--Claude Marks discusses the new film COINTELPRO 101
By Angola 3 News
Claude Marks, Director of The Freedom Archives, talks to Angola 3 News about the highly anticipated new documentary film, entitled COINTELPRO 101, which is premiering on October 10, at the Mission Cultural Center of Latino Arts in San Francisco.
According to its website, the Freedom Archives “contains over 8000 hours of audio and video tapes. These recordings date from the late-60s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international solidarity movements. The collection includes weekly news/ poetry/ music programs broadcast on several educational radio stations; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; diverse activist voices; original and recorded music, poetry, original sound collages; and an extensive La Raza collection.”
Angola 3 News:What can you tell us about your upcoming film COINTELPRO 101?
Claude Marks:We’ve been aware of the need to talk more about COINTELPRO since we made The Legacy of Torture – the video about the government torture of the Panthers in New Orleans in 1973 – which later became the unjust basis for the San Francisco 8 Case. In travelling with that film and organizing for the dropping of charges, we referred to COINTELPRO but often were talking to younger people in particular, who had not heard the term and had no historical frame of reference for that period of intense repression.
So we undertook to make this new film, knowing that no government agent or agency has ever been held accountable for the assassinations of leaders, the destruction of organizations, the imprisonment and political targeting of so many people – people who still remain prisoners of the wars against movements for liberation and self-determination within the US borders.
COINTELPRO 101 is not the first or only film on the subject, although there have not been many, but we hope it can help reinvigorate some organizing work, and reopen some thinking about the violence directed against progressive movements, this hidden history, and nature of the state and its agencies of repression.
A3N:How was the film showing and related workshop at the US Social Forum received by the audience?
CM:This was a good opportunity to infuse the very broad conversations at the Social Forum with a self-conscious discussion about the nature and continuity of government repression. From the European invasion & Middle Passage forward, we have always seen genocide. Prisons, COINTELPRO, Abu Ghraib…all represent the continuity of what any movements to change power relations are and will be up against.
A3N:Your website states that the film’s “intended audiences are the generations that did not experience the social justice movements of the sixties and seventies.” Given that COINTELPRO officially ended in the early 1970s, why is this story so important for the younger generation to know about?
CM:Well, the mission of the Freedom Archives is to help educate people, and especially the rising new generations, as to the true nature of recent radical history.The high point of struggle represented by the loosely used term “the sixties” and the violent repression against it, contains essential lessons for every young person seeking a more just society. More generally, people should not be misled by the myth of democracy, the idea that the system can be made to work for “us” or that those in power will somehow reach a moral epiphany and give up anything of consequence without a fight.
We see this myth exposed today in many ways – mass imprisonment, the tearing up of families and communities – driven by racism – the criminalization of dissent so any act of resistance becomes by their definition an act of “terrorism.”
This is a continuum that is unleashed upon the world’s peoples as well as internally. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are targeted. Muslims and South Asians are targeted. Women and queer folks are targeted. Prisoners are subjected to the worst inhumanities, and if they are ever released, what do they have they to look forward to?
The U.S. has by far the largest incarceration rate in the world—as they build more prisons, the schools deteriorate and the public education system lies in racist tatters.
A3N:How do you think the US government’s repression of the Left today differs from the COINTELPRO era?
CM:In the 1970s, the public and some officials, faced with the exposure of the illegal acts of government and police agencies against dissent, feigned concerns about the loss of civil liberties, held hearings, and alleged that reforms would take place. But today, the acts of the FBI, police, and other agencies, once illegal, are now legitimate, legal – via the Patriot Act and other unconstitutional measures, all in the name of homeland security and defending the nation against “terrorism.”
The playing field has changed. The government now openly conducts assassinations anywhere in the world, can declare people to be “enemy combatants” and imprison them indefinitely without charges; drone warfare permits mass civilian murders by so-called military experts thousands of miles away without risking US military casualties – it’s a “game” except to the thousands of victims.
Today the government claims the right to breach international human rights laws and conventions with no accountability. And the corporate media is so integrated into this strategy, that there is little room for “legitimate” opposition to get a hearing. So it becomes incumbent upon us to organize and message independently and with few resources.
COINTELPRO 101 is made with mainly love and fumes, but we hope that it will be a useful tool to engage in dialogue and to help organize movements that challenge the mythology that dissent is a guaranteed right, that seek the release of political prisoners, that counter the miseducation of our youth with an understanding of the past so they can better shape the future.
A3N:Knowing what we do about this repression in the past and present, how can activists today best defend ourselves? How should our organizing strategies be modified?
CM:We must organize to show our outrage with more consistency and despite risks. There is an urgency to demand more of one another as well. Challenging the state is serious and will not succeed as a result of stroking egos or the pronouncements of self-declared leaders. It is hard work and requires a deep commitment and a passion for serving the people and rebuilding our communities. Our capacity must grow in realistic ways as there are no shortcuts, and the path includes defeats and sacrifice. This is one of the things that our political prisoners and the many martyrs can teach us.
A3N:For our readers not close enough to San Francisco for the October 10 premiere, how will folks be able to watch the new film?
CM:The film will begin to show in communities and on campuses this fall and winter. People can reach us to make arrangements. At some point we will also manufacture DVDs. We hope to have it available with subtitles in other languages as well. Also check the website as we have resources about COINTELPRO posted and will also add a teaching curriculum to accompany the film.
A3N:How can folks best support your efforts?
