Counterpunch, May 17, 2013FBI Twists History
Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to
kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to
prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice.
This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list – the first female to have that dubious distinction.
In September 2011, an FBI cold-case investigation resulted in Portuguese police arresting Wright. Courts in that country, including its highest court, twice rejected U.S. extradition requests ruling that Wright (who changed his name to Jose Luis Jorge Dos Santos) was a Portuguese citizen and under Portuguese law the statute of limitation for his crime in the U.S. had expired.
During that July 2012 public hearing, the chair, NJ Congressman Chris Smith, blasted “rogue” judges in Portugal for “thumbing” their nose at the world, characterizing those judicial rulings as “indefensible.” A former U.S. State Department official, testifying at the hearing on Wright’s case, urged offering rewards to bounty hunters to “snatch Wright off the street” and smuggle him back into the United States – a blatantly extra-legal tactic.
That anti-Portugal rhetoric ignores the reality of the U.S. routinely disregarding other country’s laws, for example refusing to send 26 indicted CIA officers charged in Italy with the 2003 kidnapping and rendition of a man from Rome to a torture cell in Egypt and then refusing to send them send them to face sentencing after a court in Italy, a NATO ally, upheld the men’s convictions in absentia in a decision early this year.
Rep. Smith and others also sought U.S. government action against Portugal for failing to disregard its laws mandating refusal of the U.S. extradition request for Wright.
The murder convictions of Wright and Shakur, each evidenced systemic flaws within the U.S. criminal justice system that remain evident today. Neither Wright nor Shakur, for example, actually committed the murders producing their murder convictions, according to forensic evidence and other facts provided by law enforcement at the time of the trials.
Shakur’s original trial lawyer, Rutgers University criminal justice professor Lennox Hinds, said during a recent Democracy Now! interview, that his client was “shot in the back” while her “hands were in the air.” This rendered her incapable of firing a gun, evidence that the trial jury brushed-off and law enforcement authorities today bury when portraying Shakur as a brutal murderer.
Those injustices also included the trial judge’s repeatedly holding Hinds in contempt, and after the trial, an attempt by the NJ body certifying lawyers to revoke Hinds’ law license because he had criticized that murder trial as a “legalized lynching” by a “kangaroo court.”
The institutionalized injustice evident in Shakur’s trial is a rights robbing reality with an infamous history in NJ and across America.
This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list – the first female to have that dubious distinction.
Shakur was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a
May 1973 incident on the NJ turnpike, where one of her companions was
killed and another captured. Once known as JoAnne Chesimard, she escaped
from a NJ prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba in
1984 where she lives today.
While Shakur,65, occasionally criticizes racist inequities in the
U.S. – comparable to that of many politicians including Barack Obama
prior to this election of U.S. President – she does not actively
advocate or engage in terrorism.
Yet many contend she is a ‘terrorist’ because of her armed resistance
decades ago to American racism that included police brutality – a
deadly offense Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried twice in his seminal
1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. A May 10 editorial in the conservative
Washington Times declared Shakur had to “pay for her crimes” suggesting
Cuba send her to a cell in Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. torture prison
located on land the U.S. illegally occupies in Cuba.
Although federal authorities did double the NJ state reward for the
capture of Shakur to $2-million when placing her on their “Most Wanted”
terrorist list exactly forty-years after that 1973 incident, the bounty
hunter incident referenced above occurred before the widely condemned
listing of Shakur.
In July 2012, almost a year before the Shakur listing, federal
authorities discussed snatching a former Black Panther “off the street”
in Portugal during a public hearing chaired by a Republican Congressman
from New Jersey.
That ex-BPP member, George Wright, now 70, had escaped from a New
Jersey prison in 1970 while he was serving a 15-30-year sentence for a
death during a gas station robbery eight years earlier. The odyssey of
Wright, who joined the BPP after fleeing prison, included escape to
Algeria on a hijacked airliner, life in France, Guinea-Bissau in West
Africa (where he received asylum) and then to Portugal where he married a
Portuguese woman, raised a family and spent much of his life there
doing charitable and humanitarian work.In September 2011, an FBI cold-case investigation resulted in Portuguese police arresting Wright. Courts in that country, including its highest court, twice rejected U.S. extradition requests ruling that Wright (who changed his name to Jose Luis Jorge Dos Santos) was a Portuguese citizen and under Portuguese law the statute of limitation for his crime in the U.S. had expired.
During that July 2012 public hearing, the chair, NJ Congressman Chris Smith, blasted “rogue” judges in Portugal for “thumbing” their nose at the world, characterizing those judicial rulings as “indefensible.” A former U.S. State Department official, testifying at the hearing on Wright’s case, urged offering rewards to bounty hunters to “snatch Wright off the street” and smuggle him back into the United States – a blatantly extra-legal tactic.
That anti-Portugal rhetoric ignores the reality of the U.S. routinely disregarding other country’s laws, for example refusing to send 26 indicted CIA officers charged in Italy with the 2003 kidnapping and rendition of a man from Rome to a torture cell in Egypt and then refusing to send them send them to face sentencing after a court in Italy, a NATO ally, upheld the men’s convictions in absentia in a decision early this year.
Rep. Smith and others also sought U.S. government action against Portugal for failing to disregard its laws mandating refusal of the U.S. extradition request for Wright.
