Defense attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal had hoped to call author and researcher Ward Churchill to the stand to testify about the COINTELPRO program that targeted government opponents, particularly the Black Panther Party. Over 700 pages of FBI files with specific references to Wesley Cook (aka Mumia Abu-Jamal) have been uncovered. As he did with many of the other witnesses that Mumia's attorneys wanted to bring to the stand, Judge Albert Sabo quashed an appearance by Ward Churchill. The following is from an interview conducted with Ward Churchill about COINTELPRO by Amy Goodman and Bernard White of Pacifica radio station WBAI, 99.5FM (NYC):
transcribed by Bob Witanek for NJ Speakout <bwitanek@igc.apc.org> 8/20/95
BERNARD: If you had the opportunity to speak before Judge Sabo, what would you have said?
WARD: Essentially, I would have said that as a member of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960's and ealry 70's Mumia Abu-Jamal would have been directly targeted by the FBI for what they euphemistically refer to as neutralization, which is to say, to be incapacitated politically by any means available to the Bureau. And that he would have shared with every other party member and for that matter, other individuals acting in non-Black Panther capacities in the Black Liberation Movement, Puerto Rican Independence Movement, American Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, the Womens' Liberation Movement, Clergy and Laity Concerned and about 300 other activist organizations of the period. But most intensively, repression that was part of the so-called COINTELPROs or counter intelligence programs administered by the FBI were directed at the Panthers.
That is something that hasn't gone away. There is a residue of that in this country which exists. Many of the former Party members, especially those who were identified by the Bureau as being key members, remain incarcerated on what are self evidentally at this point, fabricated cases. A number of people are dead so of course, and that remains a fact. And a number of others have been quite intentionally driven out of political work and kept there by actions of the Bureau and cooperating police agencies, of which the Philadelphia Police Department was quite well documented one.
BERNARD: How many members of the leadership of the Black Panther Party are there now behind bars, similarly situated on trumped up charges?
WARD: Well quite a number, most conspicuously Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, in California for the so-called tennis court murder, which it is demonstrably true, that at the time that occurred he was more than 300 miles away. The FBI lied at his trial, were part of putting him behind the bars that still encompass him by saying they had no electronic surveillance on the Black Panther Party national headquarters in Oakland, where there was a national committee meeting going at the time the murder occurred, at which he was in attendance, though the murder occurred in Santa Monica, 300 miles away. Had they disclosed their electronic surveillance at trial as requested by the defense, it would have conclusively demonstrated that it was impossible for Pratt to have committed the act for which he was convicted and continues to serve a life sentence in prison.
BERNARD: They had an actual tape of a telephone conversation which shows that he was actually somewhere else.
WARD: Wiretaps and bugs. Both at the Party headquarters and at the apartments or domiciles of individual Party leaders at the time. Both at the Party headquarters and at the apartment of David Hilliard, where peripheral meetings occurred, would have revealed Pratt's presence in Oakland - San Francisco area on the night the murder occurred.
AMY: Why didn't they have to present this information at the trial?
WARD: They simply purjored themselves at the trial and said that no such surveillance occurred. Insofar as it had not occurred of course, they would not have had to divulge the records of the surveillance. On appeal, after the Church Committee hearings, in the mid 1970's, I think, Pratt's trial was in '72, in 1975 it was revealed that in fact they had surveilled in exactly the fashion that the defense contended. The Bureau was then ordered by the appeals court to produce the logs into evidence. They came back after I believe it was 60 days, supposedly all embarassed and announced that there was a problem that they had misplaced or lost a portion of the telephone log record. It just happened to be a 3 week period of time within which the period of the meeting fell.
And so they claimed they could not disclose the record even on appeal. In any reasonable circumstances, in any normal criminal case, that in itself would have been sufficient to remand the trial. The conviction would have been overturned. But in this case the appeals case decided that absent of proof of innocence, the conviction would stand. The case has been dragging out that way ever since.