CM:We are very much a grassroots organization. We have no corporate or government funding. We are one voice among many, but we encourage people to support the work of independent media, including ourselves.We welcome your questions and comments and greatly appreciate your support.
Also please use the audio and video documentaries that we’ve produced as educational materials and organizing tools. The actual Freedom Archives is searchable on line and is intended to preserve radical history and culture. So check us out!
A3N:Any closing thoughts?
CM:Years ago, as the movements grew and we worked in various political and media organizations, we were fond of quoting part of an 1857 speech by Frederick Douglass, often using Ossie Davis’s dramatic rendition of his famous words.They sum up a lesson that is central to what I am saying, and is at the heart of COINTELPRO 101. Many of your readers are probably familiar with it, but its essence bears repeating:
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle… If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
Prison Abolition In Practice --Part two of an interview with Criminal Injustice Kos
By Angola 3 News
Focusing on the prison abolitionist movement, we interview two co-editors of an exciting new series at Daily Kos, called Criminal InJustice Kos, a weekly series "devoted to exploring the myths of 'crime', 'criminals', and criminal justice and the intersection of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/age/disability in policing and punishment. Criminal Injustice Kos is committed to furthering action towards reducing inequity in the US criminal justice system." Look for Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
Here, in the second part of our interview, we focus on the practicality of prison abolition and look at alternatives to the US prison system. Read part one here.
Kay Whitlock (whose online name is “RadioGirl”) is a Montana-based writer, organizer, and activist long engaged in progressive struggles for racial, gender, queer, environmental, and economic justice. She has written extensively on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to police and prison violence, most notably in her former position as National Representative for LGBT Issues for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization. Her publications for AFSC include Corrupting Justice: A Primer for LGBT Communities on Racism, Violence, Human Degradation & the Prison Industrial Complex (pdf download and In a Time of Broken Bones: A Call to Dialogue on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crimes Legislation (pdf download). With Joey L. Mogul and Andrea J. Ritchie, she is the co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, forthcoming from Beacon Press in February 2011 – an analysis of queer criminalization, centering race, class, and gender, from colonial contact to the present.
Angola 3 News:What are practical alternatives to the current prison system? What examples do we have when looking from an international perspective? Examples from here in the US?
Kay Whitlock: Accumulating overreliance on more policing, harsher punishments, and an expanded prison system to allegedly produce “safety” in our society has effectively shuttered our collective ability to think about justice outside the framework of prisons. There are very few real alternatives for that reason. Clearly, the prison system is not going to be abolished in one fell swoop – that’s not realistic. But we also lack strategic capacity for thinking clearly and synergistically about how to begin interrupting the revolving door, self-perpetuating nature of the criminal legal system. And how to divert resources that otherwise might to into more policing and prisons into broader community safety strategies that also address the needs of communities of color and other groups most likely experience violence within families, communities, and the criminal legal system. These include undocumented immigrants, poor and homeless people in general, people with mental illness, women, youth, queers who challenge middle-class heteronormativity, people with addictions, and more.
There’s no funding for real alternatives. No political will to find them over time. No broad-based faith leadership that calls us to new directions. Possible options are being choked to death by political and religious cowardice and failure of imagination. So that’s our challenge: to find inventive, intriguing, and constructive ways to shake up public discourse and get practical about new directions. To reach outside of that long shadow of prison that deadens our public imagination in order to think in fresh ways about these things and start creating more community capacity to confront multiple kinds of violence – at the hands of individuals, the state, corporations, and a whole host of public/private institutions.
Thank goodness, pockets of real imagination are found in a growing number of more locally based groups and organizations, often led by people from the communities who historically have borne the systemic brunt of police/prison violence. Focusing on strategies that seek to interrupt the revolving-door nature of the criminal legal system and how to divert resources that otherwise might go into more policing and prisons they tackle specific issues such as violence against queers, women, and children in ways that open up broader discussions about the creation of community safety.
Here are just a few groups working from various angles to create community safety without reliance on more policing and prisons:
Creative Interventions (Oakland) (This link is to an interview with CI founder Mimi Kim; I've had trouble recently linking to the Creative Interventions website, which is found here.): Developing community-based responses to domestic and sexual violence in communities of color, queer, and immigrant communities without involving police, as well as strategies aimed at promoting the healthy transformation of all people involved and the larger community.
The Audre Lorde Project: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Nonconforming People of Color center for community organizing, focusing on the New York City area. One area of emphasis is working to create neighborhood safety for queers of color.
FIERCE: Building the leadership and power of LGBTQ youth of color; addressing the criminalization of poor, young queers of color in gentrifying areas in NYC by bringing those voices into the center of discussion about planning and safety.
But there also are a few systemic changes that could help enormously.
Nancy A. Heitzeg:During the past 40 years there has been a dramatic escalation the U.S. prison population, a ten-fold increase since 1970. The rate of incarceration for women escalated at an even more dramatic pace. The increased rate of incarceration can be traced almost exclusively to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other non violent felonies. It is important to note that 75% of all those imprisoned are incarcerated for a non-violent offense.
These harsh policies have proliferated, not in response to crime rates nor any empirical data that indicates their effectiveness,. They have proliferated due to our unfounded fears and the profit motive that is increasingly wound up with the prison system.
There are also international examples we can learn from. Decriminalization of drugs and other lesser offenses reduces stress on legal systems and removes an entire class of offenders form legal control. Prisons are used rarely and sentence lengths are much shorter. Perhaps the best example of how prisons may serve a rehabilitative and reintegrative purpose is Norway's new Halden Fengsel prison, described as the most humane prison in the world.