The murder convictions of Wright and Shakur, each evidenced systemic flaws within the U.S. criminal justice system that remain evident today. Neither Wright nor Shakur, for example, actually committed the murders producing their murder convictions, according to forensic evidence and other facts provided by law enforcement at the time of the trials.
Shakur’s original trial lawyer, Rutgers University criminal justice professor Lennox Hinds, said during a recent Democracy Now! interview, that his client was “shot in the back” while her “hands were in the air.” This rendered her incapable of firing a gun, evidence that the trial jury brushed-off and law enforcement authorities today bury when portraying Shakur as a brutal murderer.
“So, the allegation by the state police that she took an officer’s
gun and shot him, executed him in cold blood, is not only false, but it
is designed to inflame,” Hinds said, noting that no gunpowder residue
“was found on her clothing or on her hand,” further undercutting claims
of her shooting Trooper Werner Foerster.
The structural injustices corroding the Shakur trial involved an
all-white jury where five of those jurors had conflict-of-interest
connections to NJ state troopers (including two close relatives and a
girlfriend) and the trial judge slashing funding for defense experts
sought to highlight that forensic evidence of innocence according to a
recent statement from the National Lawyers Guild opposing Shakur’s
terror listing.Those injustices also included the trial judge’s repeatedly holding Hinds in contempt, and after the trial, an attempt by the NJ body certifying lawyers to revoke Hinds’ law license because he had criticized that murder trial as a “legalized lynching” by a “kangaroo court.”
The institutionalized injustice evident in Shakur’s trial is a rights robbing reality with an infamous history in NJ and across America.
The July 1797 hanging in Woodbury, NJ, a few miles south of
Philadelphia, of a black man convicted of murder prompted harsh
contemporaneous criticism that assailed alleged proof of guilt “being
found entirely on presumption.” The condemned man, Abraham Johnstone,
issued a stirring retort on the day of his execution in which he claimed
he was the victim of perjury, which he argued was rampant in American
courts. Johnstone stated in his retort that he had been framed by
persons seeking to steal his home.
While the failed extradition of George Wright has faded from news
headlines, the placement of Shakur on the “Wanted Terrorist” list –
triggering the prospect of a her kidnapping or, these days, of a drone
strike – has fanned protests nationwide from demonstrations to a letter
sent to President Obama asking that he overturn the FBI action, which
has been signed by over 60 activists, academics, ministers and concerned
citizens including actor Danny Glover.
That letter to Obama demanded that the FBI provide proof to document
its claim that Shakur has used her asylum in Cuba to “promote” terrorist
ideology.
That letter scored the FBI for equating “radical beliefs favoring fundamental social and economic change with terror.”
Supporters of Shakur contend her terrorist listing moves dangerously
beyond relentless revenge rooted in the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO covert
war to crush black civil rights and militant activists during the late
1960s and early 1970s (including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). A U.S.
Senate investigating committee in 1975 blasted COINTELPRO’s blatant
attacks on constitutionally protected activities during an attempt by
the FBI to sustain America’s racist status quo.
Shakur supporters see that terror listing as another step in
expanding the Terror War’s assault on domestic dissidents and erosions
of civil liberties including the First Amendment right to criticize
government. Supporters also see the listing as a weapon in right-wing
efforts to blunt Obama Administration discussions about removing Cuba
from the federal government’s list of nations allegedly involved in
sponsoring terrorism.
Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional
Rights, said the federal government is “stretching” its legal definition
of terrorism when applying that tag to Shakur. Ratner, during a media
interview, asserted Shakur was “wrongfully convicted” for that fatal
incident that he said began with racial profiling by NJ State Police. NJ
troopers were one of the first law enforcement agencies in America
exposed in media coverage and lawsuits for officially sanctioned profile
targeting of non-whites.
The same U.S. government that Ratner said is “choosing to ignore” the
legal fact that the Cuban government has an “absolute right” to
repeatedly deny U.S. extradition requests for Shakur has always given
sanctuary to wanted anti-Castro terrorists, including the CIA-trained
Luis Posada Carriles who bombed a Cuban airliner in 1976 killing 73
people.
Robert Saleem Holbrook is one of nearly 500 Pennsylvania inmates
serving controversial life-sentences for fatal crimes committed while
under 18, many who like Holbrook, were minor accomplices not the actual
murderers. Holbrook recently wrote an article criticizing the terrorist
listing of Shakur.
“If anyone is a terrorist, it is the agents who were responsible for a
campaign of assassinations, false imprisonments, illegal wiretaps and a
host of other illegal acts that emerged from COINTELPRO,” Holbrook
wrote. “Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter.”
Bruce Dixon, co-founder of the news analysis website Black Agenda
Report, criticized the failure of “nationally noted” black leaders (like
the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus) to criticize the FBI/NJ
State Police action against Shakur, for which Dixon also criticized
President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
If criticism of U.S. policies is “all it takes to be a terrorist,”
Dixon wrote in a commentary on BAR, “many thousands of today’s
yesterday’s and tomorrow’s black and non-black political activists
inside the U.S. are “terrorists” as well.”
LINN WASHINGTON, JR. is a founding member of
ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning
online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN
GRANT, DAVE LINDORFF, LORI SPENCER and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at
www.thiscantbehappening.net
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