brother of hospital security guard Priscilla Durham, who testified at the 1982 trial to hearing Abu-Jamal confess at the hospital, to shooting Officer Daniel Faulkner. Pate now states in an April 18, 2003 affidavit that Durham confided to him during a telephone conversation “around the end of 1983 or the beginning of 1984″ that she had actually lied about hearing the alleged hospital confession.

Pate states that Durham told him on the telephone that “Mumia was all bloody and the police were interfering with his treatment, saying ‘let him die.’ Priscilla said that the police told her that she was part of the ‘brotherhood’ of police since she was a security guard and that she had to stick with them and say that she heard Mumia say that he killed the police officer, when they brought Mumia in on a stretcher.”

Even before Pate’s affidavit, Durham’s account was very suspicious.

The alleged “hospital confession,” where Mumia reportedly declared, “I shot the motherf***er and I hope the motherf***er dies,” was first officially reported to police over two months later, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (Feb. 9, 1982), PO Gary Wakshul (Feb.11), PO Gary Bell (Feb.25), and PO Thomas M. Bray (March1).

Only two of these five witnesses were called by the DA: Priscilla Durham and Gary Bell (Faulkner’s partner and “best friend”).

Priscilla Durham and Gary Bell

Durham testified in 1982, and added for the very first time (not reported to the police on Feb.9), that she had reported the confession to her supervisor the next day, making a hand-written report. Neither her supervisor, nor the alleged handwritten statement was presented in court.

Instead, the DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning with a suspicious typed version. Sabo accepted the unsigned and unauthenticated paper despite both Durham’s disavowal (because it was not hand-written), and the defense’s protest that authorship and authenticity were unproven.

Gary Bell testified that his two-month memory lapse resulted from him being so upset over the death of Faulkner, that he forgot to report it to police.

Gary Wakshul: ‘the negro male made no comment.’

Police Officer Gary Wakshul was not a prosecution witness, and on the final day of testimony in 1982, Mumia’s lawyer discovered Wakshul’s statement from Dec. 9, 1981 (Mumia’s supporters cite this late discovery as another example of incompetent representation–to which defense attorney Anthony Jackson testified about at the 1995 PCRA hearings).

After riding with Abu-Jamal to the hospital and guarding him until his treatment, Wakshul reported: “the negro male made no comment.”

When the defense immediately sought to call Wakshul as a witness, the DA reported that he was on vacation. On grounds that it was too late in the trial, Sabo denied the defense request to locate him for testimony.

Subsequently, the jury never heard from Wakshul or about his contradictory written report. When an outraged Abu-Jamal protested, Judge Sabo cruelly declared to him: “You and your attorney goofed.”

At the 1995 PCRA Hearings, Wakshul testified that both his contradictory Dec. 9 “the negro male made no comment” report and the two-month delay were simply bad mistakes. He repeated his earlier February 11, 1982 statement given to the police IAB investigator that he “didn’t realize it had any importance until that day.” Wakshul also testified to being home for his 1982 vacation — in accordance with explicit instructions to stay in town for the trial so that he could testify if called.

Mysteriously, just days before his PCRA testimony, Wakshul was savagely beaten by undercover police officers in front of a Judge in the Common Pleas Courtroom, where Wakshul worked as a court crier. The two attackers were later suspended without pay, as punishment. With the motive still unexplained, the beating was possibly used to intimidate Wakshul into maintaining his “confession” story at the PCRA hearings.

Regarding the alleged confession, Amnesty International concluded: “The likelihood of two police officers and a security guard forgetting or neglecting to report the confession of a suspect in the killing of another police officer for more than two months strains credulity.”

Yvette Williams’ Affidavit and Cynthia White’s False Testimony

Yvette Williams’ July 8, 2002 affidavit, is the just latest evidence discrediting the prosecution’s star witness at the 1982 trial: Cynthia White.

Suspiciously, no official eyewitness even reported seeing White at the scene, and White is the only “witness” to report seeing alleged eyewitness Robert Chobert’s taxi cab parked behind PO Faulkner’s car.

Amnesty International documents that key DA witnesses Chobert (an arsonist on probation, driving his cab without a license) and White (a prostitute facing multiple charges) “altered their descriptions of what they saw, in ways that supported the prosecution’s version of events.”

Importantly, Williams’ account of 1) White being coerced by police to give false testimony, and 2) Police seeking out even more false testimony, is strongly supported by the testimony of Veronica Jones (at the 1982 trial and the 1996 PCRA) and Pamela Jenkins (at the 1997 PCRA).

The New Affidavit

Yvette Williams declares: “I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia ['Lucky'] White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it . . . Whenever she talked about testifying against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the police were making her lie, she was nervous and very excited and I could tell how scared she was from the way she was talking and crying.”

Explaining why she is just now coming out with her affidavit, Williams says “I feel like I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown over keeping quiet about this all these years. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. I was afraid of the police. They’re dangerous.”

Pamela Jenkins’ 1997 PCRA Testimony

At the 1997 PCRA hearing, former prostitute Pamela Jenkins testified that 1) Police tried pressuring her to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner, and 2) In late 1981, Cynthia White (who Jenkins knew as a fellow police informant) told Jenkins that she was also being pressured to testify against Mumia, and that she was afraid for her life.

As part of a 1995 federal probe of Philadelphia police corruption, Officers Thomas F. Ryan and John D. Baird were convicted of paying Jenkins to falsely testify that she had bought drugs from a Temple University student named Arthur Colbert. Jenkins’ 1995 testimony about Colbert and others she falsely testified against, helped to convict Ryan, Baird, and other officers and to dismiss several dozen drug convictions.

At the 1997 PCRA, Jenkins testified that this same Thomas F. Ryan was one of the officers who attempted to have her lie about Mumia!

The Attempts to Silence Veronica Jones

Veronica Jones (a former prostitute who was working at the scene) first told police that she had seen two men “jogging” away from the scene before police arrived. Then, as a defense witness at the 1982 trial, Jones denied making the statement, but started to describe a pre-trial visit from police, where “They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that.” Jones then explicitly testified that police offered to let her and White “work the area if we tell them” what they wanted to hear regarding Mumia’s guilt.

The DA moved to block her account, calling her testimony “absolutely irrelevant.” Judge Sabo agreed to block the line of questioning, strike the testimony, and then ordered the jury to disregard Jones’ statement.

Later, at the 1996 PCRA, Jones testified that in 1982 she had been coerced by police to recant seeing the two men jogging away, but resisted police pressure to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner.

Intimidation of Jones continued at the PCRA. Before she testified, Judge Sabo threatened her with 5-10 yrs imprisonment for admitting perjury. After testifying, he allowed NJ police to handcuff and arrest her for an outstanding arrest warrant on charges of writing a bad check.

Outraged by Jones’ treatment, even the normally ‘anti-Mumia’ Philadelphia Daily News reported that: “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing. Sabo has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness.” (Read more about Jones, and watch a new video-interview with her)

Organizing for Dec. 6 and Beyond

German author and co-founder of Journalists for Mumia, Michael Schiffmann responded to Monday’s ruling from his home in Heidelberg. Emphasizing that these two affidavits are important enough to merit a PCRA hearing, Schiffmann says, “there’s just one point I want to stress. Right-wing and FOP commentators will claim that the Williams and Pate affidavits were hearsay anyway. But this isn’t true. If someone reports a crime committed by him/herself to me, that’s called a statement ‘against one’s own interest,’ and if I report it to the police or testify to it in court, my report or testimony is admissible. Of course, both statements are highly relevant: White and Durham were main pillars of the prosecution. If they admitted to other people that they lied in court, the testimony of these other people should be heard.”

“Now we will have to redouble our efforts to ensure that the US Supreme Court grants the petition for writ of certiorari Mumia’s lawyer will be filing later this month or in December, if given a 60 day extension,” says Schiffmann. Please visit FreeMumia.com for the latest updates on organizing for December 6, and if you can, download (and print out in your community) our two new info flyers just completed:

1) A condensed legal update based on this article, and 2) A flyer summarizing the key points from The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and promoting the West Coast Book Tour.

Claude Marks is the director of The Freedom Archives, a San Francisco-based organization. Through the website and email list-serves, it provides a valuable resource documenting both revolutionary struggle and police state repression. Freedom Archives also creates high quality audio and video documentaries, including the recent video about the San Francisco Eight, titled Legacy of Torture.

Legacy of Torture can be viewed online, as well as the previous films Voices of Three Political Prisoners (featuring Nuh Washington, Jalil Muntaqim and David Gilbert), Charisse Shumate: Fighting for Our Lives, and Self Respect, Self Defense & Self Determination (featuring Mabel Williams and Kathleen Cleaver, introduced by Angela Davis).

Hans Bennett: You are a former political prisoner. Please tell us about your case.

Claude Marks: My co-defendant, Donna Willmott and I were indicted in an escape conspiracy involving Puerto Rican Independentista, Oscar Lopez, who was serving time in USP Leavenworth on charges of seditious conspiracy. The case was part of an ongoing set-up by the FBI, involved a snitch inside the prison, and clearly targeted the Puerto Rican Independence movement and its supporters. We and a collective of folks were underground until our negotiated surrender in 1994, and the two of us served prison sentences.

HB: Why did you start the Freedom Archives?

CM: I have done radio and radical media since 1968 and been part of creating radical news and political radio for many years. Myself and many collaborators secured and maintained our programs which spanned over 30 years. When I was in prison, I re-connected with many of these people and we started discussing how valuable it would be to preserve and re-purpose this radical political history and culture as well as how to make it accessible. We founded the Freedom Archives when I got out and have been building its reach and impact. We try to produce a couple of documentary audio CDs and/or video documentaries every year. We provide materials to others who are interested in this history and culture. We also focus our efforts on working with younger people in order to pass on this legacy. We say: “preserve the past, illuminate the present, shape the future!”

HB: Your recent film Legacy of Torture documents the case of the San Francisco 8.

CM: The prosecution of the SF 8 is about criminalizing the history of the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Panther Party, and delegitimizing resistance to racism and oppression. The government, both state and federal, is keen on legitimizing torture and warning activists today and into the future that the stakes are high if you are committed to fighting for a more just and humane world. The case itself rests on alleged confessions obtained under acknowledged torture and has been thrown out previously on that basis.

The structures of capitalism and imperialism rest on hundreds of years of land theft and genocide and sexual oppression. They will use any and all means to maintain their hegemony. So this prosecution is designed to discourage active dissent. Stemming from the old COINTELPRO (Counter-intelligence program), this case signals a new form of COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO was exposed and condemned by congressional investigators in the 1970s and was officially disbanded — but no agent or agency was ever held accountable for the assassinations, false charges and imprisonment of leaders, or the disorganization and neutralization of movements and organizations that they unleashed. This prosecution is part of today’s COINTELPRO along with the stepped up “Green Scare” prosecutions, the ongoing political use of grand juries (like the current one targeting the Puerto Rican Independence movement), the condoning of torture and indeterminate imprisonment in Guantanamo, the extraordinary rendition programs and secret prisons, the mass imprisonment of largely Black and Brown people, the ongoing repressive presence of police in communities, and the denial of the release of many political prisoners who have served decades inside cages.

It is our job to re-build a movement that will confront them and make them look bad. They act with perceived impunity when they defy human rights laws, scoff at the Geneva conventions, wage wars throughout the world justified by their own lies, and belittle the violence and human suffering that they are responsible for. The international communities perceive this, but we have a special role to play within these borders – to be part of holding the misrulers and torturers responsible! Their arrogance and criminality and our organizing will bring them down one day!

HB: What film are you working on now?

CM: A film called COINTELPRO 101 that introduces people to the history of government counter-intelligence while tying it to today’s reality — the world of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. The film will be an organizing tool, an opening of the door to those that have no knowledge of this history.

We hope that people can use this video as a basis for re-opening hearings on COINTELPRO and for holding people and agencies accountable for state violence directed at people’s movements. We hope that we can build a stronger movement to win the release of long-held political prisoners, those targeted by COINTELPRO who remain captives of the government. We also want to give people hope that we can work to transform the world and build a more humane society.

HB: Any film-makers you’d recommend?

CM: Costa Gavras and Ousmane Sembene.

HB: Any particular books?

CM: History, History, History! Not the BS in textbooks (see what AK Press is putting out)!

HB: Anything else to add?

CM: I am optimistic. People, especially younger generations, know that this monster is wrong. Our ability to work across generations is important, but especially for us older folks, we need to give up the reins and support those striving to live and create significant challenges to the monster. We need to connect fighting against racial and sexual oppression to saving the planet and fighting against US hegemony. A brighter future is possible if we are willing to make sacrifices. As Che always used to say: hasta la victoria siempre!

