culture

Lessons learned outside the mainstream, but necessary for those across the spectrum to understand history in general

The War Before: the true life story of Safiya Bukhari
by Safiya Bukhari, edited and with an introduction by Laura Whitehorn
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Feminist Press (City University of New York) 2010
265 pp in paperback, $15.95
ISBN 978-155861610-3

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM
BLACK NATIONALIST - HATE GROUPS
RACIAL INTELLIGENCE
GOALS: ...

Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. ...

[I]t should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence. ...

The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to "liberals" who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. ...

TARGETS: ...

[M}embers, and followers of the:
   Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
   Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
   Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)
   Nation of Islam  (NOI) ...

Offices handling these cases and those of Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, H. Rap Brown of SNCC, Martin Luther King of SCLC, Maxwell Stanford of RAM, and Elijah Muhammed of NOI, should be alert for counterintelligence suggestions. ...
(Sic.)

We didn't know that it was a specific government program, but we did know that we were under constant surveillance and attack. Many of us were subjected to random bullets and rocks that broke our office windows; strange break-ins where only our notes and address books were taken; and odd, provocative phone calls to our homes, offices and families. Any ambiguity about the source of these attacks ended for many of us on the night of December 4, 1969, with the assassination of Fred Hampton and fellow Black Panther Mark Clark in Chicago.

We did not know that a lot of the things we saw as internal contradictions were actually being manipulated by the government. And every little weakness or mistake they saw was used and preyed upon. COINTELPRO was designed to neutralize the [Black Panther] Party. It was an all-encompassing program from coast to coast.

To many Americans, the Black Panther party is an epithet that nameless GOP liars and their online lynch mob collaborators sling at Hillary Clinton. The people who believed and passed on that story by and large believe that there is some sordid relationship between Barack Obama and the Black Panthers, that the president of the United States is preparing concentration camps for them, and that what they really need to head it off are self-appointed guardians with more and more powerful guns.

If you have had a proper civics education, you will know about modern propaganda techniques and their most famous pioneer, one Joseph Goebbels. However, for a number of reasons a proper civics education is something that a lot of people never get. Thus the political effectiveness of widely propagated malicious lies.

(So do you want to know about the true relationship between Barack Obama and the Black Panthers? It's the election he lost, when he ran for Congress against Bobby Rush, the Chicago Democrat who had been a Black Panther Party member in his youth.)

This book review has digressed, to lay a foundation of relevance for those of you who are not into and never will agree with the revolutionary black nationalism to which Safiya Bukhari dedicated her life. Nevertheless, you won't have a very good understanding of some of the major events in latter 20th century US history if you don't understand what COINTELPRO was, who carried it out, which techniques to counter it worked and which didn't, and something about the human lives that it affected.

A college student from a devoutly Christian middle class black family, Bernice Jones opened her eyes to the poverty and brutality that were and still are the lot of many African-Americans, and found herself involved in the Black Panther Party. Sister Bernice was not the one with the impressive title. As with so many other political organizations, it was a woman who kept things going. In this case Bernice was what journalist and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal describes as the "queen bee" of the Panthers' New York information office. She was an up-close witness to the show trials about government-invented conspiracies, the vilification campaigns that politicians and cops waged in the mainstream news media, the raids on offices, the outright murders, and the fratricical feuds that erupted within the Black Panther Party and between that organization and other black nationalist groups. As COINTELPRO began to scatter and incarcerate the Panthers, Bernice was the one who kept the defense committees together, who made sure that the imprisoned activists were not abandoned, who transmitted the voices of those hidden away behind concrete and steel. It wasn't long before the authorities came after her, first with a preposterous conspiracy theory and then with a grand jury subpoena that gave her the choice between becoming a traitor and becoming a prisoner. She went underground.

Along the way to that point, Bernice became various things: a mother, a far more sophisticated political activist, a citizen in the Republic of New Africa organization, and a Muslim who took the name Safiya Bukhari.