There are many options available to us other than prison and certainly many uses of prison that are less draconian than those offered in the United States. We merely lack the will to change.
A3N:What examples of organizing against the PIC do you find most inspiring?
I also have a special love for groups that have a genius for refusing to get caught in the “single issue” trap that characterizes much of nonprofit work today by building strong bridges to the challenge of resisting the prison industrial complex. They prove that a single issue is an entry way to cross-issue, cross-constituency movement building. In addition to those groups already named earlier, the groups that most inspire me are:
Not surprisingly, these groups are multiracial, center the experiences and voices of people of color and poor folks, and often have strong participation – and leadership - by people who have been incarcerated.
NH: I am inspired by the work of Critical Resistance, The Prison Activist Resource Center and The Real Cost of Prisons Project. All these grassroots groups require justice activists, educators, artists, justice policy researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to work towards change. These powerful coalitions are the basis for real change.
Davis (1997: 71-72) identifies three key dimensions of this work –public policy, community organizing, and academic research;
“In order to be successful, this project must build bridges between academic work, legislative and other policy interventions, and grassroots campaigns calling, for example for the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution, and for the reversal of the present proliferation of prisons and jails."
And I am inspired by those who work to carry these voices to the outside. The writings of many political prisoners/prisoners of conscience might have remained suppressed were it not for the efforts of scholars to bring them forward. This coalition between what Mumia calls “organic and radical intellectuals” is crucial to the uncovering of the deep structural connections between race, political economy and crime.
The work of Angela Davis and Joy James is exemplary here. Their extensive writings on these matters and their careful attendance to connecting with those inside prison walls serve as a model for future work. In Imprisoned Intellectuals (2003), James gives voice to the range of political prisoners and traces the common thread of resistance across generations, nationalities, racial/ethnic differences, genders, sexual orientations, and political causes. She hopes that writing and reading will force a transformative encounter “between those in the so-called free world seeking personal and collective freedoms and those in captivity seeking liberation from economic, military, racial/sexual systems.”
A3N:Andrea Smith, co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence argues that “the criminalization approach proffered in the mainstream anti-violence movement doesn’t work. And, also, this criminalization approach obfuscates the role of the state in perpetrating gender violence.” What do you think is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?
KW: Andrea is right, and over the past dozen years or so, there has been a growing challenge from women of color working on anti-violence issues to challenge the rush by white-dominated anti-violence groups to embrace more policing/harsher punishment approaches. (See some exceptional resources here, here, and here. Similarly, I am part of a growing movement of progressive queers who are challenging mainstream embrace of more policing and “get tough on crime” approaches to anti-LGBT violence; several progressive queer groups spoke out on same here.
The mainstream analysis leaves state violence out of the picture – but in fact, women (especially women of color who are low income) are often on the receiving end of mirror image forms of violence in their homes and communities and in the criminal legal system.
There’s no single solution to the problem Andrea names. What might work for one community may not work for another. But I do know some ingredients for approaches that might work better:
•address state violence – including the violence of the policing and punishment systems – in all anti-violence work.
• center the leadership and perspectives of people and communities most affected by state violence – people of color (including immigrants), poor people, prisoners and their families, former prisoners – in the work. Otherwise, we just replicate the idea of white people believing we are able to decide “what’s best” for communities of color.
• recognize that we can never just police and punish our way to safety. The overarching challenge is addressing systemic forms of violence, exclusion, and injustice in our communities. We need to build within a framework of strengthening community well being in which commitments to racial, gender, and economic justice has real, vibrant, ongoing meaning.
• shift the meaning of “criminal” simply from “dangerous individuals” to a more expansive vision that includes the harm done to individuals, entire communities, and whole nations by corporations, governments, and other public/private institutions.
• openly confront and challenge the ways in which violence against women – in families, communities, prisons – is mainstreamed into popular culture and marketed as a profitable media commodity.
Acts of sexism are commonly employed to validate and rationalize normative misogynistic practices; for instance, sexist jokes may be told to foster disrespect for women and an accompanying disregard for their well-being, which ultimately make their rape and abuse seem "acceptable". Examples of behaviors that typify rape culture include victim blaming, trivializing prison rape, and sexual objectification. Our propensity for violence and sexual objectification are part and parcel of the hostile environment which leads to both rampant sexism and prisonization.
A3N:In her recent book Are Prisons Obsolete? , Davis writes that "a major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more human, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners -- calling for less violent conditions, an end to sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing -- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?" How do you think we can best walk this line?
KW: We need to be careful in thinking about “reform” as end and in and of itself. Too often, “reform” means that we’re buying time to make sure that nothing fundamentally changes. For example, in the 1970s, many of us argued that indeterminate sentencing was being abused and demanded “reform.” What we got was a series of “get tough on crime” measures: 3-strikes laws, mandatory minimums, so-called “truth in sentencing” laws, and the bogus “War on Drugs.” Hundreds of thousands of people were swept into prisons for longer periods of time - and it's still happening.