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/the-freedom-archives-an-interview-with-claude-marks/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/organizing-to-abolish-the-prison-industrial-complex/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/organizing-to-abolish-the-prison-industrial-complex/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:02:02 +0000 Hans Bennett http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=2332 The prison abolitionist group, Critical Resistance (CR) is organizing a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of their groundbreaking 1998 conference at UC-Berkeley.

Hans Bennett: What does “prison abolitionist” mean?

Rose Braz: CR seeks to abolish the prison industrial complex: the use of prisons, policing and the larger system of the prison industrial complex as an “answer” to what are social, political and economic problems, not just prisons.

Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today. Abolition means a world where we do not use prisons, policing and the larger system of the prison industrial complex as an “answer” to what are social, political and economic problems. Abolition means that instead we put in place the things that would reduce incidents of harm at the front end and address harm in a non-punitive manner when harm does occur. Abolition means that harm will occur far less often and, that when harm does occur, we address the causes of that harm rather than rely on the failed solutions of punishment. Thus, abolition is taking a harm reductionist approach to our society’s problems.

Abolition means creating sustainable, healthy communities empowered to create safety and rooted in accountability, instead of relying on policing, courts, and imprisonment which are not creating safe communities.

HB: How has prison changed in 10 years?

RB: One recent shift is that our denunciation of conditions inside has been twisted into justifications for expanding the system, particularly through what are sometimes called “boutique prisons”.

For example, there is fairly uniform agreement that California’s now $10 billion-per-year prison system holds too many people, provides horrendous health and mental health care, underfunds and cuts programming and services, and consistently fails to deliver on its promise of public safety. Nonetheless, California’s answer to this disaster has been to make it even bigger, building more prisons and in particular specialized prisons — for women, for elderly prisoners, for the sick, etc.

What’s new and more insidious about this expansion is that it has not been couched in ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric that politicians usually employ to justify expansion. Rather, in response to growing anti-prison public sentiment, these plans have been grounded on the rhetoric of “prison reform” and in regard to people in women’s prisons: “gender responsiveness.”

One current challenge is to continue to debunk the myth that bricks and mortar are an answer to these problems and to make common sense that the only real answer to California’s prison crisis is to reduce the number of people in prison and number of prisons toward the goal of abolition.

HB: How has the anti-prison movement evolved in the last 10 years?

RB: In the last decade, I think the movement has become more coordinated, is growing and has shifted the debate from one about reform to one that includes abolition.

In 1998, while there were numerous people and organizations working around conditions of confinement, the death penalty, etc., and in particular using litigation and research strategies; grassroots organizing challenging the PIC was at a low following the crackdown on the movement in the 1970’s and 80’s. We believe that a grassroots movement is a necessary prerequisite to change. CR is bringing people together through our conferences, campaigns, and projects toward the goal of helping to build that movement.

I also believe the debate has shifted and unlike a decade ago, abolition is on the table. A prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of it. In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come.

HB: What distinctions do you make between “political prisoners,” and others, including non-violent and violent offenders?

RB: CR focuses on how the PIC is used as a purported “answer” to social, economic and political challenges, and clearly a big part of the build up of the PIC followed directly on the political uprisings of the ’60s and ’70’s. CR seeks to abolish the PIC in its entirety, for us that means fundamentally challenging the PIC as an institution. This means that just as we fight for Mumia to not be locked in a cage, we also fight for people convicted of offenses classified as “violent” or “nonviolent” by the state to also not be locked in cages. While acknowledging that people are put in prison for different reasons, we do not make the distinction between people in for “violent” or “nonviolent” offenses because the PIC is not an answer to either.

HB: Anything else to add?

RB: One day, I believe those who fought for abolition will be seen as visionaries. Historian Adam Hochschild notes that there are numerous institutions in history that appeared unchangeable and moreover, small numbers of people have sparked extraordinary change.

Until the late 18th century, when the British slavery abolitionist movement began, the idea of eliminating one of the fundamental aspects of the British Empire’s economy was unimaginable. Yet, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 managed to create enough social turbulence that 51 years later, the slave ships stopped sailing in Britain.

In the US, the first slavery abolitionists were represented as extremists and it took almost a century to abolish slavery. Similarly, many who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system without segregation.

As Hochschild wrote, “The fact that the battle against slavery was won must give us pause when considering great modern injustices, such as the gap between rich and poor, nuclear proliferation and war” and I would add the Prison Industrial Complex. “None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery, but they will not be solved at all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable.”

Despite an important NY Times article written on the day of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s release in May, the mainstream media has virtually ignored this powerful new book which argues in painstaking detail that Abu-Jamal is innocent and that the actual shooter of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner was a man named Kenneth Freeman. The one exception to this media blackout was an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by Milan Simonich. Instead of ignoring it like the rest of the mainstream media, Simonich chose to dishonestly present the book, contending that O’Connor “is guilty of writing the sloppiest, most one-sided crime book of the year,” by mixing “recycled conspiracy theories with his own sweeping pronouncements, most devoid of fact.”

To learn more about Framing and the meticulous arguments made by O’Connor, you can watch my video-interview with him at Philadelphia City Hall on the day of the book’s release (PARTS 1, 2, and 3) and read my text-interview with him a few weeks before that, which focused on how exactly the frame-up happened, Kenneth Freeman, the March 27 court ruling, and Frank Rizzo’s legacy. Abu-Jamal-News.com also features an excerpt, a previous interview, O’Connor’s review of “Murdered By Mumia,” and his response to the March 27 ruling.

For irrefutable evidence of mainstream media bias against the world famous death-row journalist considered by many to be a political prisoner, just compare this coverage of Framing to last December’s release of Murdered By Mumia, written by Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner. The attention was massive and almost uniformly absent of any serious questioning of the book’s assertion that Abu-Jamal received a fair trial and that the evidence of his guilt is clear-cut. The Philadelphia Inquirer actually featured three days worth of excerpts from Murdered, but would not even mention any of the criticism of the book from Abu-Jamal’s supporters.

On December 4, two days before the book’s release, Journalists for Mumia organized a press conference to present our side of the story, arguing that Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial, and that there is evidence of his innocence that the court needs to consider. Along with a presentation of the newly discovered crime scene photos, our event featured Pam Africa (of The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal) and local journalists Linn Washington Jr, David Love, and David Lindorff who passionately argued for the legitimacy of the new photos as an important story deserving of media coverage, which they argued was just one more reason that Abu-Jamal needs a new trial. Despite my personal invitation to every Philadelphia media outlet I could find, not one single reporter from the local mainstream media covered our event. The only mainstream coverage came from British journalist Jon Hurdle of Reuters.

Hurdle’s article was the very first mainstream report of the new crime scene photos, and his article was cited the following week on Philadelphia’s NPR show Radio Times, and in an uncharacteristic Philadelphia Weekly article, which challenged Smerconish and Faulkner’s argument that the Abu-Jamal/Faulkner case is “open and shut”. While not cited directly on the controversial Dec. 6 Today Show, by co-host Matt Lauer, Hurdle’s article almost certainly helped persuade the Today Show to air the photos and, therefore, become the first television show to even acknowledge them.

By asking Faulkner and Smerconish challenging questions and accurately representing what Abu-Jamal supporters were saying about the photos, Lauer and the Today Show became the clear exception to the rule. As a result, right-wing media critics went crazy with outrage, and both Faulkner and Smerconish publicly vented their anger at Lauer, particularly for his last question to Faulkner: “Maureen, when you’re ever, when you’re alone, when you’re alone with your thoughts at night, when you even see pictures of the protest like the one we have across the street, does it ever cross your mind that perhaps they’re right? Do you ever allow yourself to consider the fact that perhaps he didn’t do this?”

Following the Today Show, I frantically sent personal emails to all of the same mainstream media folks (both local and national) that I invited to our Dec.4 press conference, and said: “Hey, this story of the crime scene photos is getting even more credibility! Isn’t this news now? Isn’t it only fair to present the opinions of Abu-Jamal’s supporters alongside those of Faulkner and Smerconish?” To top this off, I told the media about the slideshow presentation of the photos I would be giving on Dec. 8, for which I had contracted the use of the photos so that the media could film the event and therefore feature the photos on their news program. Guess what? Not one reporter showed up!

If these December events are not proof enough of the media’s inexcusable bias, just compare this to the abhorrent treatment of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Faulkner, Smerconish, and other advocates of Abu-Jamal’s execution constantly say to “read the transcripts” for clear evidence of a fair trial and Abu-Jamal’s guilt. Now, here is a book that is based almost entirely on the court transcripts, but the author argues that these transcripts reveal a frame-up of a factually innocent man! This is not published by a leftist Abu-Jamal support group, but rather by an established publishing house. The most basic notions of journalistic fairness demand that Framing be given equal coverage, so that the public can hear both side of the debate and decide for themselves what they think of this case

This media blackout of Framing is even more scandalous following the May 2 NY Times article by Jon Hurdle, who also wrote the Dec.4 Reuters article. Being recognized in the NY Times should have been an impetus for more coverage by other media outlets, but instead, the mainstream media was uniformly silent until the dishonest May 18 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by Milan Simonich. Immediately after reading the article that day, I submitted this “letter to the editor,” but it was not published:

Milan Simonich “is guilty of writing the sloppiest, most one-sided” book review “of the year.” This dishonest review (5/18) gives further credibility to author J. Patrick O’Connor’s allegation of mainstream media bias against death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Sounds fishy, huh? This is just one part of the obvious frame-up that O’Connor exposes.

Then, a few days after writing the Post-Gazette, I wrote this letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was also not published:

I am disappointed that The Inquirer has yet to acknowledge the new book The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor. Just released by Chicago Review Press, it has been featured by the NY Times, and at my website, Abu-Jamal-News.com.

I do applaud the Inquirer’s publication of the April 2 editorial by author Dave Lindorff titled “The Mumia Exception” that criticized the March 27 court decision denying Abu-Jamal a new guilt-phase trial. Please extend this same fairness to coverage of Framing.

To recap, when Murdered By Mumia was released in December, the book received major coverage both locally and nationally. Almost uniformly, the coverage was uncritical and the book’s critics were ignored. When The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal was released in May, it was virtually ignored. Can the bias be more obvious?

On Monday, J. Patrick O’Connor kicked off his East Coast book tour with an appearance on the Washington DC, Pacifica Radio show Jazz and Justice and a book-signing event at Baruch College in New York City. Tuesday night, he is appearing at The Brecht Forum alongside Pam and Ramona Africa. Wednesday, he comes to Philadelphia for an event organized by Journalists for Mumia. The San Francisco Bay Area is now preparing for a similar tour this Fall.

The question now before us is whether or not the mainstream media can continue their shameful behavior in reporting on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A century ago, the journalist and former slave, Frederick Douglass said that “power concedes nothing”. Therefore, it is up to us to confront the mainstream media and demand that they stop ignoring this important new book. When we flexed our power last December, and wrote NBC’s Today Show to ensure fairness, we were rewarded with a stunning victory. Please help today by urging the national media, as well as our local media outlets, to report on this important book.

Outraged by this decision, Abu-Jamal’s supporters around the world held “day after” protests, and are now organizing a mass demonstration in Philadelphia on April 19, just days before the PA Presidential Primary Election. Simultaneously, Abu-Jamal is appealing the court ruling “en banc” to the entire Third Circuit, and if unsuccessful there, he will appeal to the US Supreme Court, in an effort to be granted a new guilt-phase trial.

At this critical juncture in Abu-Jamal’s case, an explosive new book is set for release in May, titled The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor, and published by Lawrence Hill Books. O’Connor explains that he “was an associate editor for TV Guide at its headquarters in nearby Radnor, Pennsylvania during the time Officer Faulkner was killed and Abu-Jamal was put on trial and convicted of murdering him… Sometime in the mid-1990s I began hearing and seeing the ‘Free Mumia’ slogan. In 1996, when HBO premiered the one-hour documentary Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?, I developed some questions about the verdict and certainly the fairness of his trial.” Soon, O’Connor had “read all the trial transcripts as well as all of the transcripts from Abu-Jamal’s Post‑Conviction Relief Act hearings that were held in 1995, and continued in 1996 and 1997. I also read all the contemporaneous newspaper articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, as well as all the books published about the case.”

In his new book, O’Connor argues that Abu-Jamal was clearly framed by police, and that the actual shooter was a man named Kenneth Freeman. O’Connor criticizes the local media, who, he says “bought into the prosecution’s story line early on and has never been able to see this case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and peace loving man.”