That's one example, there's also the case of Edward Rice and Dave Poindexter of Nebraska, of the Omaha leadership who were convicted of a murder a little while before Pratt. Where the individual who confessed to committing the murder was the chief witness against these two individuals who in all likelihood weren't even aware of it, never mind complicit in it. That individual who committed the murder is on witness protection or was, for a period of time, and the two Party leaders continue to serve life prison sentences in Nebraska.
WARD: There's the case of the New York 3. Timothy Bottoms and his colleagues in New York State, and we can go on with the list. There are quite a number.
AMY: Tell us the story of Timothy Bottoms.
WARD: Well, Bell, Bottoms and I forget the 3rd. individual's name and my apologies for that, were convicted in the mid 1970's of having engaged in what was the prosecution called cold-blooded execution styled murder of New York City police officers, two, I believe ...
AMY: I think the third person was Washington?
BERNARD: Albert Noel Washington
WARD: The 3 were convicted of this execution style slaying of 2 New York City police officers on a case in which it was subsequently revealed that the key witness was tortured in cooperation with the New York Police by the New Orleans Police prior to extradition to New York, including the insertion of a wire in his penis, slamming his head and penis with a telephone book, and so on, until he was prepared to say whatever it was the police wanted him to say. He was also threatened with being charged with the murders himself. He came and testified to exactly what the prosecution wanted. This is on record. The jury was not made aware of the manner in which the testimony was coerced. They convicted on the basis of belief in this what was false testimony, coerced testimony. And then when it was revealed on appeal that this was the manner in which the testimony had been secured, nonetheless, the convictions were allowed to stand. And that's another case that has been dragging on year after year after year.
There's the case of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who was convicted on the basis, at least in part, of false ballistics evidence, prepared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for New York Police indicating that Dhoruba, formally known as Richard Moore, one of the Panther 21, was in possession of a weapon, fired at the home of the prosecutor of the Panther 21, wounding 2 police officers, there. And that was a complete fabrication. They managed to keep him in prison for almost 20 years by suppressing this evidence, which by law, was to be disclosed at the trial as requested by the defense, and the existence of it was denied. And he's on the street again. But he spent 20 years of his life, 19 I guess, behind bars, and so on and so on and so on.
AMY: Why do you think Judge Sabo quashed the subpoena?
WARD: Well he quashed it because he's going to say that even if true and even if applicable to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the information is 20 years or more old, and therefore would not be relevant to the case. And I would argue to the contrary, that an individual, once targeted, within the rubric of COINTELPRO, for neutralization, is only taken off the list ... that kind of targeting only ends, when the political activity of the individual which caused him to be targeted in the first place, ends. Mumia Abu-Jamal never suspended political activity. He transformed the nature of the political activity in certain ways, although there's clear lines of continuity to when his political career began in the Information Ministry of the Black Panther Party assisting in putting out the Black Panther newspaper, and otherwise spreading information having to do with the Party's positions and what it was that was happening to the Party. It was an information service function that he performed for the Black Panthers.
After he left the Party, after the Black Panther Party dissolved, along about 1975, he became very active in community radio and other dimensions of information sharing, as an independent political activist. So in other words, he continued the same kind of political activity that caused him to be targeted by the FBI and cooperating elements within the Philadelphia Police Department in the first place. And therefore, those sorts of things that pertained to his treatment or handling under COINTELPRO, continued as well, not only through the 1970's but into the 1980's. And in the early 80's he was neutralized, as they put it.
Now neutralization as it was explained on record by the FBI, pertains not necessarily to apprehension of parties in commission of a crime, preparation of evidence against them, and securing of judicial conviction, but rather to simply make them incapable of engaging in political activity buy whatever means. Now that can include, intimidation, that can include what they call "bad jacketing," that is to make it appear that they are police informers, or infiltrators, or provocateurs, but indeed they are not. Usually provocateurs are used to fulfill that function, sometimes agents are. But basically to discredit them in that way. Or to discredit them personally. To cause the false impression to be held in people's minds that they are guilty of embezzlement of Party funds, or funds that are raised for a particular political activity, whatever, they're personally profiting, ripping off the people.