Many people call for reforms today. Let’s get rid of prison rape. Let’s reinstitute rehabilitation. Let’s repeal certain draconian sentencing laws. All good and essential ideas. But very little – in some cases, nothing - will fundamentally change unless those ideas, and more, are advanced within a strategic framework of abolition. Why? Because if we’re not thinking “bigger,” the so-called reforms inevitably will morph into new ways of supporting the existing system. We need to remind ourselves that the first abolition struggle wasn't "realistic" - and originally, it was about as popular as the plague. White abolitionists caught hell from family, friends, neighbors, and faith communities. But it was the boldness and necessity of the vision that encouraged historic persistence and began to gain support. The Right knows the importance of the larger strategic vision that seems outrageous at first, but mainstreams over time because of the relentless pulse of national and local messaging/organizing that folds into the vision over a long period of time. Liberals and progressives in the United States so often seem to have forgotten this.
It is time for us to open up a fundamentally different and more expansive conversation around anti-queer violence and the creation of safe communities. A conversation emphasizing the integrity of community relationships and a radical commitment to community well being for all, not just the most socially, economically, and racially privileged among us.
Within that larger framework, practical reforms can be strategic steps toward something new. But apart from it, you can count on politicians, corporations, and do-nothing religious leaders to simply tweak the status quo – to our ultimate disadvantage.
The late, great civil rights activist Lillian Smith insisted that the realization of genuine justice depends on our willingness to pursue big ideas, to risk organizing for what we truly long for. In time, she asserted, big ideas that are persistently pursued will begin to take root. “To believe in something not yet proved,” Smith said, “and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open.”
NH: The current conditions of incarceration in the US are deplorable as are the roots of prisons in racism and classism. Both are situations of injustice that we must name and oppose. Prison conditions in the US are torturous. The United States has a long list of standard police, prison and jail practices that rise to the level of torture.
This is surely unacceptable to civilized people anywhere and it is not incompatible to work for improvements of theses egregious human rights violations which working towards the larger goal of abolition altogether.
Noted author and educator Jonathan Kozol observes: “At issue are the values of a nation that writes off many of its poorest children in deficient urban schools starved of all the riches found in good suburban schools nearby, criminalizes those it has short-changed and cheated , and then willingly expends ten times as much to punish them as it ever spent to teach them when they were still innocent and clean.”
This is unacceptable. We must organize, continuing the legacy of struggle. We must come together across boundaries of national identity, gender, race, class and ethnicity. The call to social justice, especially when addressing complex and cloaked systems of racialization, requires critical and systematic documentation, the surfacing of deep political and economic structures, and bold confrontation. It requires the analytical tools and methods of multiple disciplines, as we have attempted to offer here. The dismantling of the white supremacist patriarchal capitalist machinery of criminal injustice requires coalitions between “intellectuals” of all sorts.
We must work in alliance to realize the vision that another world is possible.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.” This top-secret and illegal operation was a dirty war on the entire US Left, including the civil rights & Black liberation movements.
In terms of scale, the FBI's war of repression against the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was greatest against the Black Panthers. Many Panthers, like Chicago leader Fred Hampton, were assassinated outright, while others were framed for murders they did not commit. A few of these Panthers, like Geronimo Ji Jaga and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, had their convictions overturned and were released, but many of the COINTELPRO survivors remain in prison today.
In addressing why the Panthers were targeted so intensely by COINTELPRO, Noam Chomsky wrote in 1973: "A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the motivations for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther Party. The report describes the party as 'the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.' Its 'hard core members' were estimated at 800, but 'a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age.' On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive apparatus of the state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political force."
Michael Richardson is now working on a book about the Omaha Two and an archive of his definitive OpEdNews.com series about the case is available here. This year, he began a new series of articles at Examiner.com, exploring the broader history of COINTELPRO, along with a continued focus on the Omaha Two, viewable here.
Ed Poindexter today.
(Photo by Michael Richardson)
Mondo we Langa today.
(Photo by Michael Richardson)
Angola 3 News:Please tell us about who the Omaha Two are.
Michael Richardson:Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) were two leaders of the Black Panther affiliate chapter in Omaha, Nebraska and targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Operation COINTELPRO. Both men are serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary for the 1970 bombing murder of an Omaha policeman and have been imprisoned forty years. The former Panther leaders have come to be known as the Omaha Two.
A3N:As a journalist at the time, how did you first react to news of their arrests?
MR:I didn’t know Poindexter, but Mondo, then called David, was a friend of mine I met at Omaha City Council meetings. I knew Mondo was the sharpest critic of Omaha police around and that he was constantly being harassed, so I wasn’t surprised he became a prime suspect. I didn’t think he did it though and I followed the case in the news and attended part of his trial the next year. I never got to speak to Mondo after his arrest and I moved from Nebraska within a year of his trial.
My first published article was a report on the trial that appeared in the Omaha Star, but it only reported the surface story as the true facts of the case remained hidden.
Over the years I have wondered if Mondo was guilty, as there seemed to be so much evidence of his involvement. Finally, after over 35 years of doubt I began corresponding with Mondo and started research on the case. I reviewed portions of the voluminous court file, interviewed people familiar with the case including the two current attorneys, read old newspaper accounts, studied formerly secret COINTELPRO files, and visited with both men at the prison where they are held.
I am now convinced Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa did not get a fair trial and were framed by overzealous police and prosecutors who ended up letting the real killers get away to put the Panther leaders in jail.
A3N:Can you briefly explain the charges against the Omaha Two, and what evidence was used to convict them?
MR:On August 17, 1970, an anonymous 911 caller reported a woman screaming at a vacant house. Police arrived to an ambush instead, in which 29 year-old Officer Larry Minard was killed. A recording of the killer’s voice was sent to the FBI crime laboratory for analysis but before Minard was even buried, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered the crime lab to withhold a report on the tape.