In his review of the recent book Murdered by Mumia, O’Connor writes that “there’s a great deal to admire about Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner,” but concludes that her “obsessive hate for Abu-Jamal has blinded her to the prosecutorial misconduct and judicial bias that plagued his trial and justifiably fueled his rise to a world stage. The real villains in her life were the police and prosecutors who framed Abu-Jamal for Officer Faulkner’s killing. They are the ones, not the long drawn out appellate process, that have kept Abu-Jamal alive, who have denied her the closure she was due more than twenty-five years ago.”

For more background on The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal and J. Patrick O’Connor, Abu-Jamal-News.com is featuring an excerpt from the new book, a previous interview with the author, and O’Connor’s review of Murdered By Mumia. This new interview was conducted on April 11, 2008, and will be featured in the Journalists for Mumia newspaper, to be released days before the April 19 demonstration in Philadelphia.

Hans Bennett: Advocates of Abu-Jamal’s conviction and execution always say that a police frame-up of Abu-Jamal is a lunatic, far-fetched “conspiracy theory” that should be dismissed by any sane observer. What do you mean when you say he was “framed”? How was this done?

J. Patrick O’Connor: Mumia’s early association with the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party marked him as a subversive to George Fencl, the chief inspector of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Civil Defense Bureau. His subsequent sympathetic coverage of MOVE while reporting for the local public radio station made him an avowed enemy of Mayor Frank Rizzo. Minutes after Officer Faulkner was shot at 3:55 a.m., Inspector Alfonzo Giordano — who reported directly to Fencl — took command of the crime scene and personally set in motion the framing of Abu-Jamal. It would be Giordano who claimed that Mumia told him in the paddy wagon that he dropped his gun after he shot Faulkner; it would be Giordano who arranged for prostitute Cynthia White and felon Robert Chobert to identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter. Giordano and White would be the D.A. Office’s only witnesses at the preliminary hearing to hold Abu-Jamal over for trial where Giordano repeated this “confession.”

Giordano is as corrupt a police officer as one can imagine. For years he had been extorting kickbacks — personally averaging $3,000 per month — from Center City prostitutes, pimps and bar owners, which explains his early arrival at the crime scene. He knew Cynthia White and her pimp. He coerced her at the scene to identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter. She would be the only witness the D.A. had to claim to see Abu-Jamal holding a gun over Faulkner. In her original statement to the police — given within an hour of the shooting — she had Abu-Jamal running from the parking lot and from as far away as 10-yards firing off “four or five shots” at Faulkner before the officer fell. In her third interview with police detectives, given on December 17, she fine-tuned her statement to comport with the actual evidence in the case that Faulkner was shot at close range. (In one of the most sinister aspects of Abu-Jamal’s case, the police department waited until the Monday after Abu-Jamal’s conviction to “relieve” Giordano of his duties on what would prove to be well-founded “suspicions of corruption.” Four years after Abu-Jamal’s trial, Giordano pled guilty to tax evasion in connection with those payouts and was sent to prison.)

Incredibly, the police arriving at the crime scene would later claim not to have conducted any tests to determine if Abu-Jamal had recently fired a gun by checking for powder residue on his hands or clothing, nor did they claim to even feel or smell his gun to determine if it had been recently fired. Tests such as these are so routine at murder scenes that it is almost inconceivable the police did not run them. It is more likely that they did not like the results of the tests.

From the outset, the investigation into the shooting death of Officer Faulkner was conducted with one goal in mind: to hang the crime on Mumia Abu-Jamal. There was no search for the truth, no attempt at providing the slain officer with the justice he deserved. Giordano handed Abu-Jamal to the D.A.’s Office with his own lie about Abu-Jamal confessing to him and packing off Cynthia White in a squad car to tell her concocted account of the shooting. When the D.A.’s Office was forced to back away from the corrupt Giordano, Assistant D.A. Joseph McGill elicited a new “confession” to replace Giordano’s in February when security guard Priscilla Durham and Officer Garry Bell, Faulkner’s best friend on the police force, responded to his promptings by saying they heard Abu-Jamal blurt out at the hospital, “I shot the mother-fucker and I hope the mother-fucker dies.” Not one of the dozens of other officers present at the hospital would make such a claim. In fact, the two officers who accompanied Abu-Jamal from the time he was placed in the paddy wagon until he went into surgery, reported that he made no comments in signed statements given to detectives assigned to the case that morning.

The prosecution knew that its new “confession” could be skewered if Abu-Jamal’s defense attorney, Anthony Jackson, called the two officers who accompanied Abu-Jamal to the stand, so all the prosecution really had was Cynthia White. With White saying she saw it all from beginning to end, and willing to testify that she saw Abu-Jamal blow the helpless Faulkner’s brains out in ruthless cold blood, McGill had his case made, providing White’s credibility could survive Jackson’s cross-examination. McGill bet the entire case that it could, and despite the utter web of lies she told the jury, was right.

HB: Why do you think that Kenneth Freeman was the actual shooter of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner?

JPO: Kenneth Freeman was Billy Cook’s street vendor partner and was riding with him in the VW when Faulkner pulled the VW over. Freeman got out of the VW and subsequently handed Faulkner a phony driver’s license application bearing the name of Arnold Howard, which Howard had recently loaned to him. Howard’s papers were found in Faulkner’s shirt pocket. Police rounded up both Howard and Freeman in the early morning hours of December 9 and brought them in for questioning. At the Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995, Howard testified that on several occasions, Cynthia White picked Freeman out of a lineup.

At Billy Cook’s March 29 trial for assaulting Officer Faulkner, with McGill as the prosecutor, White told McGill in direct testimony that the passenger in the VW “had got out.” McGill said, “He got of the car”? White responded, “Yes.” (At Abu-Jamal’s trial, McGill got White to testify that only Abu-Jamal, Cook, and Faulkner were at the scene.)

Various witnesses said they saw a black man running from the scene right after the shooting. Some of the eyewitnesses said this man had an Afro and wore a green army jacket. Freeman did have an Afro and he perpetually wore a green army jacket. Freeman was tall and burly, weighing about 225 pounds at the time.

Cab driver Robert Harkins was driving right by the parked police car and the VW when he saw a police officer grab a man. The man “then spun around and the officer went to the ground,” falling face down backwards, landing on his hands and knees. The assailant shot the officer in the back, causing him to roll over on his back, and then executed him with a shot to his forehead.

Harkins described the shooter as a little taller and heavier than the 6-foot, 200-pound Faulkner. Robert Chobert told police in his first statement that the shooter had an Afro and weighed about 225 pounds. (Abu-Jamal, also about 6-foot, wore in his hair in dreadlocks and weighed 170 pounds at the time.)

In Billy Cook’s April 29, 2001, affidavit he declared that Freeman was with him the night of the shooting, was armed, and fled the scene after Faulkner was shot. Cook said he did not see who shot Faulkner.

Freeman would meet an ignominious death hours after Philadelphia police firebombed the MOVE house on Osage Avenue in 1985, killing 11 MOVE members, including John Africa, whose corpse had been beheaded. Freeman’s dead body was found bound, gagged and naked in a vacant lot. There would be no police investigation into this obvious murder. The coroner listed his cause of death as a heart attack. The timing and modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme act of police vengeance.

HB: In your book, you were very optimistic about the Third Circuit granting Abu-Jamal a new guilt-phase trial. Were you surprised by the March 27 ruling? If so, how do you account for such a surprising ruling?

JPO: I was incredulous. I thought the oral arguments on May 17 had gone extremely well for Abu-Jamal and that he would get a new trial. The 2-1 majority ruling demonstrated anew just how politicized this case always has been from the beginning and continues to be still. The two Republican- appointed judges on the panel formed the majority and the lone Democrat-appointed judge dissented. I hate to make it sound that simple, but the U.S. Supreme Court itself is not above making decisions based on party or ideological lines and all too frequently does.

In its ruling, the majority stated it believed Abu-Jamal had “forfeited his Batson claim by failing to make a timely objection. But even assuming Abu-Jamal’s failure to object is not fatal to his claim, Abu-Jamal has failed to meet his burden in providing a prima facie case.” The majority stated that he failed because his attorneys at his PCRA evidentiary hearing neglected to elicit the prosecutor’s reasons for removing 10 otherwise qualified blacks by means of peremptory strikes during jury selection.

“Abu-Jamal had the opportunity to develop this evidence at the PCRA evidentiary hearing, but failed to do so. There may be instances where a prima facie case can be made without evidence of the strike rate and exclusion rate. But in this case, we cannot find the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling [denying Abu-Jamal's Batson claim] unreasonable based on this incomplete record,” the majority wrote. In a nutshell, the majority denied Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim on a technicality of its own invention, not on its merits.

Judge Ambro’s dissent was sharp: “…I do not agree with them [the majority] that Mumia Abu-Jamal fails to meet the low bar for making a prima facie case under Batson. In holding otherwise, they raise the standard necessary to make out a prima facie case beyond what Batson calls for.”

In other words, the majority, in this case alone, has upped the ante required for making a Batson claim beyond what the United States Supreme Court stipulated. When ruling in Batson in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court imposed no timeliness restrictions as to when a Batson claim may be raised, nor has the court done so in the intervening 22 years. Neither did it require that the racial composition of the entire jury pool be known before a Batson claim could be raised. (In fact, the Supreme Court recently added heft to its Batson ruling, ruling in Synder that the purging of only one black juror on the basis of racial discrimination was grounds for a new trial.) In addition, the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that to establish a prima facie case for a Batson claim, the defendant must show only “an inference” of prosecutorial discrimination in purging even one black from a jury. Even the Third Circuit has never previously allowed the timing of a Batson claim to be material, nor had it ever ruled previously that not knowing the racial composition of the entire jury pool was a fatal flaw in lodging a Batson claim.

The fact that the prosecutor in Abu-Jamal’s case used 10 of the 15 peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from the jury — a strike rate of 66 percent against potential black jurors – is in itself an inference of discrimination. The result was that only three of the 12 jurors impaneled were black.

The Third Circuit should have remanded the case back to Federal District Court Judge Yohn — the judge who ruled on Abu-Jamal’s habeas corpus petition in 2001 — to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine the prosecutors’ reasons for excluding the 10 potential black jurors he struck. If that hearing revealed racial discrimination on the part of the prosecutor during jury selection, Judge Yohn would be compelled to order a new trial for Abu-Jamal.

Abu-Jamal is left with only two remedies to correct the flawed Third Circuit ruling. His first option is to request the Third Circuit to review its decision en banc where the entire panel of judges sitting on the Third Circuit would conduct oral arguments anew. There is some likelihood that the Third Circuit might agree to meet en banc because the panel’s decision to deny Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim went against that court’s own well-established precedents in granting similar Batson claims in the past. However, the barrier to en banc deliberations is a high one: a majority of the sitting judges must vote to reexamine the case. On the Third Circuit Court, there are 12 judges eligible to vote, but four have already recused themselves from this particular case, meaning five of the remaining eight judges would be needed to go forward en banc. Abu-Jamal has most probably had his one day before the Third Circuit.

Barring a reversal by the Third Circuit, Abu-Jamal’s final option is to appeal the Third Circuit’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has on three previous occasions denied to take up his case. This time, though, there is a remote possibility that the high court may take the case up because the Third Circuit’s ruling created new law by placing new restrictions on a defendant’s ability to file a Batson claim.

HB: With the media spotlight on the PA Primary Elections, and the major demonstrations supporting Abu-Jamal on April 19, what would you like the world to know about this famous death-row case? How far has the city of Philadelphia come since the days of Police Commissioner and Mayor Frank Rizzo, a notorious racist and public advocate of police brutality?

JPO: In a real sense, D.A. Lynn Abraham, just as Frank Rizzo before her, embodies the worst of Philadelphia. Known as “the Queen of Death” for her zeal in seeking the death penalty, she was depicted as the nation’s “deadliest D.A.” in a New York Times Magazine article in 1995. Her personal vendetta against Abu-Jamal equals that of Officer Faulkner’s widow. The day Federal District Court Judge Yohn overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence in 2001, Abraham put her antipathy for Abu-Jamal this way: “Today, Mumia Abu-Jamal is what he has always been: a convicted, remorseless, cold-blooded killer.”

The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal represents an enormous miscarriage of justice, representing an extreme example of prosecutorial abuse and judicial bias. What makes getting to the truth about this case so difficult for people, particularly people in Philadelphia, is that the prosecution built its case on perjured testimony with a calculated disregard for what the actual evidence established. The local media bought into the prosecution’s story line early on and has never been able to see this case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and peace loving man.

Two things account for the unprecedented national and international interest in this case. First and foremost is the man himself. Despite more than 25 years of the bleakest existence possible in isolation on death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal remains what he has always been: an articulate, compassionate righter of wrongs. The second thing that makes this case so compelling to such a wide audience is that his trial represents such a monumental abuse of government power to railroad one man that it really says no citizen is truly free until this wrong has been undone.