These days, especially in the United States, Islam has been painted with a broad brush by people who may not understand it but definitely dislike it. So did Safiya embrace subservience to tyrannical men? Not a chance. Her chapter on sexism within the black liberation movement puts that into perspective. Did she embrace murderous bigotry? Apparently not.

The police did catch up to her, though, and in a shootout in Virginia that left one of the men she was with dead and the other man and herself in custody Safiya found herself on trial for her life, charged with felony murder. As in, participating in a felony wherein one of her associates was killed by the police. She didn't get the electric chair but was sent to prison, from which she had to briefly escape to seek medical treatment that was denied her.

After eight long years, she came out of prison to a daughter who had been raised by Bukhari's mother, a movement that had been scattered asunder, and the reality of dozens of black revolutionaries still in prison from the war that had gone on before, the conflict engendered by COINTELPRO. She spent the last two decades of a life cut short by the complication of hypertension as a leading campaigner for the freedom of the political prisoners. There were some victories along the way, but dozens remain behind bars to this day, some of them since the 1960s.

Safiya Bukhari was 53 when she died, and never in her life was she one to think of writing her memoirs. She wrote for political effect at various junctures in the face of various challenges, mainly to guide younger activists. Often she grounded her arguments in personal experience. After she died, her daughter Wonda Jones came to former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn with an envelope full of her late mother's writings. Laura spent years editing, which included compiling other speeches, writings and broadcast transcripts. Whitehorn combined, rearranged and polished these items into a coherent whole. She was assisted with a foreword by former political prisoner Angela Davis and an afterword by current political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

(Are you going to say that there are no political prisoners in the United States, only people in prison for committing crimes? This book gets into that question, too.)

So where does this all fit into the larger picture of American history? Well, of course you won't fully understand US race relations unless you know about COINTELPRO, and you won't fully appreciate the differences between a Jesse Jackson and a Barack Obama if you don't know about the specific dirty war that the former had to confront and the latter did not.

And what about Watergate? It turns out that "Deep Throat" was W. Mark Felt, second-in-command to J. Edgar Hoover and convicted for certain COINTELPRO abuses against white radicals and their families and friends, but pardoned by Ronald Reagan. You need not fully buy political analyst George Friedman's opinion of what Felt's belated admission means about Watergate and a great swath of US history, that it's about an FBI that became a power unto itself. But actually, this reporter does share the conservative STRATFOR founder's belief that Watergate was about FBI surveillance of the Nixon team that antedated the botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee office and the death of J. Edgar Hoover.  Far more likely, Watergate was the pinnacle of a police state apparatus that began during and after World War I, was exposed and forced into retreat for awhile in the 1970s, but came back with a vengeance under the George W. Bush administration and is still with us.

Understand the "what," recognize that although Felt and Nixon are dead many of the "who" are still with us, update your knowledge of the "when" and "where" by way of information available through Google searches, and one begins to get a better appreciation of the present-day lay of the political land. The War Before fills in a missing piece of that puzzle and thus has its rightful place among both history and political science texts.

You commie radicals who conclude that it all goes to show that Hoover and Felt were fascists, think again. These guys were Nazi hunters in World War II, with Hoover running an extensive press operation to portray himself as such and Felt actually being quite good at it. The syndrome that produced COINTELPRO is far more subtle, and to that extent more frightening.

You Tea Party folks who are sure that Obama is coming after you to throw you into a concentration camp and thus conclude that you really need to buy an expensive machine gun, consider what Safiya Bukhari said about the essence of security when under attack by government forces:

The history of COINTELPRO shows that the enemy will use anything and everything they know about you to their advantage. If there are no "dirty little secrets" that the enemy can drop in the media or tell your next-door neighbor or your comrades, then we have managed to take one weapon from them. ...

 

The basic element of security is trust. Without trust there is no security. Trust comes from knowing and believing that you are safe within a specific area, whether it's a company of people or the confines of a building. ...

On second thought, go blow your money on that machine gun. You're already trusting people whom you shouldn't.