http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_100955.shtml
WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - After nearly 55 years of punishing U.S. economic sanctions strangling the Cuban people and their revolutionary government, there is fear now that a $2 million bounty placed on the head of escaped Black Liberation Army (BLA) leader Assata Shakur, could lead a desperate person on the island to try to assassinate her in order to collect the bounty on her head, this according to Lennox Hinds, a professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Rutgers University, and attorney of record for Ms. Shakur.
“I would not be surprised,” Mr. Hinds told The Final Call,
“if (Pres. Barack Obama) does not give the order for them to send the
(Navy) Seals to infiltrate and capture her” on the Caribbean island.
Mr. Hinds joined dozens of activists from around the country Nov. 2,
at the Law School of the University of the District of Columbia, at a
“celebration” and all-day series of educational workshops organized by
the Jericho Movement
for freedom for political prisoners on the anniversary of the
“liberation of Assata Shakur,” from U.S. imprisonment for a crime her
supporters insist she did not commit.
“The only way that we can change that, is to force the people around
him, that is the people of conscience, to educate him on who she is,”
Mr. Hinds continued.
“At this moment she is a ‘terrorist.’ Who is a terrorist? Another
client of mine—Nelson Mandela—he was on the terrorist watch list, okay?
Why was he on the terrorist watch list? Many members of Congress
(said), ‘Is he on the terrorist watch list? We’re surprised.’ There
they are trying to take pictures with him. Right?” he added, speaking
of the 95 year-old former South African president and freedom fighter.
“But he’s a terrorist because an ally of the United States—apartheid
South Africa—said he was a terrorist,” Mr. Hinds explained. “Everybody
thought he had horns and a tail. The ANC (African National Congress)
was a terrorist organization, and so they put them on the terrorist
watch list. They put her on the terrorist watch list (Ms. Shakur). We
have to change that dynamic and it’s possible to do that.”
Assata Shakur has always maintained that when she was in captivity, she
was a political prisoner in the war that elements of the U.S.
government has waged against African people since their capture and
enslavement on these shores, the Jericho Movement insists.
In May, 1973 she was arrested after she was wounded in a shootout on
the New Jersey Turnpike in which Black Liberation Army member Zayd
Malik Shakur and state trooper Werner Foerster were killed. She was
charged with a laundry list of crimes attributed to the BLA, including
murder, bank robbery, and kidnapping.“It was a classic case of profiling,” attorney Nkechi Taifa told The Final Call, “in which the car they were riding ostensibly had a broken taillight. The FBI and the state troopers knew who they were following, knew who they were looking for and it was pure harassment as described in the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) to arrest activists on any type of charge, put them in jail, have them spend up their resources on legal matters and spend the rest of the summer in jail. That was really the reason in which they were stopped. “Assata was shot with her hands in the air, seated,” Atty. Taifa continued. “That was proven by three neurologists during the trial, who talked about the bullets that entered her, and the only way they could have entered was with her hands in the air. Yet, she was convicted of the death of one of the state troopers, despite the fact again, that it was proven that she never shot any weapon. There was no residue—gunpowder residue—on her hands” or clothing.
Although she was charged with committing a series of bank robberies along the East Coast, she was either acquitted, or the charges against her were dropped in each case, Atty. Taifa explained.
“She considers herself a modern-day escaped slave on the Underground Railroad, similar to Harriet Tubman. Back in the day, Harriet Tubman had a $12,000 bounty on her head. Today, Assata Shakur has a $2 million bounty.
That means that anybody who might be feeling the impact of economic demise who sees her on the streets of Havana, has the legal license to kill her and get a reward, or turn her in and get a reward.” Today, she is No. 1 on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” terrorist list, the first woman so listed, even though the crimes of which she was accused were acts of defiance of the secret, illegal, U.S. domestic spying program, and were certainly not considered to be acts of “terror” at that time, Atty. Taifa insisted.
“There is unfinished business since the Civil Rights era. And that unfinished business is the plight of the political prisoners who are still languishing in prison as a result of that era’s” illegal actions against Black people.”
Despite arguments from critics labeling Ms. Shakur and others as otherwise, they are not common criminals said the attorney.