In the trilogy’s first movie, The Bourne Identity (2002), Jason Bourne, played by Matt Damon, is mysteriously found by fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea, unconscious, with several bullets in his back. After help from the crew’s doctor, Bourne regains consciousness only to discover that he has amnesia and a microchip embedded under his skin, which projects the numbers of a mysterious Swiss bank account. After arriving in Switzerland to investigate this mysterious bank account, Bourne is sleeping at night in a park when he is awakened by police officers who begin to bully him. Without thinking, Bourne fights back and sends both cops to the hospital—now realizing that he possesses extraordinary fighting skills.

Bourne soon learns that he is a CIA assassin, and his gunshot wounds and amnesia have stemmed from a botched assassination attempt on an African leader planning to write a book exposing numerous ultra-secret CIA operations in Africa. Bourne soon realizes that the CIA is now trying to kill him, and after he survives several attempts on his life, he has the inevitable confrontation with his CIA boss, at which point he finally remembers the full details of the failed assassination attempt.

In the second movie, The Bourne Supremacy (2004), he is still suffering from amnesia but can remember some fragments of his past, including several assassinations that he performed for the CIA. Disgusted by his assassin past, he continues his rigorous physical training and also confronts the intense psychological trauma that continues to haunt him. He is particularly haunted by scattered memories of his very first job, where he killed a prominent Russian politician that was opposing the privatization of oil, following the dissolution of the USSR.

As Bourne is hunted once again, this insubordinate, former assassin is forced to use the very fighting skills that he has come to despise. While providing explosive hand-to-hand combat, gunfights, car chases, and a suspenseful plot, the action scenes will satisfy any fan of action movies. However, distinguishing this from the typical action film, it explores Bourne’s deep psychological wounds resulting from his violent past, and his displeasure at having to use violence for his survival. Indeed, the violence is not glorified at all.

This summer’s The Bourne Ultimatum marked the final chapter of this exciting trilogy. After explosive confrontations with CIA “assets” in London and Tangiers, Morocco, Bourne returns to New York City where he finally confronts the man who created him as part of an experimental training program for the CIA’s elite assassins. In the process, Bourne remembers the full details of his “training,” which entailed treatment shockingly similar to the torture tactics used at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Indeed, this is how he was made into an unquestioning trigger-man serving the murderous agenda of US global dominance.

“A Movie For Today”

Recently interviewed by CNN about Ultimatum, Damon said that movie’s similarities to the current war on Iraq were no accident. “All of these movies are very much of the time that they were made, and at a time when we had gone into this war. To have this character aware of what he had done and try to take responsibility for his actions I thought was a really good thing . . . It’s this guy who has done these horrible things, but now we see he thought he was doing them for the right reasons at the time he did them, but he realizes he was sold a bill of goods,” Damon said. “So that’s very much a movie for today.”

Having grown up next-door to anarchist historian Howard Zinn, actor Matt Damon is no stranger to radical politics. In his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting (1997), Damon’s character (a mathematical genius from Boston’s working class) challenges Robin Williams’ character to read Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Williams then responds by challenging him to read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent!

Recently, Damon narrated the documentary about Zinn, titled You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train (2004), and also began a project with FOX Television to create a TV mini-series based on Zinn’s A People’s History, before it was cancelled by FOX.

Damon’s recent films The Good Shepherd (2005) and Syriana (2005) also present a radical critique of the CIA and the general objectives of US foreign policy. In Martin Scorcese’s The Departed (2006), Damon plays a corrupt police officer working for Frank Costello, a real-life Boston gangster with documented ties to the US intelligence community.

Robert Ludlum and the Radical Spy Novel

The recent Bourne movies are based on the trilogy written by best-selling author Robert Ludlum, a WWII veteran who passed away in 2001. The original Bourne Identity was written in 1980, so the new movies have been updated to correspond with recent history. The only real similarities in the plot are that Bourne is a wounded CIA assassin, with amnesia, who is being hunted by the CIA. In the book, Bourne is severely traumatized by his experience leading a US death-squad in the killing fields of the Vietnam War.

In contrast to conservative spy fiction authors like Tom Clancy, who glorify the US National Security State, Ludlum’s many books presented a profoundly critical view of authoritarianism, ruling class power, the military-industrial complex, violence, and the US intelligence community.

Inspired by the emergence of The Trilateral Commission, The Matarese Circle (1979) is Ludlum’s Cold War classic. Two arch enemies (one Russian and one US master-spy) both make themselves wanted fugitives of their respective agency, when they unite to bring down a covert international ruling class network which owns most of the media and the world’s military industries. “The Matarese” have effectively created and supported global wars (including between the US and the USSR) both for war profiteering and to further their overall power over the global poor.

Many of Ludlum’s books focused on US political and economic collaboration with the Nazis, as well as post-WWII Nazi plots to retake power, including The Holcroft Covenant (1977), The Apocalypse Watch (1995), and The Sigma Protocol (2001), whose historically accurate summary of US corporate ties to Nazi Germany, is truly chilling. One of Ludlum’s last books, The Janson Directive, is a harsh critique of liberalism, arguing that alleged motives of “humanitarianism,” often serve as a cover for the sinister agendas of the global corporate elite and the governments that serve their interests.

A movie adaptation of The Chancellor Manuscript (1977) starring Leonardo DiCaprio is due out in 2008. Here, Ludlum addresses US industrialists’ ties to Nazi Germany, illegal CIA domestic spying, and the US military’s murderous racism. The main story is about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive blackmailing of other powerful people, which he used to further his own racist and authoritarian agenda. The book suggests that Hoover was assassinated by someone who then stole his extensive files that he had long used for blackmail. Perhaps he finally blackmailed the wrong person?

The Subversive Action Movie

Popular musicians like Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine, Bruce Springsteen, and the young Bob Dylan, have garnered the support of major record labels and have subsequently been able to bring very radical political analyses into mainstream US culture. In a similar vein, with the support of big media, exciting action movies like The Bourne Ultimatum have been able to present scathing critiques of the status quo to mainstream audiences that simply enjoy a good action movie.

Along with the previously mentioned films, two other post 9-11 spy thrillers are highly recommended. The 2007 film Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg and Danny Glover, is based on the book Point of Impact, about the fictional ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, written by The Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter. Interestingly, in the beginning of Shooter, the disaffected Swagger (played by Wahlberg) is seen viewing the prominently displayed the radical-activist Znet website. After Glover’s character talks him into doing one last favor for the government, Swagger is double-crossed, and proceeds to use his Marine skills to hunt down the private military contractors and politicians who skillfully framed him for a murder that he didn’t commit.

The 2004 version of the 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate, starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, is a riveting critique of the post-911 climate of fear-mongering, the power of transnational corporations like Haliburton, and the chilling real-life history of experiments in mind-control similar to the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.

Check them out!

A Christmas Cage

by Mumia Abu-Jamal
February, 1982

Shortly before 6 A.M., the speaker in this tiny, barren cell blares a message, said to be from prison superintendent David Owens: “A Merry Christmas to all inmates of the Philadelphia prison system. It is our hope that this will be the last holiday season you spend with us.”

A guard reads Owen’s name and the speaker falls silent for a half-hour. I wonder at the words, and ponder my first Christmas in the Hospital wing of the Detention Center. Christmas in a cage.

I have finally been able to read press accounts of the incident that left me near death, a policeman dead, and me charged with his murder. It is nightmarish that my brother and I should be in this foul predicament, particularly since my main accusers, the police, were my attackers as well. My true crime seems to have been my survival of their assaults, for we were the victims that night.

To add insult to injury, I have learned that the forces of “law & order” have threatened my mother and burned, or permitted the burning, of my brother’s street business. Talk about curbside justice! According to some press accounts, cops stood around the fire joking, and then celebrated at the stationhouse.

Nowhere have I read an account of how I got shot, how a bullet happened to find its way near my spine, shattering a rib, splitting a kidney, and nearly destroying my diaphragm. And people wonder why I have no trust in a “fair trial!” Nowhere have I read that a bullet left a hole in my lung, filling it with blood!

Nowhere have I read how police found me, lying in a pool of my blood, unable to breathe, and then proceeded to punch, kick, and stomp me — not question me. I remember being rammed into a pole or a fireplug with police at both arms. I remember kicks to my head, my face, my chest, my belly, my back, and other places. But I have read no press accounts, and have heard tell of no witnesses.

Nowhere have I read of how I was handcuffed, thrown into a paddy wagon, and beaten, kicked, punched and pummeled. Where are the witnesses to a police captain or inspector entering the wagon and beating me with a police radio, all the while addressing me as a “Black motherfucker?” Where are the witnesses to the beating that left me with a four inch scar on my forehead? A swollen jaw? Chipped teeth?

Not to end prematurely, who witnessed me pulled from the paddy wagon, dropped three feet to the cold hard earth, beaten some more, dragged into Jefferson Hospital, and then beaten inside the Hospital as I fought for breath on one lung?

I awoke after surgery to find my belly ripped from top to bottom, with metallic staples protruding. My penis, strapped to a tube, and tubes leading from each nostril to God knows where, was my first recollection. My second was intense pain and pressure in my already ripped kidneys, as a policeman stood at the doorway, a smile on his moustached lips, his nametag removed and his badge covered. Why was he smiling and why the pain? He was standing on a plastic, square bag, the receptacle for my urine!

Am I to trust these men, as they attempt to murder me, again, in a public hospital? Not long afterwards, I was shaken to consciousness by a kick at the foot of my bed. I opened my eyes to see a cop standing in the doorway, an Uzi submachine gun in his hands. “Innocent until proven guilty?”

HIGH WATER PANTS & COLD

Days later, after being transferred to city custody at Guiffre Medical Center, under armed police guard, I was put in a room (#202) in the basement’s detention unit, which is the coldest in the place.

After I was transferred to what’s laughingly referred to as the “new hospital” wing of the Detention Center, I found out what “cold” really means. For the first two days the temperature plummeted so low that inmates wore blankets over their prison jackets.

I had been officially issued a short-sleeved shirt and some tight high-water pants, and I was so cold that for the first night I could not sleep. Other inmates saved me from the cold. One found a prison jacket for me. (I had asked a guard, but he told me I would have to wait until an old inmate rolls, or gets out. So much for “using the system.”) Other inmates, and a kind nurse, supplemented my night warmth.

The prison issued one bedsheet and one light wool blanket. When I protested to a social worker she told me defensively, “I know it’s cold, but there’s nothing I can do. The warden’s been told about the problem.” Why am I concerned about cold? Because the doctor who treated me at Jefferson Hospital explained that the only real threat to my health was pneumonia, because of my punctured lung. Is it purely coincidental that for the next week I spent some of the coldest nights and days of my life? Is the city, through the prison system, trying to kill me before I go to trial? What do they fear? I told this all to my prison social worker (a Mrs. Barbara Waldbaum), and she poo-pooed the suggestion. “No, Mr. Jamal, we want to see you get better.” “Not hardly,” I replied.

Miraculously, after my complaints, some semblance of heat found its way into the cells on my side of the wall. Enough to sleep, at least. Is it coincidental, too, that the heat began to go on the night I was visited by Superintendent David Owens? “It is our hope that this will be the last holiday season you spend with us…” Owens’ words ring through my mind again — is there another, grim meaning to this seemingly innocuous holiday greeting?

ECHOES OF PEDRO SERRANO

There is another side to this controversial case that people are not aware of. My cell is reasonably close to the place where Pedro Serrano was severely beaten and strangled to death. I have talked to eyewitnesses – some who I know in the street. These brothers, at considerable personal peril, have told their stories to police and to prison officials, to city Managing Director W.W. Goode, to the Puerto Rican Alliance, and to me. Some have been threatened by guards for doing so, but they have done so despite the threats.

According to several versions Serrano, who had already been beaten by guards, was shaking his cell door, making noise to attract attention. Guards, angered at the noise, ordered all inmates into lock-up. Most complied. One, a paralyzed, wheel chair-bound inmate, did not. He drove his chair near a wall, and watched in silence.

The guards opened Serrano’s cell, dragged him out, and proceeded to punch, kick and stomp him. He cried out in pain and terror, but the other inmates, locked up, were helpless. One guard, well-known for his violence, reportedly whipped him with his long keychain, producing thin red welts in Serrano’s white flesh.

Before this latest assault on my brother and myself, I covered a press conference called by the Puerto Rican Alliance and members of the Serrano family. I saw photographs of Pedro Serrano, his face swollen even in death. I saw a body riddled with swellings, bruises, and welts. I remember the thick dark bruises beneath his neck and I remember calling David Owens for a comment.

