BY GLENN GREENWALD |  THURSDAY, APR 28, 2011 09:29 ET

The first four Directors of the CIA (from 1947-1953) were military officers, but since then, there has been a tradition (generally though imperfectly observed) of keeping the agency under civilian rather than military leadership. That’s why George Bush’s 2006 nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to the CIA provoked so many objections from Democrats (and even some Republicans).

The Hayden nomination triggered this comment from the current Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein: “You can’t have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence. The CIA is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency.” The then-top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said “she hears concerns from civilian CIA professionals about whether the Defense Department is taking over intelligence operations” and “shares those concerns.”

On Meet the Press, Nancy Pelosi cited tensions between the DoD and the CIA and said: “I don’t see how you have a four-star general heading up the CIA.” Then-Sen. Joe Biden worried that the CIA, with a General in charge, will “just be gobbled up by the Defense Department.” Even the current GOP Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, voiced the same concern about Hayden: “We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.”

Of course, like so many Democratic objections to Bush policies, that was then and this is now. Yesterday, President Obama announced — to very little controversy — that he was nominating Gen. David Petraeus to become the next CIA Director. The Petraeus nomination raises all the same concerns as the Hayden nomination did, but even more so: Hayden, after all, had spent his career in military intelligence and Washington bureaucratic circles and thus was a more natural fit for the agency; by contrast, Petraues is a pure military officer and, most of all, a war fighting commander with little background in intelligence. But in the world of the Obama administration, Petraeus’ militarized, warrior orientation is considered an asset for running the CIA, not a liability.

That’s because the CIA, under Obama, is more militarized than ever, as devoted to operationally fighting wars as anything else, including analyzing and gathering intelligence. This morning’s Washington Post article on the Petraeus nomination — headlined: “Petraeus would helm an increasingly militarized CIA” — is unusual in presenting such a starkly forthright picture of how militarized the U.S. has become under the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner:

Gen. David H. Petraeus has served as commander in two wars launched by the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. If confirmed as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus would effectively take command of a third — in Pakistan.

Petraeus’s nomination comes at a time when the CIA functions, more than ever in its history, as an extension of the nation’s lethal military force.

CIA teams operate alongside U.S. special operations forces in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Yemen. The agency has also built up a substantial paramilitary capability of its own. But perhaps most significantly, the agency is in the midst of what amounts to a sustained bombing campaign over Pakistan using unmanned Predator and Reaper drones.

Since Obama took office there have been at least 192 drone missile strikes, killing as many as 1,890 militants, suspected terrorists and civilians. Petraeus is seen as a staunch supporter of the drone campaign, even though it has so far failed to eliminate the al-Qaeda threat or turn the tide of the Afghan war. . . .

Petraeus has spent relatively little time in Washington over the past decade and doesn’t have as much experience with managing budgets or running Washington bureaucracies as CIA predecessors Leon E. Panetta and Michael V. Hayden. But Petraeus has quietly lobbied for the CIA post, drawn in part by the chance for a position that would keep him involved in the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen.

It’s rare for American media outlets to list all of our “wars” this way, including the covert ones (and that list does not even include the newest one, in Libya, where drone attacks are playing an increasingly prominent role as well). But Barack Obama does indeed preside over numerous American wars in the Muslim world, including some that he started (Libya and Yemen) and others which he’s escalated (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Because our wars are so often fought covertly, the CIA has simply become yet another arm of America’s imperial war-fighting machine, thus making it the perfect fit for Bush and Obama’s most cherished war-fighting General to lead (Petraeus will officially retire from the military to take the position, though that obviously does not change who he is, how he thinks, and what his loyalties are).

One reason why it’s so valuable to keep the CIA under civilian control is because its independent intelligence analyst teams often serve as one of the very few capable bureaucratic checks against the Pentagon and its natural drive for war. That was certainly true during the Bush years when factions in the CIA rebelled against the dominant neocon Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith clique, but it’s been true recently as well:

Others voiced concern that Petraeus is too wedded to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and the troop-heavy, counterinsurgency strategy he designed — to deliver impartial assessments of those wars as head of the CIA.