“These are people who answered the cry from thousands and thousands
that something must be done about all of this madness. This madness of
Black men’s hearts being cut out in Buffalo, N.Y., this madness of
Black women being shot at in Chattanooga, Tenn.
“These are the things that were happening in the ‘60s and ‘70s that
the Black Liberation Army, which was an offshoot of the Black Panther
Party, decided that they would seek to do something about it. And it is
in the context in the context of that era that many people are still
languishing.”
Many of those who have been identified by the Jericho Movement and
its allies which organized the celebration as political prisoners are
Muslims. Many, like Imam Jamil El Amin became Muslims after getting
involved in the Black liberation movement, according to Masai Ehehosi,
a member of the Republic of New Africa who now advocates the complete
“destruction” of the prison-industrial complex, after spending 14 years
in prison as a result of his own participation in the BLA.
“Imam Jamil El Amin, a man formerly known as H. Rap Brown may come
up a few times in this conversation,” Mr. Ehehosi told the assembly,
“because among other things, not only was the organization that he was
a part of in the early days—SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee) one of the specific targets of the Counter Intelligence
Program—but he’s also one of the individuals who was named specifically
as a target when they talked about ‘how do we stop the development of a
Black Messiah, able to unify and electrify the people.’
“You’ll see why there’s a lot of reasons why the oppressor would in
fact fear (the Muslim) community. Sometimes we come to the question
where folks try to take us outside of the folds of Islam. That’s not
the way we view it at all. Some folks would like to fall back on the
fact that he’s in there because of being H. Rap Brown. We just think
that H. Rap Brown was a man of character.
“So the state targeted him from the beginning because they knew his
character. When he became a Muslim he became more of a threat. He said
he loves Allah more than he loves the state. Imam Jamil was one of the
ones who said ‘fascism is here in America. Fascism is coming and
they’re going to call it patriotism,” said Mr. Ehehosi.
There is indisputable evidence that the government has
“preemptively” targeted Muslims for prosecution and incarceration, as a
part of the scheme to “build the surveillance state with political
prisoners,” and it comes from attorney Stephen F. Downs, who spent his
professional career as the chief attorney for the New York State
Commission on Judicial Conduct, disciplining bad judges.
Mr. Downs, founder of Project SALAM, has worked closely with more
than 100—mostly Muslim—defendants and inmates who were pre-selected for
prosecution before they committed any crimes.
When the trial of one Muslim defendant was over, “I was convinced,
along with a lot of other people, that the government had deliberately
framed an innocent man,” Mr. Downs told the assembly. “It wasn’t just
that they had made a mistake. They understood exactly who he was and
what he was doing.
“He was a peaceful man. He was not involved in terrorism. And they
framed him anyway. We were mystified by this. In my professional career
I had never seen a case like that. I had seen people wrongfully
convicted, but never in the same kind of deliberate, almost angry way,
by the government, taking down someone who was innocent. We began to
look around the country to try to find other people.
“Pretty soon we began to find a lot of people,” he said. All of them
had one thing in common; they were part of a patter on what he calls
“preemptive prosecution.” Victims of the practice were enticed or
entrapped into committing crimes, often at the hands of provocateurs
who were forgiven of terrible crimes, and often given handsome cash
rewards for their efforts.
This government overreaching, however, may eventually spell the end
of the practice of preemptive prosecution. “I was very depressed a
couple of months ago. We didn’t seem to be going anywhere,” Mr. Downs
said in response to a question from The Final Call, “and then
along came (Edward)
Snowden.
“Snowden’s leak, I think will turn out to be one of the pivotal
moments in American history, because he changed the debate. Suddenly,
White folks began to see that they were being treated like Muslims.
I’ve always felt that we’re going to win when we get the people to fear
the government more than they fear the Muslims.
“People have to understand that Muslims are simply being used as the
excuse. They are creating the fear. To have ‘national security’ you
have to a war? All of these folks up here are part of a fake war, a
phony war that justifies going in and violating the Constitution. All
of this security state violates the Constitution he added.
“Inevitably, if you give the government that much power, they’re
going to overreach. Once they overreach, we have an opportunity to join
together, but we’ve got to join together,” to combat the surveillance
state,” said Mr. Downs.
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