A 15 year-old, DuanePeak, was soon charged with the murder and after six different versions of the crime, he implicated Ed and Mondo in exchange for his own freedom.
Dynamite was allegedly found in Mondo’s basement only to have two different detectives both claim they were each the one that found the explosives.
The 911 tape was withheld from the jury. The conflicting police dynamite testimony was also unknown to the jury, as was the deal that allowed Peak his freedom. The jury was never informed that the defendants were COINTELPRO targets.
After five days of deliberation, the jury convicted Ed and Mondo of murder but spared their lives from the electric chair. The two men have been in prison ever since.
A3N:Can you please explain what COINTELPRO was? How do the Omaha 2 fit into the story of COINTELPRO?
MR:Operation COINTELRO was a vast, illegal campaign by the FBI in the 60’s and 70’s to “disrupt” domestic political activity that J. Edgar Hoover deemed dangerous. The clandestine program was national in scope, targeted thousands of individuals and groups and broke a number of laws dwarfing Watergate in magnitude.
The Black Panthers were the primary target of Hoover’s law enforcement conspiracy. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa had been COINTELPRO targets for at least a year prior to their arrests. Hoover had sent several memos to the Omaha FBI office complaining about a lack of results and urged the Omaha agents to be “imaginative” with counterintelligence actions.
Poindexter had been the subject of a secret FBI smear campaign with forged letters and anonymous phone calls while Mondo was targeted for an ambush while distributing Black Panther newspapers. It was the death of Minard, however, that gave the FBI an opportunity to put the Omaha Two behind bars.
At the time of the trial, the jury had no idea that COINTELPRO manipulation of evidence had occurred. The secret program was officially disbanded a week after the trial ended making Ed and Mondo the last COINTELPRO victims.
The COINTELPRO withholding of evidence did not surface until years later following Freedom of Information requests for COINTELPRO documents.
A3N:Have all the COINTELPRO documents been released?
MR:No. Key documents identifying informants and providing evidentiary details have been destroyed, withheld, or remain heavily redacted.
In the mid 70’s when the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate investigated COINTELPRO, much of the Omaha case remained hidden and so the full story of the FBI duplicity in Omaha remains unknown and will likely never be fully disclosed.
Five different members of the Omaha Police Department ended up making perjured or false statements about the case in court proceedings, to the media, and in congressional testimony.
No official or agent of the FBI ever was publicly disciplined for the COINTELPRO misconduct in the Omaha case.
A3N:What are the Omaha Two doing today to challenge the convictions and imprisonment?
MR:Both Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa have habeas corpus petitions pending in the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and petitions for hearings pending in the U.S. District Court of Nebraska.
Both appeals address the conflicting police testimony on dynamite and new scientific testing of the 911 tape that establishes DuanePeak did not make the deadly phone call as he had claimed.
Poindexter asked the Nebraska courts for review and in 2008 was told by the Douglas County District Court that it didn’t matter where the dynamite was found or who found it.Last year the Nebraska Supreme Court told Ed that it didn’t matter who made the 911 call.
A3N:How has the mainstream media done with reporting on the Omaha Two?
MR:Poorly. The national media has largely ignored the case and the regional media has failed to explore the COINTELPRO aspect of the prosecution. Almost all Nebraska media accounts of the Omaha Two contain factual errors of some sort and glaring omissions of relevant facts. Anyone relying on the mainstream media about this COINTELPRO case is sadly both misinformed and under-informed.
Racism and the stigma against the Black Panthers is partially to blame, while COINTELPRO media manipulation was another factor in early reporting on the case. Why the media continues to ignore this important case today is a mystery to me.
A3N:What upcoming articles are you working on?
MR:Now that internet newspaper Examiner.com has named me the COINTELPRO Examiner, the opportunity to report on the Omaha Two is part of my beat. I intend on revisiting, in serial form, the long convoluted history of the case as well as report on current developments.
My research on the FBI and COINTELPRO has led me to understand that Ed and Mondo are not alone and that each COINTELPRO conviction needs a fresh new look. COINTELPRO was the largest, most systematic attack on our legal system in U.S. history. It is our responsibility today to carefully review the cases of remaining COINTELPRO targets because of the strong possibility of tampering with evidence.
MR:Any case coming out of the 1970’s involving the Black Panthers is important because of the COINTELPRO abuses. The Angola 3 case is somewhat different than others since its genesis is inside a Louisiana prison. It may have not been technically a J.-Edgar-Hoover-authorized COINTELPRO prosecution but some of the trial tactics, including deals with informers, are the same.
The severity of the punishment, decades in solitary confinement, calls out for review and is itself an injustice.
A3N:Any closing thoughts?
MR:Larry Minard, the father of five young children, was buried on what would have been his 30th birthday. He was a police officer responding to the call of a woman screaming. Larry Minard’s killers walk free today.
The named supplier of the dynamite, a suspected police informant, was never charged with the crime and only spent one night in jail.
The anonymous 911 caller was not properly identified and has never been charged in the case.
DuanePeak, the confessed bomber, was released after less then 3 years in juvenile detention.