“Mumia,” he answered, “Mr. Serrano was not beaten to death, according to all the reports I’ve received. The Medical the Examiner concurs, Owens said authoritatively. “Mr. Serrano was not beaten by any member of my staff,” Owens would later proclaim to my radio listeners.

Remember the dark bruise around Serrano’s neck? Owens told me he apparently strangled on a leather restraining belt, by exerting pressure until death. Inmate eyewitnesses say a guard wrapped the leather strap around Serrano’s neck and pulled him back into the room, where he was again beaten and placed in restraints. Serrano, arrested for burglary, was described by his wife as being in love with life, and surely not suicidal, as prison officials have suggested.

Why have I recounted these intricacies of a case that is now public knowledge? I’ll tell you why: because my jailers, the men who decide whether I am to leave my cell for food, for phone calls, for pain medication, for a visit for a loved one, are the very same men who are accused of murdering Pedro Serrano!

Remember the D.A.’s claim that police had enough evidence to charge me with murder? How much more evidence do they have on Serrano’s accused murderers? Yet every day they come to work, do their do, and return home to their loved ones … while others sit in isolation and squalor.

Consider the scenario — accused murderers guarding accused murderers! How insane — yet, how telling it is of the system’s brutality.

JUSTICE FOR WHOM?

What is the dividing line? That Serrano was a “spic,” a “dirty P.R.,” and thus his life is worthy of the diversions of a system that talks justice, yet practices genocide. I am accused of killing a policeman, who was, moreover, white. For that, not even the pretense of justice is necessary. “Beat him, shoot him, frame him, put fear into his family” is the unwritten, but very real script.

I have been shackled like a slave, hands and feet, for daring to live. Those who have dared to question the official version have been threatened with dismissal from their jobs, and some with death.

Why do they fear one man so much? Not because they loved his alleged “victim” — but because they fear any questioning of their role of accuser, and, occasionally, executioner. Who polices the police? The D.A. is well-known as a character whose only interest is higher political office — obviously he would oppose a special prosecutor, for he wants his office to have the glory of hanging murder on “the radical reporter.”

Where was Ed Rendell when Winston C.X. Hood and Cornell Warren were summarily executed, their hands shackled behind them? What credence did he give the witnesses to these murders? Or the outright, cold-blooded killing of seventeen-year old William Johnson Green? Or the intentionally broadcast beating of Delbert Africa? Where was his unquenchable thirst for justice then? Need we mention Pedro Serrano?

Make no mistaka-jaka! As a nigger or a spic, there is no semblance of justice and we better stop lying to ourselves.

Who are we to blame? No one but ourselves. For we condone and allow it to happen. We are still locked in the slavish mentality of our past centuries, for we care more for the oppressor than for ourselves.

How many more martyrs will bleed their last, before we wake up, stand up, demand and fight for justice?

And justice, true justice, comes not from the good graces of the Philadelphia Police Department, the District Attorney’s office, the court system, or your friendly neighborhood lawyer. It comes from God, the giver of your very life, your health, your air, and your food.

* For more information, the Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal website is: Abu-Jamal-News.com or also visit: FreeMumia.com (NYC), FreeMumia.org (SF), EmajOnline.com (Educators for Mumia), PrisonRadio.org (Mumia’s Radio Essays), or contact:

International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone – 215-476-8812/ Fax – 215-476-6180
E-mail – icffmaj@aol.com

The December 6 broadcast of NBC’s Today Show, the highest rated morning news show in the country, featured the newly discovered Mumia Abu-Jamal/Daniel Faulkner crime scene photos taken by press photographer Pedro P. Polakoff. The photos had been completely ignored by the mainstream media (only published by the SF Bay View), until a Dec. 4 Reuters article reported on a press conference in Philadelphia where the photos were presented by several prominent journalists, along with other evidence of both an unfair trial and innocence, as was also reported by the Black Commentator.

The photos were presented on the Today Show segment featuring Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner, marking the release of their new book titled Murdered by Mumia. The show followed a massive media-activist campaign that was launched weeks before by supporters of Abu-Jamal to “ensure fairness” on the Dec. 6 program. A large group of Mumia supporters gathered outside the show, and passed out flyers challenging the statement made at the “Murdered by Mumia” website that he “was unanimously convicted of the crime by a racially mixed jury based on: the testimony of several eyewitnesses, his ownership of the murder weapon, matching ballistics, and Abu-Jamal’s own confession.”

Murdered by Mumia: A Police Widow’s Fight For Justice?

The title used for the show, “Murdered by Mumia: A Police Widow’s Fight For Justice,” certainly could have been better since it does serve to equate “justice” with executing Mumia because that is Faulkner’s stated goal. However, after getting past this problematic title, it became clear that this would not be the typical biased mainstream media report on this controversial and emotionally charged case, as we have seen with past shows like ABC’s 20/20.

Co-host Matt Lauer introduced the show by reporting that “On December 9th, 1981 a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed while serving in the line of duty. A man named Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. To this day he maintains his innocence. To some he is a cold-blooded killer, to others he’s a political prisoner.”

After Lauer’s short introduction, the set-up piece begins with video and narration by NBC’s Rehema Ellis. While showing video footage of Mumia and numerous demonstrations supporting him, the narrator states that “there have been rallies and fundraisers for a man, many say was framed by a racist legal system.” While displaying the new photos, the narrator reports, “now supporters say there is new photographic evidence that should lead to a new trial,” followed directly with a quote from attorney Robert R. Bryan, that “the jury only saw one side of the coin.”

As the report progressed, it became clear that this was not the typical report from the mainstream media, as expressed in several ways:

1. NBC honestly reported how Abu-Jamal remains in his death-row cell despite the 2001 federal court decision overturning the death penalty.

2. The recognition that “to this day he maintains his innocence” was atypical. Often coverage repeats as fact, the false claim that Mumia has never proclaimed his innocence.

3. The footage of various demonstrations and supporters for Mumia was fairly extensive, and not presented in a demeaning way (as is usually done with labels like “Hollywood Chic,” which serve to trivialize supporters as ignorant or naive dupes. They recognize that Mumia does have strong support around the word, and there is footage of Pam Africa, coordinator of Mumia’s international support network (ICFFMAJ), speaking at a demonstration: “It’s a righteous cause. That’s why you see people here from Belgium, France, Germany, and South Africa.”

After the interview with Faulkner and Smerconish begins, footage is shown of the large demonstration in support of Mumia while Lauer says: “I want to show people a live shot outside our studio right now and show them that there is a fairly substantial protest right across the street from our studio. These people got up early in the morning, came from someplace to express their views that this man is innocent. Why do you think they’re here if they don’t truly believe that?”

Faulkner answers: “They are trying the case in the court of public opinion, and not in the court of law. That is why I think people need to read the book. It’s all there. My life, the facts, [and] what happened the night my husband was murdered. It’s all in the book.”

Lauer then cites attorney Robert R, Bryan, as saying that “when the decision came down in 1982, there were constitutional issues, racism, injustice, and evidence tampering,” then further quoting Bryan as saying that Smerconish is an opportunist.

In response, Smerconish cites the fact that he is not making any money from the book, but Lauer interrupts him, saying “maybe he’s not talking about financial gain,” but rather about “status and attention.” After Lauer asks this, they show a close up of Maureen Faulkner where she appears to be glaring at Lauer.

The Crime Scene Photos

At this point, Matt Lauer brings up the new evidence: “There are some photographs that have been released by supporters of Mumia, and they were taken by a freelancer named Pedro Polakoff. The supporters say that these photos show a policeman holding two guns in his bare hand, contradicting the officer’s trial testimony that he had preserved ballistics evidence. Another shows you husband’s hat on top of a car, and not on the sidewalk as it is in the official police photo of the crime scene. A third shows a blood-stained sidewalk where the shooting took place, but does not show any signs of the marks in the concrete that might have occurred if your husband had been shot from above as prosecutors contended. The defense attorney says that he can ‘have a field day’ with these photographs if a new trial…”

Cutting off Lauer, Smerconish makes no attempts to challenge any of these stated facts. He says “This is the outrage. For 26 years, these canards have enabled the manipulation of the process. It’s as reliable as the fact that Christmas is on the 25th of December, that they will come up with something every year. One year it was a guy who stood up and said, ‘I know who murdered Danny Faulkner — I did it,’ and the defense lawyers thought he was preposterous. Another year, there was a guy who said he was there and that the dying words of Danny Faulkner were “get Maureen, get the children,” when everyone agrees that he died instantly, and unfortunately she never had the chance to have children with Danny. Where does it stop?”

Maureen asks “Where have these pictures been for 26 years? I mean, where have they been? Why hasn’t this man come forth sooner than now.”

Lauer then asks his final question: “Maureen, when you’re alone with your thoughts at night, when you even see pictures of the protests like the one we have across the street, does it ever cross your mind that perhaps they’re right? Do you ever allow yourself to consider the fact that perhaps he didn’t do it?”

Faulkner’s response? “No. He murdered my husband in cold blood and there is no doubt in my mind. Absolutely no doubt.”

Where Have These Pictures Been For 26 Years?

Smerconish did not try and challenge anything factually about the photos, but rather shifted the topic to two completely unrelated witnesses. In contrast, Faulkner addressed them directly by asking why it took 26 years for the photos to emerge publicly.

I asked German author Michael Schiffmann (who discovered them in 2006) to respond to this statement from Faulkner. Dr. Schiffmann says: “Indeed she has a point here. The reason it took so long is that the DA didn’t want these photos, indeed didn’t want to have anything to do with them and actually deep-sixed them. We can ask, why? Their authenticity is not in question as several of them appeared in the papers at the time. They didn’t want them on account of what they might show, an investigation that was incredibly sloppy and manipulative. Their lack of interest — and the fact that they didn’t inform the defense — alone might be reason for a new trial, as correctly pointed out by Linn Washington at the Dec. 4 press conference in Philadelphia.”

This issue of the delay, was one of the central discussions at the Dec. 4 Journalists for Mumia press conference

Huddle was apparently convinced that this is serious evidence that deserves media attention, because later that day he wrote an article for Reuters that accurately presented our stance regarding the new photo evidence and our demand for a new trial.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This important show, and its recognition of the new crime scene photos must now be used to go even further. The new mainstream credibility of the photos can be utilized to kick start more media coverage and a longer, more in-depth mainstream media investigation into Polakoff’s photos. Because these photos are such powerful evidence, it can only help us if the mainstream media puts these photos under intense scrutiny. Please help by contacting the mainstream media and asking them to investigate these photos further — giving them the public spotlight they deserve.

For more information about the crime scene photos, see the May 18, 2007 press release by Journalists for Mumia and the October, 2007 press release written by Princeton University Professor Mark L. Taylor of Educators for Mumia.

A full transcript of the Today Show’s “Murdered by Mumia: A Police Widow’s Fight For Justice” is available with an article by Geoffrey Dickens who writes critically about the show from the anti-Mumia perspective.

The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Journalists for Mumia, and Educators for Mumia have initiated a media-activist campaign urging people to write The Today Show at today@msnbc.com asking them to fairly present both sides of the Mumia Abu-Jamal / Daniel Faulkner case, by also featuring as guests, Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC).

A sample letter, accompanied by an extensive informational press pack has been created to use for contacting The Today Show. Please take a minute and contact them to ensure fair media coverage of this controversial and important case.

Sincerely,

The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal

Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal

SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Today Show,

On December, 2007, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal will be entering the 27th year. In the course of those years, much of the media coverage has contained pure speculation and falsehoods. Media watchdogs like FAIR.ORG have sharply criticized this coverage as being biased against Abu-Jamal.

We understand that on Dec. 6, the Today Show intends to air a show about Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner’s book Murdered By Mumia. Interestingly, the scheduled interview regarding the new book focusing on Mrs. Faulkner comes at a time of many startling new developments in this historic case, generating international attention.

Reflecting the international interest in this case, in 2003, Abu-Jamal was named an honorary citizen of Paris, and in 2006, the city of St. Denis named a street after him. While this was largely motivated by opposition to the death penalty, they also cited strong evidence of both an unfair trial and Abu-Jamal’s innocence.

One of these developments centers on extraordinary photos of the 1981 crime scene taken by Philadelphia-based press photographer Pedro Polakoff that reveal manipulation of evidence, and completely contradict the prosecution’s case, including Officer James Forbes’ testimony that he properly handled both Abu-Jamal’s and Faulkner’s guns (the photos show Forbes holding both guns in his bare hand). Also the photos reveal that there were no large bullet divots or destroyed chunks of cement where Faulkner was found, which should be visible in the pavement if the prosecution’s scenario was accurate, according to which Abu-Jamal shot down at Faulkner and allegedly missed several times while Faulkner was on his back. Of particular note, this photographer twice attempted to provide these photos to the District Attorney for both the 1982 trial and the 1995 PCRA hearings, and was ignored both times.