Indeed, over the past year the CIA has generally presented a more pessimistic view of the war in Afghanistan than Petraeus has while he has pushed for an extended troop buildup.

That’s why, noted The Post, there is “some grumbling among CIA veterans opposed to putting a career military officer in charge of an agency with a long tradition of civilian leadership.” But if one thing is clear in Washington, it’s that neither political party is willing or even able to stand up to the military establishment, and especially not a General as sanctified in Washington circles as Petraeus. It’s thus unsurprising that “Petraeus seems unlikely to encounter significant opposition from Capitol Hill” and that, without promising to vote for his confirmation, Sen. Feinstein — who raised such a ruckus over the appointment of Hayden — yesterday “signaled support for Petraeus.”

The nomination of Petraeus doesn’t change much; it merely reflects how Washington is run. That George Bush’s favorite war-commanding General — who advocated for and oversaw the Surge in Iraq — is also Barack Obama’s favorite war-commanding General, and that Obama is now appointing him to run a nominally civilian agency that has been converted into an “increasingly militarized” arm of the American war-fighting state, says all one needs to know about the fully bipartisan militarization of American policy. There’s little functional difference between running America’s multiple wars as a General and running them as CIA Director because American institutions in the National Security State are all devoted to the same overarching cause: Endless War.

* * * * *

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What terrible threat does Serbia pose? One wonders. It seems that Serbia’ very existence is a threat to the New World Order. You just never know what those rebellious Southern Slavs will do next. Untamed, all they think about is enjoying life. Dancing and drinking, the Belgrade slogan. Belgrade, voted the world’s Number One Party City. Endless bars and cafés, its great rivers, the Danube and the Sava. Its blasting brass bands. Joyous Serbs, living the present, but not forgetting its recent brutal past.

Bulgaria to Serbia’s southeast is subjugated, NATO and U.S. military bases marking its landscape. The huge city-like bases in Germany for 100,000 troops are no longer necessary. America is “reconfiguring its footprint”—that is, reviewing global deployment of troops in order to be capable of applying military force anywhere rather than just sitting in place. More mobile bases. Lily pads, they are called in military jargon, bases from which troops hop from one to another.

Like frogs hopping from water lily to the other, U.S and NATO soldiers and mercenaries are  jumping on demand (JOD) from one to another of a growing number of the empire’s foreign bases. Frogs equal battle-ready troops. Saudi Arabian restrictions on the use of U.S. bases there resulted in the construction of the Qatar lily pad. The air war against Serbia and the theft of its historic territory of Kosovo made possible the creation of a giant lily pad-state there. (Cf Camp Bondsteel) Lily pads-military bases now dot Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic, northwards to the Baltic States, across the Black Sea to Georgia, another lily pad-state, to lily giant pad-state Iraq, and on to Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. The circumference of the Earth is the only limit today to U.S. military expansion but the moon and Mars are not excluded from military Strangelove ambitions and dreams.

According to NATO strategy these joyous Serbs need a lesson in realism. “We of NATO want to help them learn to live democratically and in true freedom.” Even if temporary chains are required to educate them. A good shock is needed to shake them out of their lethargy. These unruly and lazy peoples are lacking in ambition. They don’t even attempt to exploit the oil and minerals lying under the surface of their lands.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen admits that “for understandable historical reasons there might be some skepticism in Serbia regarding a relationship with NATO. Might be some skepticism, he says! “My mission is to see all countries in the Balkans integrated in the Euro-Atlantic structures of NATO and the EU.” NATO insists that since Serbia is a European nation, its future can only lie within the European community … that is, in warlike NATO. All the other Balkan countries are already normalized and integrated. Or the process is underway.

However, there is that small matter of the NATO 98-day air war against Serbia in 1999, a little over a decade ago, to be absorbed. NATO bombing of a major European capital city. Feature that! And then also the minor matter of the U.S. theft of the key Serbian province of Kosovo, declaring its independence, then recognizing it diplomatically and transforming it into a NATO military-intelligence, lily pad stronghold.