J. Edgar Hoover let the killer of Larry Minard, the 911 caller, go free to make a case against the Omaha Two.
Justice has not been done in Nebraska.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex --An interview with Criminal Injustice Kos co-editors Nancy Heitzeg and Kay Whitlock, part one
By Angola 3 News
Focusing on the prison abolitionist movement, we interview two co-editors of an exciting new series at Daily Kos, called Criminal InJustice Kos, a weekly series "devoted to exploring the myths of 'crime', 'criminals', and criminal justice and the intersection of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/age/disability in policing and punishment. Criminal Injustice Kos is committed to furthering action towards reducing inequity in the US criminal justice system." Look for Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
Stay tuned for part 2, where we focus on the practicality of prison abolition and take a close look at alternatives to the US prison system.
Kay Whitlock (whose online name is “RadioGirl”) is a Montana-based writer, organizer, and activist long engaged in progressive struggles for racial, gender, queer, environmental, and economic justice. She has written extensively on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to police and prison violence, most notably in her former position as National Representative for LGBT Issues for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization. Her publications for AFSC include Corrupting Justice: A Primer for LGBT Communities on Racism, Violence, Human Degradation & the Prison Industrial Complex (pdf download and In a Time of Broken Bones: A Call to Dialogue on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crimes Legislation (pdf download). With Joey L. Mogul and Andrea J. Ritchie, she is the co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, forthcoming from Beacon Press in February 2011 – an analysis of queer criminalization, centering race, class, and gender, from colonial contact to the present.
Angola 3 News:Why do you consider yourself a prison abolitionist? What does this term mean for you?
Nancy Heitzeg: If one accepts, as I do, that prisons in the US are a contemporary extension of chattel slavery, that prisons are irredeemably rooted in racism and classism that prisons serve no purpose save corporate profit and raw retribution, then one must call for their abolition. Prison ‘reform is insufficient\t if the very notion and reality of prison itself is grounded in inequality, injustice and destruction.
In a small yet dense book - Angela Davis asks – Are Prisons Obsolete??? If prisons are indeed social structures rooted in racism, classism and fear – then we must take the questions seriously. We must try to imagine a nation – perhaps a world without prisons.
"As important as reforms may be, frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison...We must give serious consideration to abolitionist strategies to dismantle the prison system...which preserves existing structures of racism as well as creates new ones...this is no more outlandish than the fact that race and economic status play more prominent roles in shaping the practices of social punishment than does crime."(Davis 1998 105)
I have always known people who were in prison and or known of others who were. I have always thought about prison. "Letter from A Birmingham Jail", Blood in My Eye, The Ten - Point Program of the Black Panther Party, The Attica Prison Uprising, and Free Leonard Peltier! all shaped my political consciousness from the youngest of ages. I have always studied the prison -- even though my area of graduate study and expertise was more broadly focused on deviance and all aspects of social control - formal medical and informal, the prison and correspondingly the death penalty always loomed as the sanction of last resort – the punishment fit for those who were to be most "feared" who represented at least in theory, the most dangerous of all rule-breakers. And soon it became comparatively clear that the definition and control of deviance was more closely linked to WHO the deviant was rather WHAT the deviant did. Some murderers were never arrested, others merely fined, and still others were imprisoned or executed. Same with all the rest: the robbers the assaulters the thieves the dealers of drugs and so on. Far from being mutually exclusive or race and class blind, systems of control are inter-dependent and over-lapping, and discretion often is shaped by discrimination. You can not be an honest scholar of the sociology of deviance without also being a scholar of social inequality – of race class gender sexual orientation and age.
Race, class and gender are inextricably bound up with the definition and control of deviance. To the extent that the privileged and empowered "norm" is white, male, financially well off, heterosexual and adult, then people of color, women, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and the young become "the Other", the "abnormal", the "deviant". Further, these "Others" have been subject to labeling and social control based on the intersection of race, class, gender and other differences. The "matrix of domination" shapes access to systems of social control as well as to social opportunity. And, while there are "deviants" of all classes, all races, all genders and ages, the models under which they are controlled reflect their relative social status. It became clear that prison was not really for the "worst" of all offenders because corporate white-collar crime is responsible for a least 5 times more deaths each year and 10x more money lost than so-called street crime. Prison was a place for the poor, the black/brown, the young – it was meant for those "others" we were lead to fear most.
So the prison is a site where justice was not served but where injustice was further re-inscribed, a place where punishment often does not fit the crime if there indeed was one, a place where social inequality was both the precursor and the antecedent. The prison is for me — with the many who write from within the walls – a site of resistance.
To be an abolitionist is just that – to strive to create and rediscover alternatives to incarceration, to find solution to "crime" that restores communities rather than decimates them, it is to ask the difficult questions that push us to imagine an end to the reliance on the prison and related retributive sanctions. To say, yes, that prisons are obsolete.
In the face of this accumulation of knowledge, I had a choice. Either I would have to close my heart and mind, or I would have to face these truths head on, and make a decision in line with my conscience, ethics, and spiritual belief (I am a Buddhist practitioner).
Really, it’s as simple as that. If you know about mass violence and injustice, do you turn away, making justifications for your silence and indifference? Or do you act on what you know of the systemic hell of the U.S. incarceration system and how the misery it produces corrupts and harms every aspect of U.S. society? And, particularly relevant for me, when you’re a white person and consider yourself anti-racist, what do you do about the evil of mass incarceration?
In my view, the role and reach of prisons in U.S. life constitutes one of the greatest moral crises of our age. To me, declaring myself an abolitionist means that:
• I am part of a growing, diverse, movement that seeks not only to abolish the institution of the prison in the United States, but also dismantle the confluence of public, private, political, and economic interests called "the prison industrial complex."