Since his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has published six books and countless articles, and has delivered hundreds of speeches, including keynote addresses for college graduations. As a prolific writer and tenacious journalist, he has earned the respect (and support) of such notable prize-winning authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Salman Rushdie. Just recently, he was accepted into the PEN American Center, one of the highest honors a writer can achieve. Additionally, at the time of his arrest, he was president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Association of Black Journalists, and was awarded the PEN Oakland award for outstanding journalism after the publication of his first book, Live from Death Row. Since Live, he has garnered a following of dedicated readers around the world, including scholars, college educators, and journalists. His work is, in part, testament to the dignity he has demonstrated for the past 25 years he has been on death row.

The ethical interests in balance and fairness in presenting “news” regarding the Abu-Jamal case, arguably requires providing Today Show viewers with information evidencing Mr. Abu-Jamal’s innocence and unfair trial. To represent this other side, and to provide perspectives addressing the informational needs of your viewers, I ask that you also feature experts Linn Washington, Jr. (Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University) and Dr. Suzanne Ross (Clinical Psychologist and Co-Chair of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC) as guests on your Dec. 6 show (they can be contacted via Journalists for Mumia: hbjournalist@gmail.com).

While Mrs. Faulkner certainly has a “story” and is entitled to her opinions, your viewers should be privy to other facts, such as the prosecution withholding key evidence, witness coercion, racist jury selection, and evidence that Judge Albert Sabo boasted about his desire to help the prosecution “fry the nigger,” as enclosed in the press packet provided here for you: http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/pr/PressPackNov07.pdf

I also write to provide you with information (inclusive of material from Abu-Jamal’s lawyer) in the interests of journalistic balance, fairness and integrity. The press packet includes 1) A recent Black Commentator article by Philadelphia lawyer/journalist David A. Love describing the significance of the Polakoff photos, 2) An Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal press release about the Polakoff photos, written by Princeton University Professor Mark L. Taylor, 3) Criticism of the 1998 ABC 20/20 program about Abu-Jamal, 4) Background on the case, focusing on both the 1982 trial and 1995-97 PCRA hearings, with a focus on Abu-Jamal’s alleged “hospital confession,” ballistics evidence, and the testimony of Veronica Jones, 5) Recent police intimidation of Abu-Jamal’s supporters, including reported death threats against Sgt. DeLacy Davis, of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, and more.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Today, Ramona recalls being in the basement with the children when the assault began. “Water started pouring in from the hoses. Then the tear gas came after explosives blew the whole front of the house off. After hearing a lot of gunfire, things became pretty quiet. It was then that they dropped the bomb without any warning.”

“At first, those of us in the basement didn’t realize that the house was on fire because there was so much tear gas that it was hard to recognize smoke. We opened the door and started to yell that we were coming out with the kids. The kids were hollering too. We know they heard us but the instant we were visible in the doorway, they opened fire. You could hear the bullets hitting all around the garage area. They deliberately took aim and shot at us. Anybody can see that their aim, very simply, was to kill MOVE people — not to arrest anybody.”

After surviving the bombing, Ramona was charged with conspiracy, riot, and multiple counts of simple and aggravated assault. Her sentence was 16 months to 7 years, but she served the full seven years when she was denied parole for not renouncing MOVE. In court, all charges listed on the May 11 arrest warrant, used to justify the assault, were dismissed by the judge. Says Ramona, “This means that they had no valid reason to even be out there, but they did not dismiss the charges placed on me as a result of what happened after they came out.”

Concluding Ramona’s 1986 trial, Judge Stiles explicitly told the jurors not to consider any wrongdoing by police and other government officials, because they would be held accountable in “other” proceedings. This would never happen, as Ramona explains: “not one single official, police officer, or anybody else has ever been held accountable for the murder of my family.”

“People should not be fooled by this government using words like ‘justice.’ My family members, who were parents of most of those children that were murdered on May 13, have been in prison for almost 30 years to this day, for the accusation of a murder that they didn’t commit, that nobody saw them commit. Meanwhile, the people who murdered their babies are still collecting paychecks, still seen as respectable, and never did a day in jail.”

Origins of the Confrontation

The 1985 police bombing was the culmination of many years of political repression by Philadelphia authorities. Much has already been written about the events of May 13, 1985, but less is told of the “MOVE 9”: Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa. These nine MOVE members were jointly sentenced in the 1978 killing of Officer James Ramp after a year-long police stakeout of MOVE’s Powelton Village home. Their parole hearings come up in 2008. Ramona Africa explains, “The government came out to Powelton Village in 1978 not to arrest, but to kill. Having failed to do that, my family was unjustly convicted of a murder that the government knows they didn’t commit, and imprisoned them with 30-100 year sentences. Later, when we as a family dared to speak up against this, they came out to our home again and dropped a bomb on us, burned babies alive.”

First, some history:

Founded in the early 70’s by John Africa, MOVE sought to expose and challenge all injustice and abuse of all forms of life, including animals and nature. Along with neighborhood activism, MOVE also organized nonviolent protests at zoos, animal testing facilities, public forums, corporate media outlets, and other places.

MOVE’s first conflicts with police began at these nonviolent protests when Mayor Frank Rizzo’s police reacted in their typical brutal fashion. From the very beginning, MOVE acted on the principle of self-defense and “met fist with fist.” Defending this today, Ramona Africa explains “I’m sure the police were outraged that these ‘niggers’ had stood up to them, telling them that they couldn’t come and beat on our men, women, and babies without us defending themselves. What are people supposed to do? Sit back and take that shit?”

Given Rizzo’s iron-fist rule, confrontation with MOVE was inevitable. Infamous for his racist brutality as Police Commissioner from 1968-71, Rizzo once publicly boasted that his police force would be so repressive that he’d “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” He was elected mayor in 1972, with campaign slogans like “Vote White.” By 1979, his police force would become the first PD ever indicted by the federal government, when the Justice Dept had brought suit against civil authorities– not just police officials. The suit named Rizzo and 20 other top city officials (inclusive of police command) for aiding and abetting police brutality.

Police attacks on MOVE escalated on May 9, 1974 when two pregnant MOVE women, Janet and Leesing, miscarried after being beaten by police and jailed overnight without food or water. On April 29, 1975, Alberta Africa lost her baby after she was arrested, dragged from a holding cell, held down, and beaten in the stomach and vagina.

On the night of March 18, 1976, seven MOVE prisoners had just been released and were greeting their family in front of their Powelton Village home in West Philadelphia, when police arrived and set upon the crowd. Six MOVE men were arrested and beaten so badly that they suffered fractured skulls, concussions and chipped bones. Janine Africa was thrown to the ground and stomped on while holding her 3-week old Life Africa. The baby’s skull was crushed and Life was dead.

After MOVE notified the media of the attack and baby’s death, the police publicly claimed that because there was no birth certificate, there was no baby and that MOVE was lying. In response, MOVE invited journalists and political figures to their home to view the corpse. Shortly after the attack, renowned Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal (now on death row) interviewed an eyewitness who had watched from a window directly across the street. “I saw that baby fall,” the old man said. “They were clubbing the mother. I knew the baby was going to get hurt. I even reached for the phone to call the police, before I realized that it was the police. You know what I mean?” The District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute the murder.

The Standoff Begins

In response to the escalated police violence, MOVE staged a major demonstration on May 20, 1977. They took to a large platform in front of their house, with several members holding what appeared to be rifles. MOVE explains that: “We told the cops there wasn’t gonna be any more undercover deaths. This time they better be prepared to murder us in full public view ‘cause if they came at us with fists, we were gonna come back at them with fists. If they came at us with clubs, we’d come back at them with clubs, and if they came at us with guns, we’d use guns too. We don’t believe in death-dealing guns. We believe in life, but we knew the cops wouldn’t be too quick to attack us if they had to face the same stuff they dished out so casually on unarmed defenseless folk.”

Speaking through megaphones on the platform, MOVE demanded a release of their political prisoners and an end to violent harassment from the city. Heavily armed police surrounded the house, and a likely police attack was averted when a crowd from the community broke through the police line and stood in front of MOVE’s home to shield the residents from gunfire.

Days later, Judge Lynn Abraham responded by issuing warrants for 11 MOVE members on riot charges and “possession of an instrument of crime.” Police then set up a 24-hour watch around MOVE’s house to arrest members leaving the property, a standoff that lasted for almost a year.

Mayor Rizzo escalated the conflict on March 16, 1978, when police sealed off a four-block perimeter around MOVE headquarters, blocking food and shutting of the water supply. Rizzo boasted the blockade “was so tight, a fly couldn’t get through.” Numerous community residents were beaten and arrested when they attempted to deliver food and water to the pregnant women, nursing babies, and children inside.

After the two-month starvation blockade, MOVE and the City came to a fragile agreement under pressure from the federal government and a very sophisticated campaign mounted by a Philly based community coalition. On May 8, 1978, MOVE prisoners were released, and the police searched MOVE’s house for weapons. Police were shocked to find only inoperable dummy firearms and road flares made to look like dynamite. In the agreement, the DA agreed to drop all charges against MOVE and effectively purge MOVE from the court system within 4-6 weeks. In return, MOVE would move out of their home within a 90-day period, while the city assisted them in finding a new location.

After searching the MOVE home and finding only inoperable dummy weapons, police began to modify terms of the agreement, focusing on the alleged 90-day “deadline,” for MOVE to leave their home. MOVE says that the 90-day time period had been described to them as “a workable timetable for us to relocate,” but “was misrepresented to the media as an absolute deadline. MOVE made it clear to officials that we’d move to other houses but we were keeping our headquarters open as a school.”

At an August 2, 1978 hearing, Judge Fred DiBona ruled that MOVE had violated the deadline and signed arrest warrants that would justify the police siege the following week.

The morning of August 8, hundreds of riot police moved in, bulldozers toppled their fence & outdoor platform, and cranes smashed their home’s windows. Forty-five armed police searched the house and found that MOVE was barricaded in the basement. Police began to flood them out with high-pressure hoses.

Suddenly gunshots fired, likely from a house across the street. Police opened fire on MOVE’s house—using over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The police and most of the mainstream media would later report that MOVE had fired these first shots. However, KYW Radio reporters John McCullough and Larry Rosen both recalled hearing the first shot come from a house diagonally across the street, where they saw an arm holding a gun out of a third floor window.

The subsequent gunfire was chaotic and mostly directed at the flooded basement. Officer James Ramp was fatally wounded in the melee. Three other policemen and several firemen were also hit. A stake-out officer admitted later, under oath, that he had emptied his carbine shooting into the basement, where he heard screaming women and crying children. At a staff meeting days later, a police captain noted “an excessive amount of unnecessary firing on the part of police personnel when there were no targets per se to shoot at.”

When MOVE eventually surrendered and came out of the house, their children were taken and the adults were viciously beaten. Chuck and Mike Africa had been shot in the basement. Live television documented the violent arrest of Delbert Africa. He was smashed in the head with a rifle butt and metal helmet. While on the ground, he was brutally stomped. Twelve MOVE adults were arrested.

At a press conference that afternoon, asked whether this was the last Philadelphia would see of MOVE, Rizzo proclaimed “the only way we’re going to end them is, get that death penalty back, put them in the electric chair, and I’ll pull the switch.”

Destruction of Evidence

The subsequent case against the “MOVE 9,” was plagued by factual inconsistencies and illegal police manipulation of evidence.

Temple University professor and Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington covered the August 8 confrontation and the trial of the MOVE 9. Interviewed in the recent documentary MOVE, narrated by Howard Zinn, Washington stated that “the police department knows who killed Officer Ramp. It was another police officer, who inadvertently shot the guy. They have fairly substantial evidence that it was a mistake, but again they’ll never admit it. I got this from a number of different sources in the police department, including sources on the SWAT team and sources in ballistics.”

Manipulation of evidence began immediately after the MOVE adults were arrested: Mayor Rizzo ordered the police to bulldoze MOVE’s home by 1:30pm that day. Police did nothing to preserve the crime scene, inscribe chalk marks, or measure ballistics angles. In a preliminary hearing on a Motion to Dismiss, MOVE unsuccessfully argued that destroying their home had prevented them from proving that it was physically impossible for MOVE to have shot Ramp. MOVE cited the case of Illinois Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark where the preservation of the crime scene enabled investigators to prove that all the bullet holes in the walls and doors were the result of police gunfire.