Or it could include, as in the case of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, and a number of other people as well, outright political assassination. But the point of a neutralization is exactly as the word implies, to prevent a continuation of political activity. In the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, I will argue, the neutralization occurred by falsely creating the appearance that he was in commission of a crime he did not commit, to put him in prison. Now, that he's on death row in a prison, may be an added attraction that was not anticipated by the counter intelligence operatives, who selected him for elimination. Prison might have been sufficient, but death row adds an added attraction is so far that it makes it sort of an exemplary case. The cost of political activism can include judicial railroading into the electric chair, or the gas chamber or to lethal injection.
BERNARD: Was the original design of COINTELPRO either to eliminate them outright or send them to jail for the rest of their lives?
WARD: Well that's one I guess you'd have to say extreme dimension of it. And its certainly been practices to a certain extent. There are a number of individuals who have been handled in that fashion. Many more, however, have been handled by the bad jacketing techniques, the discrediting techniques, the intimidation techniques, the harassment techniques. In essence, there's a gradient curve that's applied. Techniques or tactics quite illegal on their face are applied against activists in two ways:
One is, it's undertaken at a certain level. Spreading false information about a person. OK, because they are not assessed as being in themselves, necessarily a tremendous security risk, but they're engaged in what the Bureau or the police department views to be politically reprehensible or objectionable activity. And so they will begin to try to discredit them. And perhaps visit them. Engage in a couple of false arrests. Conduct interviews in their homes. Make it clear that the police are paying attention to them, that the FBI is paying attention to them, to try to intimidate them. Basically, they cow them into suspending the activity. If they do not, if they continue, particularly if they respond in a fashion that is sort of an escalation of their political activity, in response to this harassment, then there's an escalation of the tactics. Maybe they'll be arrested and prosecuted for spurious reasons. Maybe there will be more vicious rumors circulated about them. Maybe there will be more false information of a worse sort planted in the press. And if they persist then there will be a further escalation, and so on until we're getting into the areas you are talking about.
Now the second way is that there already perceived at the point that counter intelligence picks up, as being a key activist. The FBI used to maintain, and it under another rubrick still maintained, what it calls a key agitator's index. The people who are considered to be key activist will be targeted for higher level tactical applications from the onset.
AMY: Now how can people know if they were under surveillance as part of the COINTELPRO?
WARD: Well surveillance is fairly easy. That is information that is readily available under the Freedom of Information Act, although the specifics of the nature of the surveillance, who did the surveillance, and so on, maybe information that is deleted for one of a number of reasons under the act. The FBI has a number of loopholes under which it can withhold portions. Or in some cases the entirety of documents that pertain to a given individual. Your first key is on requesting of information under the Freedom of Information Act is whether or not you have a file. A cautionary note, if you happen, by some wild fluke, not to have an FBI file, then the bulk of everyone who has ever been active in anything in the United States has one. But the first key is you have an FBI file. Active or dormant. It doesn't matter. It indicates that you are under or have been under some kind of monitoring or surveillance by the FBI. Just an affirmative response that you indeed do have a file. Which will be the first thing that comes back to you in the mail. They'll search their indices and if something pops up, they'll notify you of that. And if you want to proceed, and request that they divulge the contents of that file, there's a fairly elaborate process and it will probably take you about 14 months from the time you start to the time you actually receive your file material. You'll get portions of the information. Usually the documents that you receive will sufficiently indicate to you, since you know what your activities have been, where you've been and so forth, what the likely form of surveillance, and the intensity of surveillance was that was applied to your case. And you can probably conclude from that why they were surveilling you. And if they were doing more than surveillance. While specifics like individuals who were informants, their names will be deleted. Additional information which would reveal the identities despite the deletion of the name will also be delter. Sometimes whole documents as I said would be held out, but they are required to insert a sheet, telling you how many pages of the document and under what exemption it was removed.
So you can begin to reassemble your file in somewhat different form.