• over the years, I have come to see more and more clearly the ways in which the U.S. prison system is foundationally, fundamentally, and violently racist; it has been from the very beginning. Because I care passionately about dismantling racism and white privilege in this country, the abolition of the prison system seems to me an essential part of the struggle.
• I have come to see that human rights abuses and torture within U.S. prisons is normative, not a "bad apple" departure from the norm.
• I do not accept our society’s increasing utilization of prisons to reinforce racism; to criminalize mental illness; to police and punish the very poverty it has created; to avoid coming to terms with a shattered public education system; and to police and punish sexual and gender nonconformity.
• in my view, only the call to abolition opens up sufficient creative and imaginative public space in which to think about what authentic justice might look like if the concepts of justice for all, community well being, and universal human rights were at the center of our vision addressing the understandable yearning for safety and security. Otherwise, we will simply accept the inevitability of prisons and never fundamentally challenge their nature, reach, and function in this country.
A3N:How does today’s prison abolitionist movement related to the movement to abolish slavery in the pre-U.S. Civil war period? What is the legacy of pre-Civil War black chattel slavery on today’s prison-industrial complex?
NH: The term abolitionist is a direct reference to the movement to abolish slavery. Again in Are Prisons Obsolete???, Davis argues that the prison industrial complex is indeed the new plantation – the latest in a series of historically uninterrupted efforts to legally and economically suppress blacks. As slavery inspired the abolition movement and Jim Crow segregation/extra-legal lynching inspired he Civil Rights Movement, so too the prison industrial complex must be resisted by new abolitionists.
And yes we can draw a direct link from slavery to the prison industrial complex. In the South especially, there is really no difference but the name in places like LSP Angola , an old plantation which immediately was transformed in to a penitentiary after the Civil War.
The abolition of slavery did not result in the abolition of legitimated white supremacy in the law; it merely called for new methods of legally upholding the property interests of whiteness. The criminal justice system begins to play a new and crucial role here. There was a subsequent transformation of the Slave Codes into the Black Codes and the plantations into prisons. Following Reconstruction, the rights extended to blacks via the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were quickly subverted by laws and Supreme Court rulings that upheld racism. Laws were quickly passed that echoed the restrictions associated with slavery, and criminalized a range of activities of the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment – "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States"- contained a dangerous loophole- "except as a punishment for crime" This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks. This practice in combination with a brutal convict lease system in many southern states effectively allowed for the perpetuation of slavery -- just by another name.
Following the end of legalized racial discrimination, there was an especially concerted effort to escalate the control of African Americans via the criminal justice system.
Marable (1983:120-121 makes this point, "...white racists began to rely almost exclusively on the state apparatus to carry put the battle for white supremacy...The criminal justice system became, in short, a modern instrument to perpetuate white hegemony."
These practices gain primacy during the post-Civil Rights years as the criminal justice system provides a convenient vehicle for physically maintaining the old legally enforced color-lines as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned. The criminal justice system and its’ culmination in the prison industrial complex also continues to guarantee the perpetual profits from the forced labor of inmates, now justifying their slavery as punishment for crime. Finally, the reliance on the criminal system provides the color-blind racist regime the perfect set of codes to describe racialized patterns of alleged crime and actual punishment without ever referring to race.
As Angela Davis (1997:62) observes, ""Crime is one of the masquerades behind which "race", with all its menacing ideological complexity, mobilizes old public ears and creates new ones."
KW: There is a clear and dreadful line of continuity connecting the institution of chattel slavery and policies and public/private interests supporting mass incarceration. Examine the Slave Codes and then the post-slavery Black Codes to see how readily "emancipation" morphed into "criminalization." Legal segregation followed; today, the racial impact of "get tough on crime" and the expansion of the prison industrial complex continue that direct line. (I want to note, too, that federal, state, and territorial laws criminalized traditional American Indian cultures and daily life. Luana Ross powerfully addresses this in her book, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. The criminalization of immigrants, today particularly immigrants of color, deserves our attention.)
But so many people – I would certainly guess most white people – in this country are neither aware of these facts nor particularly want to know them because they shake up our tendency to want to believe that systemic racism is either gone or well on the run. In my work, I meet countless people who believe that that slavery is a relic of the past; that black people should just "get over it" and "move on." There is enormous resistance to learning about and recognizing just how the prison-industrial complex works in our society – and how low-income people of color provide the bodies that produce the profits for the incarceration industry.
In my work, I am particularly intrigued with the amount of anger so often directed at anyone who raises these questions – even anger from much of the liberal-left, particularly white folks. The depth of that anger, the depth of refusal to engage these historical and contemporary facts tells me that we’re dealing with enormous fear here. Racial fear; Racism. In many cases, that racism is not intentional; it certainly is unexamined. But nonetheless it is always there, at the very heart of things. Abolition discussions pull the rug out from under the cozy fiction that we actually are entering a post-racial phase in U.S. history and give lie to the comforting bromide that slavery is behind us.
In many respects, I believe that contemporary abolition discussions mine the mother lode of racism in the United States.
A3N: What do you think are common public misperceptions of the abolitionist movement? What roles do mainstream educational institutions and the corporate media play in creating these misperceptions? How can abolitionists best confront these misperceptions and constructively engage the general population?
NH: We must confront false assumptions and stereotypes that are fueled by media. The fears that lead to excessive prisonization are fueled by public misperceptions of crime...A substantial body of research documents the role of media - especially television – in constructing perceptions of crime, public images of the criminal, and subsequently shaping public policy.
