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<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>by BAR managing editor Bruce A.
Dixon</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Assata Shakur could not have been named “most
wanted terrorist” without the explicit approval of the first black president and
his attorney general. In doing so, they have declared open war on the black
liberation movement, something that J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO were only
able to do in secret.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Not Your Daddy's COINTELPRO: Obama Brands
Assata Shakur “Most Wanted Terrorist”</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>by BAR managing editor Bruce A.
Dixon</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Whoever imagines our first black president and
his first black attorney general had little or nothing to do with naming Assata
Shakur its “most wanted terrorist” list is deep in denial and delusion.
“Terrorist,” as my colleague Glen Ford points out, has never been anything but a
political label, applied by the authorities for their own political purposes.
The international legal angle as well, with Assata Shakur receiving political
asylum from the Cuban government the last 30 years, also makes her placement on
that list something that Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama
absolutely had to carefully consider and approve..</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>A lot has changed in the forty years since
Assata Shakur was wounded and captured in New Jersey. The press conference
announcing her capture was doubtless headed up by white police and district
attorneys. Back then, black faces were pretty scarce in the top ranks of cops
and prosecutors anywhere, and J. Edgar Hoover had only recently left the FBI..
Last week's announcement of the $2 million bounty on Assata's head was anchored
by a high ranking black cop, and of course, there are black faces in the offices
of president and US Attorney General. People who call themselves progressives,
do call that “progress,” don't they?</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT
size=4><STRONG>The premiere federal initiative for political policing was
something called COINTELPRO. </STRONG></FONT><A href="" target=_blank><FONT
size=4><STRONG>COINTELPRO</STRONG></FONT></A><FONT size=4><STRONG> was a secret
“counterintelligence,” as in “counter-intelligent” and/or evil multiplied by
stupid federal program which for 25 years labeled thousands of civic
organizations, churches, labor unions, and grassroots movements as threats to
“national security.” Federal agents secretly coordinated local police and media
assets in hundreds of campaigns to discredit and destroy those organizations,
utilizing illegal surveillance, agents provocateur and media slander. Individual
leaders and participants were harassed, falsely prosecuted and imprisoned, and
sometimes murdered. COINTELPRO's existence only came to light as a result of
</STRONG></FONT><A href="" target=_blank><FONT size=4><STRONG>US Senate select
committee</STRONG></FONT></A><FONT size=4><STRONG> chaired by Senator Frank
Church hearings in 1975.</STRONG></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>The good news about COINTELPRO was first, that
the government of those days wasn't bold enough, that it felt too hemmed in and
prevented by the American people from openly targeting political dissidents for
assassination and murder, and second, that it eventually did come to light.
Government officials even had to pay token damages in a handful of cases, such
as the murder of Illinois Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton, and publicly
claim their official misconduct had ended.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT
size=4><STRONG>Forty years later though, we live in the era of secret
kidnappings, regular torture, ghost prisons and executive branch murder by
drones or special ops teams. Today the federal Department of Homeland Security
funds counter-terrorism </STRONG></FONT><A href="" target=_blank><FONT
size=4><STRONG>fusion centers</STRONG></FONT></A><FONT size=4><STRONG> which
openly disseminate the kind of inflammatory and fanciful disinformation to local
police and security contractors about those the government wants targeted that
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI agents had to come around and whisper in their ears. Now
</STRONG></FONT></FONT><FONT size=4><STRONG><FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>that</I></FONT><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"> is
progress.</FONT></STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Forty years and change ago, the whole
constellation of African American leadership wrapped its arms around the
segments of the black movement that came under vicious police assault. I was a
member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago in 1969 and 70, and we never had as
many friends as we did when our offices were riddled with gunfire or our members
murdered by police. Back then when , everyone from the Urban League and NAACP to
Operation Breadbasket and the Afro-American Patrolman's League stood up for us.
Those who've viewed the recently released documentary Free Angela Davis &
All Political Prisoners can see the same phenomenon of four decades ago, with
Rev. Ralph David Abernathy wrapping his arms around “our sister Angela Davis”
when she was accused of murder in the deaths of a judge and others in
California. </STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>It's been a week now since the $2 million
dollar bounty and “most wanted terrorist” announcement. In that time, not a
single nationally noted African American “leader” has raised his or her voice.
Not Ben Jealous. Not a single black mayor or member of the Congressional Black
Caucus. Not Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, and certainly not the presidential lap dog Al
Sharpton. Sharpton has worn wires for the FBI more than once, and is credibly
accused of trying to get close to people who were rumored to be close to Assata
Shakur in the 1980s. Those people wisely avoided Rev. Al.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT
size=4><STRONG>Such is the pressure of subservient conformity among the black
political class that not a single African American politician, religious leader,
or personage of national note has opened his or her mouth in Assata Shakur's
defense, with the solitary exception of Angela Davis, once a political prisoner
and fugitive in the days before the word “terrorist” had been coined. Lockstep
conformity like this is hard to shake. In their 45 minutes in an otherwise
excellent </STRONG></FONT><A href="" target=_blank><FONT
size=4><STRONG>Democracy Now</STRONG></FONT></A><FONT size=4><STRONG> show
mostly devoted to Assata Shakur's case, neither Shakur's attorney Lennox Hinds
nor Angela Davis could bring themselves even to hint that the president and
attorney general were responsible for branding her as the nation's “most wanted
terrorist.” </STRONG></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Four decades have seen the flowering of elite
affirmative action in the military, corporate America and in American political
life. Our black political class never tires of holding their own illustrious
careers up as “the fulfillment of Dr. King's dream.” But the fact is that US
corporations couldn't do business in Africa without black faces. The US couldn't
give military aid and training for a quarter century to 52 out of 54 African
governments, arming all sides of every civil and international conflict in the
most war torn regions of the planet, without black diplomats, black admirals and
black generals. It couldn't deploy the world's most massive prison and police
state without hundreds of thousands of black prison guards and police, some in
the most senior positions and many more in line behind them.