Serbs do not forget. War by the West against Serbia, by the way, is not new. Nazi Germany destroyed Belgrade in World War II. Italian Fascism treated Communist Yugoslavia viciously both during WWII and in its aftermath. In the 1950s the city of Belgrade still lay in ruins just as did the cities of defeated Germany. The West at the time then partially boycotted Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia even after it broke with the USSR. The Italian extreme right still today holds powerful grudges and prejudices against Serbia as the heartland of Yugoslav Communism.

Public opinion in Serbia hasn’t forgotten NATO’s unilateral decision to wage war against it. Despite Belgrade’s partially pro-Western government, surveys show that two-thirds of Serbians oppose NATO membership. Chiefly because planes of the NATO alliance departing from air bases in Italy bombed worker-managed factories in Serbia allegedly in order to put a stop to President Milosevic-led Serbians’ cruel crackdown on ethnic Albanian rebels in breakaway Kosovo. NATO-USA bombed what remained of Socialism in East Europe to make way for the multinationals.

That NATO’s intentions were humanitarian, Serbs are convinced, is bullshit.

Since then relations with NATO have improved somewhat, even though Belgrade—which has close ties to Russia—adopted a policy of military neutrality in 2007.

Twelve years have passed since NATO sent its bombers of death over Belgrade and Nish. Serbs have not forgotten. Opposition parties organize manifestations in their maltreated though joyous capital city. Nationalists oppose contacts with NATO and the very idea of a scheduled NATO summit right in the capital of Belgrade. “Shame for the country and the nation.” The ruins that NATO left behind are still there. A reminder of the real nature of NATO.

“Never in NATO,” says former Serbian Premier Kostunica, recalling the NATO bombing as does every Serb. Today nationalists point out the similarities between the bombardment of Tripoli and those of Belgrade in 1999. The Serbian Foreign Affairs Minister, Vuk Jeremic, says that “citizens of Serbia are not indifferent to the bombing in Libya. We have seen the sufferings of civilians in the attacks on us. Therefore we feel solidarity with Libyans.”

Any actions of the pro-western government in Belgrade alarm Moscow. Premier Putin on a recent visit to Belgrade stressed that Moscow does not want Serbia in NATO. “If NATO installs its missiles in Serbia,” he said, “Russia will be obligated to direct its nuclear potential against Serbia.”

One asks why Russia should stand up for Serbia? One recalls the long historical affinity between the two countries. Russia has long seen itself as the great protector of the Serbian people, traditionally due to their common Slavic background. Russia is the most powerful Slavic country and feels its duty is to protect struggling Serbia under attack from the West.

Russians, Serbs and other Slavic countries once shared a common belief called Pan Slavism. Pan Slavism meant that all Slavic countries shared a common heritage, as well as common language affinities. Russia long headed this movement. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in WWI, Russia entered the war also to protect their cousins.

Serbia once stood as the bulwark in southern Europe of Eastern Orthodoxy, which after the fall of Constantinople had its greatest champion in the ‘Third Rome’, Moscow. The Catholic Hapsburg Empire lay just to the west, as close as Croatia, while the Muslim Ottoman Empire occupied Serbia for centuries. In Serbia’s defense, the Russian Orthodox Church demonstrated the strong religious ties between the two countries when it inserted itself into the debate about Kosovo’s independence: “That act has unilaterally upset the balance in the world.”

The real reasons for Russia’s position on Serbia today are more pragmatic. Historically, everyone in the Balkans loves a good conspiracy theory. Today, especially the one that involves energy pipelines and military bases is not theory, but fact. According to NATO and its many intelligence agencies, Russians are plotting to create a thinly-disguised military base in Serbia. If true, that would be the Kremlin’s first new European base since the end of the Warsaw Pact, a natural response to NATO’s expansion in the region. For the reality is that every country around Serbia is either in NATO or wants to be.