The photographic evidence presented in court was also incomplete. Before demolishing MOVE’s house, police did take photos of empty shelves and claimed they had been used to store their guns. However, there were no photos of MOVE pointing or shooting guns from the basement windows, of police removing weapons from the house, or supporting the claim that police removed guns from the mud of the basement floor. To the contrary, a police video viewed in court actually shows then police commissioner Joseph O’Neill passing guns into MOVE’s front basement window.

Strongly suggesting the deliberate destruction of evidence, police video footage was also blanked out at the point where Ramp was shot on all three police videotapes presented in court.

Ballistics evidence presented about Officer Ramp’s death is also inconsistent. In the documentary film MOVE, Linn Washington recalls the treatment of evidence at the trial. “They had a big problem with the authenticity and thus the validity of the medical examiner’s report. The prosecutor took out a pencil and erased items in the report that he didn’t like. Now MOVE was objecting and the judge was saying ‘sit down and shut up’ and allowed the guy to do that.”

On August 8, The Philadelphia Bulletin reported that Ramp had been “shot in the back of the head according to the police log.” The next day, the Daily News instead reported that the bullet head entered his throat at a downward trajectory in the direction towards his heart. Later, in court, the prosecution’s medical examiner, Dr. Marvin Aronson testified that the bullet entered his “chest from in front and coursed horizontally without deviation up or down.”

In their recent newsletter, MOVE argues that if they had shot from the basement, the bullet would have been coming at an “upward” trajectory instead of the “horizontal” and “downward” accounts that had been presented. This crucial point aside, it would have been essentially impossible to take a clean shot at that time. The water in the basement, estimated more than 7 feet deep, forced the adults to hold up children and animals to prevent them from drowning. “The water pressure was so powerful it was picking up 6 foot long railroad ties (beams that were part of our fence) and throwing them through the basement windows in on us. There’s no way anybody could have stood up against this type of water pressure, debris, and shoot a gun, or aim to kill somebody.”

On May 4, 1980, Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa were convicted of 3rd degree murder, conspiracy, and multiple counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault. Each was given a sentence of 30-100 years. Two other people denounced MOVE and were released. Consuela Africa was tried separately because the prosecutor found no evidence that she was a MOVE member.

Mumia Abu-Jamal writes that the MOVE 9 “were convicted of being united, not in crime, but in rebellion against the system and in resistance to the armed assaults of the state. They were convicted of being MOVE members.”

When Judge Malmed was a guest a few days later on a talk radio show, Abu-Jamal called in and asked him who killed Ramp. The Judge admitted, “I have absolutely no idea” and explained that since MOVE called itself a family, he sentenced them as such.

Preparing for 2008 Parole Hearing

Mike Africa, Jr. wants his parents to come home. The son of MOVE 9 prisoners Mike and Debbie, Mike Jr. was born in prison just weeks after his mother withstood police gunfire and a vicious beating on Aug. 8, 1978. Today, Mike Jr. explains that growing up without parents is “very hard. It’s like missing part of yourself. The system separated MOVE people like they did because they know it’s hard to deal with being separated from your family.”

After the May 13, 1985 bombing, Mike Jr’s grandmother decided to leave MOVE, and brought him and his sister with her. “Not being in MOVE and not having parents was especially hard because I didn’t understand why my parents were in prison I was ashamed. It was never really explained to me until Ramona brought me back to MOVE following her 1992 release.” Since returning to MOVE, Mike Jr. has traveled around the world publicizing the struggle to release his parents and the other MOVE 9 prisoners.

August 2008 will mark the 30th year of the MOVE 9’s imprisonment, and they will be eligible for parole for the first time. MOVE has begun to organize and raise public support for their release. Ramona Africa is particularly concerned about two possible clauses that can be implemented to deny parole.

First is the “taking responsibility” clause, which basically demands a prisoner admit guilt in order to be granted parole. “That is not acceptable, because it is patently illegal. If a person was convicted in court, to then demand that they admit guilt — even when they are maintaining their innocence, as the MOVE 9 are — is ridiculous. The only issue for parole should be issues of misconduct in prison that could indicate one’s not ready for parole. Other than that, an inmate should be paroled,” explains Ramona.

Second is the “serious nature of offense” clause. “This is patently illegal too because the judge took this into consideration and when the sentence was issued, it meant that barring any misconduct, problems, new charges, etc. this prisoner was to be released on their minimum. To deny that is basically a re-sentence. We’re dealing with these issues because when our family comes up for parole, we don’t want to hear this nonsense.”

MOVE held a conference May 12, and is organizing another for later in August, dealing with this issue of parole for political prisoners. Ramona also urges to people to support Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal before the Federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals: “This brother’s life is on the line here. … He became a target of the government because he was the only journalist that consistently reported on the truth about what was going on with MOVE. Mumia gave us his support uncompromisingly throughout the years and that is why we give him our support and loyalty now.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal writes today, “The muted public response to the mass murder of MOVE members has set the stage for acceptable state violence against radicals, against blacks, and against all deemed socially unacceptable. … The twisted mentalities at work here are akin to those of Nazi Germany, or perhaps more appropriately, of My Lai, of Vietnam, of Baghdad, the spirit behind the mindlessly murderous mantra that echoed out of Da Nang: ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it.’ ”

Over the years, MOVE has never been left in peace. The 1978 and 1985 police destruction of MOVE’s homes; the arrest and capital sentence of reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal, who covered the MOVE conflicts; the 1998 death of Merle Africa in prison; and the 2002 custody battle over Zachary Gilbride Africa are only a few examples of MOVE’s long history of confronting the system. This tradition is best summed up by MOVE founder John Africa in his 1981 speech to the jury before he was acquitted of federal weapons charges in the famous criminal trial, “John Africa vs. The System”:

“It is past time for all poor people to release themselves from the deceptive strangulation of society…This system has failed you yesterday, failed you today, and has created conditions for failure tomorrow, for society is wrong, the system is reeling, the courts of this complex are filled with imbalance. Cops are insane, the judges enslaving, the lawyers are just as the judges they confront. … trained by the system to be as the system, to do for the system, exploit with the system, and MOVE ain’t gonna close our eyes to this monster.”

The new crime scene photos described by Bryan were recently unveiled in Philadelphia by German author Michael Schiffmann, during a crucial week for Abu-Jamal.

On May 17, a three-judge panel from the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals held oral arguments in Philadelphia and considered four different issues regarding the fairness of Abu-Jamal’s original 1982 trial. Joined by Christina Swarns of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Bryan argued that Abu-Jamal’s trial was tainted with racist jury selection, confusing jury instructions, prosecutorial misconduct in summation to the jury (at both guilt and penalty phases), and the bias of a trial judge that a court stenographer overheard boasting in 1982, that he was going to help the prosecution “fry the nigger.”

Supporters of Abu-Jamal packed the federal courthouse and held a large demonstration outside on the street. While many of the hundreds of supporters outside held large posters displaying the new crime scene photos to the Philadelphia public, the explosive new evidence could not be presented in the courtroom because of the narrow “four-issue” scope of the oral arguments.

Only a new trial will allow this new photographic evidence to be presented before a court.

German Author Michael Schiffmann Presents New Photos

Among the many international observers in Philadelphia for the hearing, was German author Michael Schiffmann, who utilized the important week to present the crime scene photos and other new evidence from his new book (not yet published in the US) “Race Against Death; Mumia Abu-Jamal: a Black Revolutionary in White America,” an expansion of Schiffmann’s PhD dissertation at the University of Heidelberg, just released in Germany.

Following the May 17 oral arguments, Schiffmann presented Race Against Death to a standing-room only crowd at a community center in West Philadelphia. Along with presenting original ballistics analysis, Schiffmann unveiled the new crime scene photos from the morning of December 9, 1981, that have only been published in his German book.

Schiffmann recounted how in May, 2006, he discovered two photographs on the Internet that were taken by the only press photographer immediately present at the 1981 crime scene – Pedro P. Polakoff, III. Upon contacting him, Polakoff told Schiffmann that he arrived within 12 minutes of hearing about the shooting on the police radio and about ten minutes before the Mobile Crime Unit (responsible for forensics and photographs) arrived. According to Polakoff, this unit had still not taken any photos when Polakoff left after 30-45 minutes at the scene.

Schiffmann published five of Polakoff’s photos in Race Against Death, and chose four of those to present to the US public on thousands of large posters spread around Philadelphia, and also on the “Journalists for Mumia” website, Abu-Jamal-News.com.

One photo is of Police Officer James Forbes, who testified in court that he had secured the weapons of both Faulkner and Abu-Jamal without touching them on their metal parts in order to not destroy potential fingerprints. Attorney Robert R. Bryan considers this photograph of Forbes to be the “most stunning example” of the “incompetent manner in which the police at the scene dealt with the evidence,” because Forbes is “holding both pistols found at the scene in one hand, bare-handed! This is unthinkable. A nitwit could do better. Why were there no fingerprint tests? Why no ballistic examinations? It reminds me of a scene from ‘The Keystone Cops,’ the way the evidence was being handled and manipulated, except this was not funny.”

Another, two-photo sequence shows that the police moved P.O. Faulkner’s hat from the roof of Abu-Jamal’s brother’s car, and placed it instead on the sidewalk in front of 1234 Locust where it was later photographed by the police photographer who arrived 10 minutes after Polakoff.

The last photo is of the large, empty space directly behind P.O. Faulkner’s car, where the second-most important prosecution witness, cab driver Robert Chobert, testified to have been parked when he claimed to have observed Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner.

Schiffmann extensively interviewed Polakoff about what he saw and heard at the crime scene, and reports in Race that “according to Polakoff, at that time all the officers present expressed the firm conviction that Abu-Jamal had been the passenger in Billy Cook’s VW and had shot and killed Faulkner by a single shot fired from the passenger seat of the car.”

While this observation contradicts the official prosecution scenario that Abu-Jamal ran from across the street before shooting Faulkner, it strongly supports Schiffmann’s original ballistics analysis and conclusion that a third person (not Abu-Jamal or his brother Billy Cook) most likely shot and killed Faulkner. This third person was Kenneth Freeman (Billy Cook’s friend and business partner), who – according to the available evidence – was the passenger in Cook’s car, and was therefore the black male that six eyewitnesses reported to see fleeing the scene moments before other police arrived.

Polakoff also told Schiffmann that the police opinion that the passenger was the shooter “was apparently based on the testimony of three witnesses who were still present at the crime scene, namely, by the parking lot attendant in charge of the parking lot on the Northern side of Locust Street, by a drug addicted woman apparently acquainted with the parking lot attendant, and another woman. As Polakoff later heard from colleagues in the media, the parking lot attendant had disappeared the day after, while the drug-addicted witness died a couple of days later from an overdose.”

Schiffmann concludes that “whatever it was that these witnesses saw or did not see, we will probably never know – the interesting fact in any case is that neither of them ever appeared in any report presented by the police or the prosecution.”

Polakoff told Schiffmann that he was simply ignored when he repeatedly contacted the DA’s office in 1982 and 1995 to give them his account–and his photos–of the crime scene.

Mainstream Media Ignores Photos

While a few alternative media websites like The Independent Media Center (indymedia.org) and Infoshop News (infoshop.org) have enthusiastically reported on the unveiling of Polakoff’s photos, a “Google” news search reveals a total blackout in the mainstream media. Not even one mainstream media outlet has reported on them.

Veteran Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington, Jr., has been covering the Abu-Jamal case for over 25 years. He feels that the media’s absolute failure to even acknowledge these explosive photos continues a long history of media bias against Abu-Jamal’s fight for a new and fair trial. This shows “once again how this supposed information seeking institution shirks its ethical duties in the Abu-Jamal case to ‘seek truth and report it.’”

“This series of photographs damage the prosecution’s case significantly because they graphically show police tampering with and manipulating the crime scene.”

“Given the old ‘picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words’ dynamic, it is not surprising that the prosecutor repeatedly rejected this photographer’s offers of assistance because his photos expose the structural flaws in the case presented in court against Abu-Jamal. These photos provide additional evidence that the jury did not consider all of the available evidence due to misconduct by police and prosecutors. This misconduct fuels demands for a fair trial in this case.”

Listen to the audio from Michael Schiffmann’s presentation:

http://insubordination.blogspot.com/2007/05/audio-press-release-new-mumia-crime.html

View the crime scene photos:

http://Abu-Jamal-News.com

Hans Bennett: While many of us gathered here in Philadelphia on April 24 celebrating the birthday of Mumia Abu-Jamal, you were in Texas visting Haramia KiNassor (Kenneth Foster, Jr.) on death row. How was your visit?

Walidah Imarisha: It was a hard decision to be down in Texas instead of in Philly for Mumia’s birthday. Mumia’s Live From Death Row was a catalyst for so much of my political understanding and organizing work, and working on his campaign is one of the main reasons I moved to Philadelphia.

