Black Panthers Rearrested

Yesterday, at the protest against the Iraq War, a young Muslim-activist brutha was telling me about the recapture of eight members of the BPP, and their treatment during the their earlier prosecutions in the 60s/70s. Abu Ghraib, all over again. COINTELPRO is ostensibly defunct and discredited. (For those of you who live in the U.S., and are unfamiliar with COINTELPRO, please, please educate yourself on it. The U.S. fascination with torture did not begin at Abu Ghraib.) Yet, in the selective application of justice characteristic of the U.S., its perpetrators have gone unpunished/unprosecuted for the murders and torture committed under the program. Not a single leader--Black or Muslim--who claims to stand for justice and for the rights of the People, from Jesse Jackson to WD Muhammad, or even Farrakhan, has called for an inquiry into COINTELPRO. Today the system continues to victimize these innocents, as if they haven't suffered enough. Muslims and people of conscience must speak out against this injustice.

I'm not sure what's being done, if anything, to organize against this outrage. The Jericho Movement may be posting updates, as they become available:

http://thejerichomovement.com/

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http://bombsandshields.blogspot.com/

Eight veterans of the Black Panther Party (BPP,) seven of whom are accused of belonging to the Black Liberation Army (BLA,) were arrested today on charges stemming from the 1971 shooting death of San Fransisco Police Sgt. John V. Young.

The August 29, 1971 attack on the Ingleside Police Station came only eight days after San Quentin prison guards gunned down BPP Field Marshal "Soledad Brother" George Jackson. The murder of Jackson provoked threats of retaliation and even sparked the Attica Prison rebellion.

Seven of the men arrested, all suspected BLA members, were charged with murder and conspiracy. They are Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Herman Bell, 59, and Jalil Abdul Muntaqim formerly known as Anthony Bottom, 55, both currently incarcerated in New York state; Henry Watson Jones, 71, of Altadena; Francisco Torres, 58, of Queens, New York; and Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Florida.

Another suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought on murder and conspiracy charges. Authorities believe he could be in France, Belize or Tanzania.

Taylor and two others faced murder charges in 1973, but the case was dismissed after a San Francisco judge that torture was used to extract confessions from the men. San Francisco Police Department Inspectors Frank McCoy and Ed Erdelatz were present for the interrogation and torture which consisted of stripping the men naked and beating them with a lead pipe, blindfolding them and throwing wool blankets soaked with boiling water over their bodies, placing electric probes on their genitals and other body parts, inserting an electric cattle prod in their anus, punching and kicking, and slamming them into walls while blindfolded.

McCoy and Erdelatz came out of retirement to lead investigation when the case was reopened sometime in 2002. The decision to re-investigate the incident followed the Department of Justice's expanding prosecution of political crimes in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Bell's attorney Stuart Hanlon called the arrests a "prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the '60s." "There's a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the Panthers," Hanlon said. "Now they're going after old men."