The story of the Russian base started when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Belgrade last October. A new joint center for emergency co-ordination was to be created in the Serbian city of Nish. The site was to be on an all-but-unused airport there. Serbia’s Russian partner would be a powerful semi-military outfit whose activities include disaster relief, but allegedly with close ties with Russia’s security services.

Speculation mounted that the Nish facilities could be used for spying or military purposes. Nish is close to the point where Russia’s planned gas pipeline, South Stream, is to cross Serbian territory. The pipeline is a joint venture between Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom, and Italy’s energy company, Eni. The route crosses the Black Sea, enabling Russia to bypass Ukraine, seen as a troublesome transit country, and is to deliver gas direct to the Balkans, central Europe and Italy.

Serbia denies that Russia is opening a military facility. Officially Nish will not be a military base. Some eleven countries from the region were invited to a conference in Belgrade to discuss their part in the establishment of the logistics and training facility in Nish.

At the same time many observers now believe that oil, not worries about Serbian brutality or genocide in Kosovo, lay behind NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, just as today in Libya. It’s the oil. Always the oil. After the war Americans built in Kosovo the huge military base, Camp Bondsteel. It appeared evident that the real purpose of the base was to safeguard the U.S. promoted AMBO oil pipeline that aimed to pump Russian and Caspian oil across the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania to Europe.

Militarization in Serbia is a valid consideration. This time however by Russia as a response to NATO occupation of the Balkans and East Europe. Serbia is a major buyer of Russian arms. Belgrade stands to receive from Russia a 10 billion USD loan, 3 billion of which to be spent on Russian arms to upgrade outdated Serbian defensive weapons. Russia also offers Serbia sorely needed fourth-generation jet aircraft.

The Serbian missile defense system which was practically destroyed during the war in 1999 showed that it was impossible to repulse NATO aggression with missile complexes developed during the 1960s and the 1970s. Serbia may now purchase two divisions of Russia’s renowned S-300 surface-to-air systems or an export variant of S-400.

Practically all radar stations in Serbia were also destroyed during the 1999 war. The country was deprived of the opportunity to control its own air space. There is every reason to believe that Belgrade will purchase Russian radar stations as well.

However, three billion dollars is not enough to modernize the air force, to rebuild the missile defense system and re-equip radar troops. Two divisions of Russian surface-to-air missile systems is not enough. What can two divisions do if the alliance can use hundreds of its fighter jets as it did in 1999? Nonetheless, Serbia is determined to rearm. Serbian rearmament is the result of NATO’s war on Serbia and the theft of Kosovo.

According to the Independent Military Survey newspaper, NATO would not impede Serbia’s initiative to rearm its armed forces with Russian arms. Even though part of the Belgrade administration wants to join NATO, the possession of Russian hardware was not an obstacle for other countries of Europe in obtaining NATO membership. Greece, for example, a member of NATO,  buys S-300 systems from Russia.

The brutal reality however is that the EU and the USA would not welcome such a deal. Not for Serbia. NATO does not conceal its plans to separate Serbia from Russia. For the great secret across the world is America’s maniacal fear of Russia. Now, today, appear many such signs of a Russian renaissance in the troubled Balkans

On the other hand Serbs believe that their problems have not been solved. After the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia, many conflict areas remained in Serbia. There’s every reason to believe that the NATO shield would not defend Serbia in the future in cases of serious conflicts. For the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took the side of the Albanians in Kosovo and detached it, that is, stole it, from Serbia.

And lest anyone forget, bloody World War I began when the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. In Yugoslavia. In the Balkans. So, an eye on the Balkans, NATO-USA occupied. Except for lonely Serbia.

 

(*Thanks to Sergei Balmasov for his article in Pravda about Russia and Serbia.)

Our senior editor Gaither Stewart serves as European Correspondent, with base in Rome. His latest book is The Trojan Spy. The book can be acquired through Amazon and other sellers.