Of particular note is media- generated hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s that inextricably linked and over-inflated "teen super-predators", inflated accounts of gang-violence and the crack cocaine "epidemic" -- all were unmistakably characterized as issues of race.
"Our perceptions of crimes are shaped to a large extent by the highly publicized crimes featured on the nightly news and sensationalized in news papers. We read about young African American and Hispanic males who sexually assault, rob and murder whites, and we assume that these crimes are typical. We assume that the typical crime is a violent crime, that the typical victim is white, and that the typical offender is African American or Hispanic."
The TV world of crime and criminals, however, is an illusion. These assumptions are false.
The reality of crime is very different from what media images suggest. An examination of official statistics (gathered annually by the F.BI. and U.S. Department of Justice and published in Uniform Crime Reports) presents data that is the exact opposite of what media presents to us.
The reality of crime is this: most crime is undetected/unreported, that which is related to property; rates for all crime are declining; the "typical" offender for all crimes is white; the "typical" victim is African American; and crime tends to be an intra-group event. Countering these media myths of crime with the truth – whenever and wherever we can – is first and essential task of abolitionists.
KW: Well, it seems important to first underscore how mainstream media – now almost wholly corporate controlled – helps to demonize prisoners, typically downplays news about police misconduct and the systemic nature of prison violence, and promotes "get tough on crime" policies. In the hands of most media, crime becomes simply another commodity. The more sensational, lurid, horrific, and terrifying, the more profitable it is. About a dozen years ago, a guy named Steven M. Chermak did a study of crime reporting (Victims in the News: Crime and the American News Media 1995), and he found that over half the crime stories he looked at were primarily based on police and court records. Not surprising, but it limits not only the source filter, but also the perspective and information that might be available.
So the stories are framed almost entirely by arrest records, police reports, and hurried exchanges between prosecutors, police, and reporters. Now, that material may be incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate in whole or in part. But accuracy or the wholeness of the story doesn’t matter. That’s the narrative. The perspectives of victims – of some kinds of crimes – might be incorporated a little bit. But you can be pretty sure that the people already considered ‘criminal’ – whether they have been rightly charged or not; whether they have been convicted of a specific offense or not – are not going to be there in any meaningful way. Not even if they have been brutalized or mistreated within the criminal legal system. That’s not really a "crime." After all, don’t "criminals" deserve to be treated as scum? Aren’t they automatically less than human? And how often are the stories of people whose lives are shattered by corporate misconduct and exploitation centered in the reporting of corporate-controlled media? So there’s a profound bias in what stories we hear, and whose voices are heard from the beginning, framing the narrative.
It’s no surprise then that so many of us who don’t routinely have to deal with law enforcement violence end up with the false idea that most people in prison are irredeemably violent; that they are sadistic murderers and rapists. And that prison is the only line of safety that protects "us" from these alleged violent predators. We aren’t encouraged to think critically about the racial and class coding that typically goes into these images. No accident that the "revolving door" rapist image, promoted by supporters of the first Bush, then running against Dukakis for the presidency, was Willie Horton, a black man. White people, particularly, aren't encouraged to think of prisoners as members of our communities, as our neighbors. But for countless people of color, of course, prisoners are members not only of their communities, but also their families.
I know from my own experience that many folks believe that we abolitionists are out of touch with the reality of violence and care more about "criminals" than "victims." That we are ready to loose hordes of psychotic, murdering rapists on the public because we don’t care about holding anyone accountable for the harms they do to others. In fact, we are viewed as eager to "excuse" their actions. Over time, many people have come to believe that only prisons keep us "safe" from violent others. And that to even question these myths is the same as an intentional attack on "victims of crime." I know from personal experience that many think we are "unrealistic" and know nothing about the devastation of violence and crime firsthand. So wrong – but it is such a prevalent belief.
The majority of people I know in the abolitionist movement – including myself – have experienced violence not only at the hands of individuals in the community – in families, schools, at home, on the streets - but also at the hands of police or prison officials. And I don’t know anyone who believes that any of this violence is unimportant or "excusable."
But we cannot just "counterattack" with our own demonizing narratives about law enforcement and those who disagree with us in order to challenge these perceptions. That just keeps the cycle going. I do believe we have to lay bare terrible truths about prison violence, but do so within frameworks that lift up the kinds of visions of community that we all hunger for. Unless there is something to fight for, and not just something to fight against, we will be on the defensive.
We also have to be willing to wrestle with difficult questions, not dodge them. Let's face it: there are some scary people who are exceptionally violent and not inclined – for whatever reasons – to change. They are relatively few, and we certainly shouldn't structure a whole policing/imprisonment system around them. But what do we do to help ensure that those few very violent folks won't keep harming others without just recreating the brutal system we have now?
And I think we have to deploy many tools in our struggle: facts and figures, yes, but also cultural means of humanizing the stories we have to tell. Most of all, we need to produce more cultural forms of imagination – poetry, visual art, video, theater, movies, dance, posters, novels, new media – that are powerful enough to even momentarily interrupt the fear that drives the anger that so often shuts down discussion.
We have to reach that emotional spot in people where they begin to recognize that they also have something to contribute to the story, and something profoundly important to gain from new approaches. We have to begin to deconstruct "us" and "them" in the general population, even as we seek to tell the truth about what happened– what is happening - and why. The story of how we got to this miserable state of affairs and what we can do to get out of it.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