A way to go at this that can fill in some of the blanks is to request the information from several different sources. Not, that you're requesting from several different government agencies but you can get an attorney to request your files. You can perhaps get a researcher to request your files. If you can get 3 or 4 requests going simultaneously or staggered over periods of time, which is even better, for the same file material, you're going to find something very interesting, and that is the pattern of deletion varies according to the request. While they may deny to you certain bits of information, they may not deny it to the researcher. Or they may deny certain bits of information to the researcher and they may not deny it to the attorney. If you can get 3 or 4 different censors' versions of the same document, you can create and composite a more complete document often. But we're talking obviously a fairly cumbersome process here.
BERNARD: How many other groups and organizations, how diverse is the FBI's surveillance of dissident groups?
WARD: Currently? Or during the COINTELPRO period itself?
BERNARD: Both.
WARD: Currently, the best information we have derives from certain past investigations, not so far past. During the early to mid 80's, the so-called CISPES investigation when they took the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador under what they called a terrorist investigation, or terrorist collaboration investigation. They ultimately expanded the scope of the investigation to include not only CISPES itself, but nearly 2000 organizations with which CISPES had some sort, organizations and individuals, excuse me, 2000 in number, with which CISPES had some sort of interactive relations. Now this included pastors of local churches who were sympathetic to the Salvadorean peasantry. It included Duke University which provided meeting space. And it also included a number of other political activist organizations. So that one investigation, you're dealing with 2000 organizations and individuals. Probably, it was roughly half and half. About 1100 different organizations and institutions and the other 900 specific individuals. That's current for all intents and purposes.
Back in the period of the Vietnam war or in the aftermath of the Civil Right Movement, Black Liberation Movement, the late 60's and early 1970's, it was probably about 10 times that number. Community organizations, petition organizations, antiwar organizations, draft counseling organizations, abortion rights organizations, and on and on. Anybody who deviated in any way from the status quo to the left was essentially subject to FBI surveillance. Now of that roughly 20,000 entities, which were subjected to the attention of the FBI solely on the basis of their political views, probably 10 to 15% were subjected to counter intelligence activity per se. And I'm being very conservative with that. If you take counter intelligence activity in its broadest scope, it's probably something on the order of 2/3 of them. That is to say that the FBI was spreading false information about them or whatever. This is roughly 1967 to 72 I'm talking about.
AMY: A volunteer just pointed out, there's an irony to surveillance by US government agencies, by the FBI, that when you ask for the papers that are kept on you, on each individual person, there is a fee per page to get those, so they're actually making money off the surveillance.
WARD: That's correct. That's the general trend in the United States with regard to information gathering on the citizenry, it applies to the FBI, it applies to the CIA, it applies to any government entity that gathers information on you. You have to pay for the results of something you already paid for and didn't want. But it's also been extended into the private sector, for instance with regard to the credit collection reporting agencies, you don't ask anyone to do that, but they do. It has a direct bearing on how you conduct your life and you, are required by law to pay them in order to receive what they collected without your permission about you in the first place. That's information that's readily available to police agencies, whether they pay for it or not, I don;t know, but if they are paying for it, they're paying for it with your money.
AMY: What about this counter terrorism bill that has just passed through Congress right now that President Clinton pushed through. How does this affect FBI activity?
WARD: Essentially, what it does is legitimate a number of areas of activity that the FBI already engaged in and would be engaged in anyway, some of the things that the Church Committee found reprehensible in the 1970's, as was the case under the Reagan Administration with the various executive orders signed by Ronald Reagan have been made legal. In one way it doesn;t affect whether they do it at all because they do it whether it's legal or not. But its much more convenient for them for it to be legal than for it to be illegal.
BERNARD: One of the things some people feel, they're reluctant to ask for their, to find out whether they have a file, because they feel that if they don't, maybe the request might generate one.