</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>All these are the fruits of what passes for
social and racial “progress” in these United States.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>This then, is the real function of corporate
and elite affirmative action, and of the black political class itself. Whether
it's moving the corporate agenda of gentrification through the destruction of
public housing, carrying out social security and Medicare cuts, or waging open
war upon the unapproved segments of the African American movement for justice
and liberation, black faces in high places have repeatedly proven themselves the
more effective evil, able to blunt leftish opposition and carry out policies
that white elites can only dream of without their help.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Assata Shakur is not a terrorist. She was shot
with her hands in the air, and no residue from gunfire was detected on her hands
or clothes or that would have been introduced as evidence at her trial. Her all
white jury was instructed to convict her for simply being there, and they did
just that. She was a political prisoner, and the only “crime” she can reasonably
be accused of is escaping and living out her life the last three decades in
Cuba. Government officials do admit that her “terrorist” activity consists of
occasional writings and speeches which advocate radical change, and the example
of her peaceful life and political asylum 90 miles from Florida.
</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>If that's all it takes to be a “terrorist,”
many thousands of today's yesterday's and tomorrow's black and non-black
political activists inside the U.S. are “terrorists” as well. There's a global
war on terror, and now it openly includes the black liberation movement,
basically everybody to the left of the established black political class. In the
wake of this announcement, can there be any doubt that many more names are or
will soon come up at the president's “terror Tuesday” meetings, at which the
White House boasts it considers who next to kidnap or murder? We're all fair
game now.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>President Obama obviously hopes the label
“terrorist” will scare present and future activists from learning what there is
to know from the proud traditions of African American and other resistance to
empire. He hopes to intimidate and frighten ordinary people, especially young
people, into the same kind of conformity as their supposed “leaders.”
</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><STRONG>Back in 2007 and 2008, candidate Barack Obama
confided to editorial boards and others a number of times that Ronald Reagan was
his favorite president. We should have listened to him a lot more closely. It's
a safe guess now, that J. Edgar Hoover is his favorite
cop.</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in"><FONT color=#800000><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I><STRONG>Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black
Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.
He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact
page, or at
bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.</STRONG></I></FONT></FONT></DIV><A
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<H2 class=comments><FONT size=4>Comments </FONT></H2>
<DIV class="comment odd clear-block">
<H3 class=title><A class=active href="" target=_blank>The BPP and community
service</A></H3>
<DIV class=submitted><FONT size=4><STRONG><SPAN
class=comment-name>stuartbramhall</SPAN> - <SPAN class=comment-date>05/08/2013 -
20:55</SPAN> </STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV class=content><FONT size=4><STRONG>As a white person who lived through the
sixties in Milwaukee, my only contact with the Black Panthers was through the
community service they provided - both through their school breakfast program
and the BP volunteers who helped patrol our inner city schools after Martin
Luther King's assassination. As a substitute teacher, I would have been unable
to keep order in my classroom without the assistance of the Panthers. People who
actually lived through this time are aware that the Panthers carried weapons
primarily for self-defense against the police and FBI. The Panthers' violent
reputation was a fiction - carefully crafted by an aggressive media campaign by
J Edgar Hoover, who was a rabid racist. Ward Churchill reprints numerous
declassified FBI memos documenting this in The Cointelpro
Papers. <BR> <BR>The sad thing is that Cointelpro never ended in the
black community. I myself became an inadvertent victim when I supported 2 former
Black Panthers in converting an abandoned school in Seattle into an African
American Museum. I write this about the in The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of
an American Refugee. I emigrated to New Zealand in
2002.<BR></STRONG></FONT></DIV>
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<H3 class=title><A class=active href="" target=_blank>Seeking Daylight</A></H3>
<DIV class=submitted><FONT size=4><STRONG><SPAN class=comment-name>Nathaniel
Gurien</SPAN> - <SPAN class=comment-date>05/08/2013 - 17:05</SPAN>
</STRONG></FONT></DIV><FONT size=4><STRONG>Since I first became aware of you
folks and attended your most recent fundraiser last year (@ Riverside
Church), I've been struggling to find any daylight between your viewpoint and
those of your esteemed colleagues (Ms Kimberley, Mr Ford, et.al.) and my own. So
far I've failed utterly!<BR>Thank you for your continuing and outstanding
independent journalism.</STRONG></FONT></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>