But I knew that being in Texas and meeting with Haramia would be one of the organizing moves that Mumia would be supportive of, and Haramia and I kept his birthday on our minds and our tongues as we talked about the work Mumia does, in relation to the work that Haramia and the other brothas on death row in Texas are doing.

Texas is rough. Prison in Texas is incredibly difficult, and death row in Texas brings to mind Mumia’s quote of a “bright shining hell.”

I met Haramia, who has been on death row for 10 years, first through his poetry, when I was the editor of AWOL Magazine, where he has had several pieces published, and then through The Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner family organization I work with in Philadelphia. Hasan Shakur, a close comrade of Haramia’s, started an HRC chapter in Texas and brought Haramia in, and he served for a while on our advisory council. I had never met him in person before April 23rd.

I entered the death row visiting area, the same area I went to see Hasan Shakur before they executed him Aug. 31, 2006. Usually visits on Texas’ row are only two hours, but because I came from out of town, I was able to request two four hour visits on consecutive days. I sat down in front of a cage, behind glass, an all white cage. As I sat and waited for them to bring Haramia out, I remembered looking through that same glass to see Hasan on the other side, his dark frame looking even larger in the cramped whiteness of the mesh cage.

They finally brought Haramia out, dressed all in white as are all prisoners at the Polunsky Unit. I was struck by how young he looked. Just like Hasan, these two strong brothas, who have been through hell every day, who are committed souljahs to the struggle, still can have their faces split with wide summer day smiles that call their child selves back into their bodies.

The time visiting with him today flew by. He has such an incredibly quick mind, we went from one subject to the next, and he never lost his concentration. We could get forty minutes and five topics off point, but he was still able to bring to back home and tie it together.

He has really tapped into art and poetry and hip hop as tools in the anti-death penalty movement, and in the struggle in general, which is a vital organizing tool to get the word out. He was one of the inspirations for the hip hop/spoken word band/collective The Welfare Poets’ anti-death penalty compilation CD Cruel and Unusual Punishment, www.myspace.com/deathpenaltycd, which is a powerful collection of raw conscious hard hitting pieces about criminal injustice in this country.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment also includes a song by Haramia’s fiancée, a hip hop artist from the Netherlands called Jav’lin. She did an incredible song called “Walk With Me,” and she just released the video of it, which is up at www.freekenneth.com, in addition to other places. I watched it as soon as I got back, and I was really moved by it, both as a piece of art (she did it on her own and out of her pocket and I thought it was really well put together and professionally done) and as a political organizing tool that really speaks to the realities of the people who love folks caught up in the criminal justice system, especially death row.

The first day was tense, because we were waiting to hear back from the U.S. Supreme Court. Haramia had gotten a positive ruling from San Antonio federal District Judge Royal Furgeson, who overturned his death sentence on March 3, saying that he could not be given the death penalty for his part in the crime. However, the state appealed and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that judge’s ruling, and reinstituted the death penalty. Haramia’s lawyer then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The minute I walked out of the prison on April 23rd, I had a message from Claire, one of his tireless supporters. The Supreme Court had declined to hear his case. It was definitely a moment of feeling completely hopeless for me, because the facts in the case that everyone agrees on so clearly do not warrant a death sentence. I did not expect justice from a system so flawed and corrupt, but it was still a hard blow.

But it was Haramia who walked me through it, by showing his resilience and inner strength the next day. He walked in with his head high, knowing that they would issue him a date of execution (which they did five days ago – the date set for his execution is Aug. 30, the day before they executed his comrade Hasan a year ago), and still committed mind, body and soul to continuing the work for freedom, just as Mumia is, and Hasan and all the other conscious folks locked down across this nation, and they struggle not for themselves, but for all of us, for our collective freedom.

Visiting flew by on April 24th, and it seemed like I had just walked in the door when the guard tapped me on the shoulder. I put up my hand to touch his through the glass, the closest to a greeting and a goodbye possible. I walked out, past the cages they hold the prisoners in, through the automatic metal doors. I looked back through the window, and the white mesh backing of the visiting cell almost obscured his frame, but then he raised a black fist in the air, and I felt his smile through the glass.

HB: Haramia’s execution date is set for Aug.30. You’ve written that everyone, from the prosecutor on down, agrees that Haramia did not kill anyone, he never even touched the gun? How can someone be executed on these grounds?

WI: Haramia was convicted under the Law of Parties, which has two parts: “A person is criminally responsible for an offense committed by the conduct of another if “acting with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense he solicits, encourages, directs, aids or attempts to aid the other persons to commit the offense” or “If, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it, if the offense was committed in furtherance of the unlawful purpose and was one that should have been anticipated as a result of the carrying out of the conspiracy.”

So basically it’s saying you are as responsible for a crime if you knowingly help and support someone in that crime OR you are guilty for the crime if you SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it would happen based on your actions.

Haramia was 19 years old when the crime he was convicted for occurred. He and three other young men were out riding around, and decided to commit a series of armed robberies. Haramia’s role in them was only as the driver of the car. After holding up two parties, Haramia asked them to stop the robberies, which all agreed to.

On the way home, they stopped the car so one of the men, Mauriceo Brown could talk to a woman. He got into an argument with her boyfriend Michael LaHood, and shot and killed LaHood. Haramia had no knowledge that this was occurring until it was too late. Brown acted on his own, and admitted to the shooting (claiming it was in self-defense), and freely stated that he acted alone. Brown has been executed by the death machine of Texas. In invoking that statute, prosecutors had to prove that Foster and his cohorts agreed to commit armed robbery when they encountered LaHood, and that they should’ve anticipated that their risky behavior might cause LaHood’s death.

Those of us supporting Haramia argue that he was falsely convicted under the Law of Parties, that this case does not fall without the jurisdiction of that law (he was not charged with armed robbery, only with first degree murder).

But on the bigger scale, which is the way Haramia, as a political organizer and activist, wants it framed, we also hold that the Law of Parties is completely flawed and needs to be eliminated. To try someone for what they should have known was going to happen is Orwellian in design and horribly frightening in its application. But of course, the work doesn’t stop there; we have to address the fact the death penalty is a brutal corrupt flawed and pointless means of “justice,” and do it away with it. We must build a criminal justice system that is based on rehabilitation, restoration and healing, about making whole, rather than punishment and further violating the communities and individuals who have been victimized by the ravages of oppression. This is the work that Haramia does every day from a cell the size of a bathroom. This is the work that we, out here, are tasked with as well, if we are look ourselves in the face.

HB: Do you think him being a political organizer is a motive for attempting to carry out this extreme sentence?

WI: Haramia became a political organizer after his conviction, while on death row. The reactions that he and other political organizers in prison and on the row suffer is definitely based on their commitment to justice and uncovering the truth. There is a strong desire, on the part of the prison system, the courts and this society, to silence the voices of the oppressed who demand not only answers, but solutions and who refuse to compromise or negotiate away pieces of their liberation.

HB: You wrote that Haramia’s death row organization DRIVE is “an amazing example of oppressed people in the worst of circumstances organizing themselves for self determination.” What kind of organizing is DRIVE doing? Has the movement now spread to Philadelphia?

WI: (www.drivemomovement.org) DRIVE is a very powerful case of oppressed peoples directly affected in the bowels (not even the belly) of the beast organizing themselves. It was founded by Haramia and other brothas on the row in Texas. It is organized across racial lines, which is fairly unheard of in prisons. DRIVE is committed to nonviolently opposing the death penalty in all its manifestations. They protest not just their own death sentences, but those of people across this country.

This has taken the form of hunger strikes, the last of which went from October of 2006 to January of 2007, a three month strike. Haramia spoke of that when I went to visit him, saying how difficult it was to see these men turn into walking skeletons. But they feel that they can not in good conscience go along with the death penalty, with all its contradictions, the overall racism and classism of who is issued the death penalty, and the inherent inhumanity of taking a person’s life.

They also have on their website a memorial to the people who refused to “walk,” that is, when their death sentence came time, they refused to go along with the program and walk to the death chamber. Haramia said they refuse to be led like cattle to the slaughter, that as human beings, it is an inherent desire to want to continue to live, and that each person who refuses to walk is engaging in an act of civil disobedience.

A recent really exciting development with DRIVE is that they have expanded to include a chapter from women on death row in Pennsylvania. This is such a powerful step because these women are organizing and mobilizing themselves, and also because there is so little discourse about women in prison, let alone women on death row.

HB: Are there any appeals left, or any other grounds to stop the execution

WI: Haramia has one appeal left, back in Texas state court. But they have never granted an appeal. And there is one more push, to ask Governor Perry for clemency, this from a governor who has never granted clemency. Haramia’s lawyer has filed the appeal and feels it is strong.

HB: What can people do to support Haramia right now?

WI I can’t stress enough how vital public pressure is right now for Haramia’s case. There needs to be a public outcry that there is no question in this case, everyone agrees that he did not pull the trigger, he never even touched the gun. He is being sentenced to die for driving a car, and that should outrage every single person that hears it.

We’re asking folks to write letters to Governor Perry:

Office of the Governor

P.O. Box 12428

Austin, Texas 78711-2428

To log onto his website www.freekenneth.com and sign the online petition, and to spread the word as far as possible to people. We have to act now while this brotha is still here with us. I know that I, personally, am heartsick at losing people in this struggle.

HB: Anything you’d like to add?

WI: One of the most powerful things about DRIVE is that it shows that for as powerless as the system tries to convince each of us, that it is simply not true. These men on death row, locked down in the heart of the biggest state killing apparatus in the world, who are supposed to be completely at the mercy of the DOC, instead are reclaiming their power and taking stands. When I am feeling depressed and hopeless, I think of all those struggling where we are told everyday struggle is impossible. I think of those who should be so warped by their circumstances, but instead are more human than those who keep them in captivity. I think of these people who make something out of nothing, and I know that not only can all of us go on, we must.

At noon, supporters organized a “Honk for Mumia” at City Hall (photos), then in the evening, supporters gathered a few blocks away, for a guest speakers and a viewing of Framing an Execution. Guest speakers included Danny Glover, Sonia_Sanchez, Linn_Washington, Jr., Ramona_Africa, and Sgt. Delacy_Davis of Black Cops Against Police Brutality.

April 24 also marked the release of a new website and newspaper published by “Journalists for Mumia,” unveiling for the first time in the US, a newly discovered crime scene photo from Dec. 9, 1981 that reveals police manipulation of ballistics evidence. The photo has already been published in the new German book on Mumia’s case (see review and interview).

The April 24 events publicized the upcoming oral arguments before the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on May 17, for which, supporters are organizing a mass demonstration (flier). The court will consider four different issues that have been certified for appeal, and then decide whether to grant a new trial, affirm the life sentence, or re-instate the death sentence.

After the May 17 date was set for oral arguments, the Philadelphia DA filed a motion asking the entire Third Circuit Court to recuse itself from the case. Mumia’s attorney felt the DA’s move was meant to delay the hearings, and to move the case to a more conservative circuit. On April 20, the court ruled in favor of Abu-Jamal in two ways. The court (1) ruled against the recusal and (2) agreed to give each side one full hour to present their arguments.

The evening event at the Friends Center (a few blocks from City Hall) was met by over a hundred police officers protesting the event for Mumia, which was a culmination of recent intimidation tactics by the Fraternal Order of Police. A benefit event in New York City had to change locations after extensive NYPD harassment. A NYPD website later boasted that the rally was “Bitch Slapped”. Then, the April 24 event in Philadelphia had to change locations after police intimidation, has documented by journalist Linn Washington, who noted that the “anti-Abu-Jamal barrage of emails and telephone calls unleashed on the Clef Club included declarations perilously close to terroristic threats.”

The Fraternal Order of Police and their allies have continued to target the French cities that have honored Mumia. In 2003, he was declared an honorary citizen of Paris — the first time since Pablo Picasso was similarly honored in the 1970s. Then last year on April 24, the Paris suburb St. Denis named a major street after Abu-Jamal. Located in the Cristino Garcia District of the city (named after an anti-Franco Spanish Republican), Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal leads directly to the largest sports arena in Europe: “Nelson Mandela Stadium.” Government resolutions were passed condemning France, criminal charges were filed against the French cities, and the FOP has continued to harass representatives that did not vote for the anti-Mumia resolutions.

In response, Mumia supporters have launched several campaigns: faxing letters for Mumia to U.S. House of Reps, circulating a letter demanding that John Conyers of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary open formal hearings to reconsider the House Resolution, and contacting Donald Payne (recently harassed by the FOP) to thank him for not voting for the resolution.

Also, two new academic papers have been written on Mumia by Tameka L. Cage and Paul Robeson Ford.