WARD: It will. It will. Automatically it will. Any request received generates a file to keep it in. But if all you've got in your FBI file is a request for a nonexistent FBI file, you don't have too much to worry about. I don;t find that a very compelling argument to suggest that you shouldn't demand information that they've collected on you. A more insidious argument is that unless you genuinely believe that they have information that is of some import to you, you shouldn't bother to try to get it because of a massive influx of requests under the FOIA will simply cause a response of the FBI going to Congress saying this is an impossible situation and you need to gut FOIA even further than it already is, which is an interesting argument. It's an argument that's often made in the US and no one seems to notice. You've got an extension of a legal guarantee of all these right which remain yours until you try to exercise them. As soon as you try to exercise your right, or a lot of the citizens begin to try to exercise their rights, the government finds that very inconvenient and simply suspends the right.
AMY: How did you get involved with tracking the FBI tracking everyone else?
WARD: Well in 1969, after I came out of the army, I was a draftee and sent to Vietnam. I came back from that a little bit irritated of the posture of my government. I'm also an American Indian and I was sent to Southeast Asia to uphold a treaty which did not require that I be there. I considered it a fact before I even left there that while I was over there doing that, the United States was in the process of standing in complete violation of 371 odd treaties that were on record with my people or related peoples right here in North America. If we're going to be busy enforcing treaties, it ought to be home, not over there.
With that perspective, I became politically active and had a roommate, at least part time, in Peoria, Illinois, which is where I'm originally from. His name was Mark Clark. Mark was a downstate defense captain for the Black Panther Party in Illinois, where in December 1969, he was the first person killed in an armed raid on an apartment on Monroe Street in Chicago which also took the life by assassination of the chairman of the Illinois Panthers, Fred Hampton. That, I guess you can say, caught my attention. And since there were clear indications from the onset of direct FBI involvement in that, and since there was a clear attempt made to cover that up, I became active in the effort to bring out the information of exactly how the murders of Hampton and Clark had occurred.
And one thing followed another from there. I became involved in the Leonard Peltier case. After I had joined the American Indian Movement, a couple of years after the point that I'm talking about here.
It's just something that began in '69 because of that incident, and because the effort to clarify what had occurred that continued for me. I began to find this pattern of FBI repression. Of covert operations directed against activists in the United States that was so pervasive it had an effect on everything I was trying to do, and everybody I was around. So I really couldn't stop once it was begun.
BERNARD: In the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal ... it's seldom mentioned that there ever was a counter intelligence program. So when folks are writing about some of the things that Mumia is claiming or his defense team is claiming, it always sounds to those people who don't know about the COINTELPRO program to be some preposterous assertion.
WARD: It's not only not preposterous, I think even in the manner in which it's put forth from activist circles, so-called hyperbolic and exaggerate circles, it's actually underplayed, the dimension of what was going on and is still going on. I want to say something which responsible and balanced individuals would probably consider to be hyperbolic and outrageous. The FBI is and always has been a political police on the national level. It has no other real function. It never did. It began with the Palmer raids. It began with repression during the period of World War I, of the American anarchists, communists and syndicalists movement. And it's continued in that vein ever since.
AMY: Explain the Palmer raids.
WARD: The Palmer raids were a series of night-time, nocturnal, raids that were conducted on a nationwide basis in 1919, 1920 across the country. They rounded up something on the order of 50,000 people in one night. Herded them into pens, auditoriums, anywhere. Masses of people and then screened them out. They picked them up simply because they were in immigrant halls, union halls, or political meeting halls that had been target by the Bureau of Investigation. A number of vigilante organizations were used to provide the manpower to accomplish this because the Bureau wasn't big enough to do it on its own. And it couldn't manage anything on that scale even with the cooperation of the local police. They enlisted a number of 'patriotic' organizations, as they called it. Rounded these people up. A complete suspension of all pretense of constitutional rights. Weeded them out on the basis of political or ideological affiliation. And began to summarily deport those they could who held the wrong political views. This is in the context of a number of trials of individuals for expressing politics of the needy radicals as they were called, people who were citizens and couldn't be deported were being prosecuted at the time for making statements in opposition to World War I under the Sedition Act. It was part of a comprehensive nationwide pattern of political repression. And that's the birth of the FBI. And it's always maintained what it calls an internal security feature which overrides almost everything else.
