Black August event on Omaha Two and COINTELPRO to be held by Malcolm X group

July 31, 2012 Examiner.com

By: Michael Richardson

COINTELPRO 101

Credits: 

Freedom Archives

The Malcolm X Memorial Foundation will host a Black August commemoration in Omaha on Saturday, August 11, 2012 at the Malcolm X Center. The theme of the event will be America’s Imprisoned Human Rights Activists and will feature the Omaha Two, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice).

Black August is a nationwide series of events recognizing the political imprisonment of activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Malcolm X Memorial Foundation has held five prior Black August events.

The Omaha Two were leaders of the Nebraska affiliate of the Black Panthers in 1970 and were targeted by J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO operation. Hoover headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and secretly directed a clandestine war on political dissidents that did not meet his favor. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa were convicted for the murder of an Omaha policeman after Hoover ordered laboratory evidence withheld.

The Black August event will feature screening of three films. COINTELPRO 101 is a documentary produced by Freedom Archives and offers an overview of COINTELPRO’s attack on American citizens particularly the Black Panthers, Hoover’s most despised group. Black August is a feature film on George Jackson, the Soledad Brothers, and the prosecution of Angela Davis. Prisons on Fire is a documentary on 1971 prison uprisings at Attica and San Quentin.

The Jericho Movement will present an exhibit of photos and biographies of 49 persons incarcerated beginning in the 1960’s who lost their freedom after clashes with police.

Tariq Al-Amin, head of Nebraskans for Justice and former Omaha policeman, will discuss the plight of the Omaha Two and how they did not receive a fair trial because of COINTELPRO interference with the police investigation.

Historian Tekla Ajbala will provide additional details on the compromised murder investigation that shifted the case from the confessed killer to the targeted Panther leaders.

Earlier this summer the Omaha City Council voted against hearing new evidence about the identity of one of the killers of policeman Larry MInard, Sr. The August 17, 1970 bombing murder of Minard was blamed on the Omaha Two and the confessed bomber, Duane Peak, was allowed to escape a murder charge in exchange for implicating the two Panther leaders.

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are in their 42nd year of life sentences at the maximum-security Nebraska State Penitentiary. Both men continue to deny any role in MInard’s death.

More information on the Omaha Two

Re-Open COINTELPRO Investigation: If the Sioux Can Seek Justice, Why Can’t Blacks?

June 27, 2012 — Glen Ford Black Agenda Report

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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Oglala Sioux have convinced the U.S. Justice Department to re-examine 50 possible political killings, from the mid-Seventies, some of which are surely linked to the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO. The program registered its biggest body count among African Americans, but Black Misleaders have made “no serious effort to exhume the full body of the program’s crimes, much less prosecute the guilty, or free the framed, or compensate the victims, or rewrite the lies of national history.”

Re-Open COINTELPRO Investigation: If the Sioux Can Seek Justice, Why Can’t Blacks?

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Who among the Black Misleadership Class is demanding a reopening of COINTELPRO’s reign of terror in Black America?”

A U.S. Justice Department team will review the deaths of 50 Native Americans over the past 40 years, in what could amount to a re-examination of at least one theater of the FBI’s infamous secret war against U.S. radicals, including members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The FBI’s counter-intelligence program, or COINTELPRO, has not been officially scrutinized since the Church Committee investigations of 1975-76. The impending Justice Department probe is the result of years of requests from members of the Oglala Sioux tribe to take a new look at scores of deaths that previous investigators had claimed were accidents or suicides, but which American Indian Movement members believe were related to political violence on the Pine Ridge reservation, including the 1973 federal siege of Wounded Knee in which two FBI agents also died. AIM member Leonard Peltier is serving a life sentence in those shootings. In the aftermath of its agents’ deaths, the FBI is reported to have “caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those it identified as key AIM leaders.”

AIM members have long maintained that many deaths that authorities attributed to accidents or suicides were actually murders committed by a tribal paramilitary force, abetted or covered up by the FBI and other federal lawmen. The FBI’s COINTELPRO specialized in instigating violence against – or fomenting deadly discord within – targeted organizations, scoring its highest body counts among AIM and the Black Panther Party, which FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover described as the number one threat to national security.

“COINTELPRO, has not been officially scrutinized since the Church Committee investigations of 1975-76.”

Had it not been for the perseverance of Oglala Sioux tribal leaders, there would be little hope of discovering the truth about political violence at Pine Ridge, and COINTELPRO’s role in the killings. But who among the Black Misleadership Class is demanding a reopening of COINTELPRO’s reign of terror in Black America? As the Jericho Movement has stated, “dozens of women and men are still incarcerated upwards of 40 years as a direct result of this heinous program.” Scores of Panthers were murdered directly by police, like Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton; or in disputes instigated by the FBI, like the Los Angeles shootings of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins by the “US Organization.” The Party itself ultimately fell victim to internal discord – a methodical COINTELPRO campaign of destabilization that produced an unknown number casualties. The Church Committee told the world that COINTELPRO was real, not a figment of paranoid radical imaginations – but there has been no serious effort to exhume the full body of the program’s crimes, much less prosecute the guilty, or free the framed, or compensate the victims, or rewrite the lies of national history.

The Congressional Black Caucus, as a body, has repeatedly ignored appeals that they demand a real investigation of COINTELPRO’s massive official criminality. Most of these requests have been directed at Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) who, as chair or ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, was the logical convener. But the closest the Caucus came to acknowledging the crimes of COINTELPRO was in Durban, South Africa, at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, when Conyers and his Black Democratic colleagues Donna Christianson (VI), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Barbara Lee (CA), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX), Diane Watson (CA), and Cynthia McKinney (GA) presented the study “COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story” to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. But Durban is far from Capitol Hill.

“The Caucus was more interested in creating an environment more conducive to Democratic electoral victories, than in justice.”

On her own, Congresswoman McKinney unsuccessfully introduced legislation, in 2006, to begin where the Church Committee left off and re-open the COINTELPRO investigation. (Rep. McKinney had held a forum on COINTELPRO at the CBC’s Legislative Weekend, in 2005.) Had the CBC deployed its collective prestige to hold a full-blown, official Caucus review of what was already known about COINTELPRO, even without subpoena power, it would have done its Black constituents, and the cause of truth, a real service. But the Caucus was more interested in creating an environment more conducive to Democratic electoral victories, than in justice.

As a result of the silence of the Black Misleadership Class, COINTELPRO still lives. From 2007 to 2009, the FBI coordinated a renewed persecution of aging Panthers in a case that became known as the San Francisco Eight, reviving charges that were nearly 36 years old.

The Oglala Sioux community was wracked by violence in the mid-Seventies, a period of terror and death fomented, in large part, by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Yet, nearly 40 years later, Sioux leaders have compelled federal authorities to take a new look at the era’s ghastly events. The Pine Ridge Sioux have no congresspersons of their own, they number only about 20,000, and they cannot claim a U.S. president and attorney general among their ethnicity. But they have the courage to demand Truth of Power.

What’s wrong with Black America?