In 1971, a citizens group in the out back of Pennsylvania, a little town called Media, where the FBI maintained one of its resident agencies, a 2 agent shop, but it has all the file paper it needs to conduct business. They subjected the FBI to what the FBI has been habitually subjecting its political opponents to throughout the course of its history. That is, in bureau parlance, a black bag job.
A black bag job is a burglary. It's a burglary of a particular kind. As anyone is interested in pursuing this further can find out, through the acquisition of a book that was published recently by South End Press, called FBI Secrets by former agent N. Wesley Swarigan. A black bag job was a burglary performed in order to lay hands on the written materials, political materials, mailing lists, position papers, internal documents, of an organization or individual in an organization that was targeted by the FBI. They weren't after money. They weren't after your art collection. They weren't after your stereo equipment. Or the things that a burglar would normally be after. They were after your political material. Or they were out to destroy things which would make it difficult to continue your work.
What this citizens' group did to the FBI was the same thing. They burglarized their office in the middle of the night and took their file material with them when they left. Then they began to break that file material down in analysis. And what they discovered is that even in this little resident agency, in the outback, not exactly the hotbed of radicalism, more than 60% of all the file material, of a non-administrative, that is to say, non-procedural nature pertained to the political activity of monitoring of the political activity of citizens. Instructively, less than 1% of the paper had to do with the activities of organized crime. 2/3 of the investiture of energy, resources and manpower by the FBI in 1971 was devoted to the political monitoring and suppression of political activities of the citizens of the United States. Virtually none of its attention, resources or manpower devoted to combatting organized crime.
In that context, COINTELPRO makes a lot of sense. It's only natural. It's nothing hyperbolic. It's exactly the function of an entity like the FBI.
AMY: What was the first book you wrote, Ward?
WARD: The first book that I put out was an edited collection of essays on the applicability of Marxist ideology or Marxist theory to the circumstances of the American Indians within the United States called Marxism and Native Americans in 1983.
AMY: And then what?
WARD: A follow up book to that called Culture Vs. Economism , some of the material that did not fit into the original collection was published independently in a much shorter volume the following year. And then really nothing book length until 1988, and that was Agents Of Repression , which focused on the FBI repression, primarily of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's. And primarily at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. But secondarily on the Black Panther Party, with a chapter of the context where all the stuff had come from so it didn't seem to be anomalous.
AMY: What about publishing houses and putting out this kind of information, how difficult was it for you to get your books published?
WARD: I've gone directly to publishers that would be inclined to this kind of material in any event. My first 3 books, Marxism and Native Americans , Agents Of Repression , and the Cointelpro Papers that you mentioned at the outset were all the South End Press, which is a progressive publisher in Boston that specializes in putting out dissident material that would not be even considered in most cases by more mainstream publishing houses, self censoring. I lately continue to have a relationship with South End Press and have a 2 volume compilation of an International Tribunal that was convened in Hawaii to consider the rights of native Hawaiians, vis a vis the colonial impositions of the United States on them. That should be coming out in the fall or spring at the latest. But also I work with a couple of other publishers, Common Courage Press, which is in a way an offshoot or spinoff from South End. And from New Society Publishers in Philadelphia, incidentally, that's been established up there, again with that purpose, to publish material that would not be picked up by Harper and Row, to make that kind of information available to people who want it. I also work with Aegis Press, a recently established entity here in Denver, and Maisa New Press in Washington DC, I have one book with them, again an edited compilation, it's co-edited with Jim and Ginny Vander Wall, called Pages of Steel and has to do with political prisons and political prisoners within the United States. A collection of essays and interviews that take that focus. So those four, primarily. I found them as wonderful alternatives to the status quo as far as getting information out to the public.
BERNARD: Well they certainly did help me understand just how this counter intelligence program operated and you get an opportunity to see facsimiles of the actual documents, redacted as most of them may be.
WARD: That was done specifically because you find so many people inclined to say your making this stuff up. Similarly do citations. I think in Agents Of Repression Jim Van Der Wall and I put together 1530 odd citations, roughly a quarter of them directly from FBI documents, and that was not sufficient. We were told by apologists such as Nathan Theoharris we were making it up. A whole convoluted argument advanced by Theoharris in the Washington Post to explain how this was shrill, hyperbolic exaggerated, unsubstantiated, flying in the face of the documentary evidence and so fort, so we did Cointelpro Papers and simply reproduced a number of the documents. We haven't heard another word from Nathan Theoharris, incidentally. Even The Nation said that that was outrageous. That the FBI would not have done the things we contended they did at Pine Ridge, for a number of rather strange bureaucratic reasons.
AMY: Repeat that, I mean that's pretty incredible about Theoharris.
WARD: Why incredible? He is an individual that has a reputation as being a harsh critic of the FBI. But if you look at his background, what he was was a functionary of the Church Committee which was very careful to criticize the FBI enough to make it appear as the system had worked, and stopped well short of what it was was on record that the FBI had actually done. It was sort of a little ritual purge, saying we've got to slap their wrist now, in order that they will be able to go on and do what they were doing all along. As the public is demanding something, so let's give them the something they're demanding, just as much as they're demanding and no more, and get on with it. That's Theoharris's background, so very sophisticated sort of posture of apology, if you will, by saying that the entity you want to protect is not perfect, you are in a position, much better then, to advance the idea that none the less, they're valid, they're sound, they're necessary and they should be treated with a certain degree of respect. It's very important I guess, to demythologize the bureau, in a contemporary scene, from the way it was viewed, and the way officialdom wanted it to be viewed, during the 1930's and 40's with public hero number one J. Edgar Hoover, and all that. That won't play anymore. So it's necessary to present a pretense of criticism and oversight, and holding them on a leash. All the better to allow them in actuality under that mantle to go ahead and do what they've already done, or always done.
BERNARD: Although you didn't make it to court this time, do you think when the new trial that we're all fighting for, hoping for, do you think you'll be able to appear in that trial? Are you willing to?
WARD: Certainly I'm willing, to. And the expectation is that should a new trial be granted, we all hope that it will, that I will be allowed to testify. Also at a federal level, there's been a submission into the record of Sabo's court of certain of the documents and materials to get this before a federal court, the federal court will review the records of Sabo's hearings. That opens the door. Now in the event that federal courts pick this up, and there's about 98% probability that they will, then the intent is that we'll testify at that level. I'm of course willing to do that. There's more than one possible venue in which I will appear on behalf of Mumia. And other people that are competent in this area as well.
AMY: If you would just take one or two minutes to summarize on what you would say in court if you got a chance to testify on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
WARD: I would say in essence that there was a very sophisticated and virulent operation under way in the late 1960's and early 1970's when Mumia began to be active which would have encompassed him, from the highest level in this country, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Philadelphia Police Department on record with actions in regard to the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panther Party was a cooperating police agency in that. And therefore, it is unquestionable that from a very early age, Mumia Abu-Jamal was specifically targeted for neutralization by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Philadelphia Police, and that the pattern of police activity evident in that targeting, was continued, as it was in a number of comparable cases, so long as he maintained political activism, and this creates the basis to believe that he was in fact framed for the crime. This is a question of motivation. There's always a question of motivation. Why would the state falsify the record to convict an otherwise innocent individual, put him in prison for a crime he did not commit? Here's the motivation. Here's the record that that motivation has been pursued in other cases, and there's no reason to conceive that it has not been pursued in his, and the court needs to take that into consideration.
AMY: Ward Churchill, thank you very much for joining us this morning.
WARD: Thanks for having me on your show.
BERNARD: Thank you very much.
transcribed by Bob Witanek for NJ Speakout <bwitanek@igc.apc.org> 8/20/95
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