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By Ron Ridenour | 04/29/2011

(This article is Part II of journalist Ridenour’s political autobiography, Solidarity and Resistance: 50 Years With Che. Click here for Part I)

Wilfred Burchett was a key source of information for many of us who wanted to understand what the United States was doing against Southeast Asians. Burchett was an intrepid reporter for decades. He was the first correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the nuclear bombing and brought the world the military-censored news of its horrors.

Burchett’s journalist code influenced my journalism:

“It is not a bad thing to become a journalist because you have something to say and are burning to say it. There is no substitute for looking into things on the spot, especially if you are going to write on burning international issues of the day. Make every possible effort to get the facts across to at least some section of the public. Do not be tied to a news organization in which you would be required to write against your own conscience and knowledge.”

I later met Burchett. We spoke of doing some writing about Cuba but we never got around to it.

I had begun working as a reporter in 1967. The written word for me is a tool I wield for our liberation from exploitation and oppression. My first reporting was for the Communist Party’s California weekly, People’s World. My last articles for that publication were first-hand accounts from Prague just after the Soviet invasion. They were not published however–a decision taken by top party leaders over the editor’s objection–and I ceased writing for the People’s World.

Che was with me in more ways than I knew at the time. His image and revolutionary thoughts were often present at demonstrations in which I participated, especially anti-imperialist actions. But what I did not know, until I worked in Cuba in 1988, was that he had a flair for writing journalistically.

On June 14, 1988, Cuba’s Journalist Union published Che Periodista (Journalist Che) commemorating his 60th date of birth. It is a collection of chronicles, battle accounts, critiques of imperialism, ideological think pieces, and an homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, a close comrade killed in an airplane accident after the revolutionary victory.

Che’s reportage originally appeared in Verde Olivo (Olive Green), the Cuban revolutionary army magazine, written between October 1959 and April 1961. I found Che’s writings concise, freshly formulated in a crisp style.

After my Czechoslovakia report was ideologically censored by the Communist Party, I sought employment in the mass media, or mainstream media (MSM). My first job was as sports editor in central California at the Hanford Sentinel (1969-70). Not knowing anything about sports writing, I learned on the job. Then, I moved up to general reporting and features. I was soon fired, because I wrote about a taboo subject: racist covenants in housing.

The editor ran my piece, “Titles Include Race Restricting Provision,” on the front page, January 29, 1970. The lead read: “Said premises shall not be sold, conveyed, rented or leased to or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.” I had found this restriction on deeds at a real estate agency.
Ron Ridenour

When real estate advertisers complained to the publisher, he warned me to learn what to write and what not to write. After I told this to a local Mexican-American, who had told me that some of his people had been denied the right to buy certain properties, one hundred people showed up to picket outside the newspaper offices. This was the first time in its history that the paper had been picketed. The publisher fired me as they chanted to save my job.

Twins and Fired

“Twins! I had twins,” I yelled to Bill when I came to work one morning at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, my next newspaper job. The week before, I had been congratulated and promoted by the publisher after my probation period of three months. I worked on the editorial desk with Bill, our city editor. But now he wasn’t smiling as usual.

“Ron, I’ve got bad news,” Bill said glumly. “The FBI is coming tomorrow to talk about you,” his voice tapered to a whisper when mentioning the FBI.

Goddamn government! Just got back on my feet; and now with two sons I had to find another job.
The FBI agents told the chief editor and the publisher that I was secretly working with the Black Panther Party in the city. It didn’t help my case with the anti-union publisher that I was trying to organize a union as well. The publisher fired me upon hearing from the FBI.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had been a target of COINTELPRO, the Agency’s code name for its dirty tricks campaign against leftists, especially anti-war and civil rights activists, and Black Panthers. Their tactics included periodic murders, fraudulent imprisonment, and cajoling employers to fire their workers who were government opponent activists.

After leaving the Committee United for Political Prisoners, I took a reporting job at the weekly Los Angeles News Advocate (LANA), whose slogan was “radical, responsible journalism”.

I covered many topics, but concentrated on the Vietnam War and resistance to it. The publisher and I were often at odds over how radical we should be. With my last reportage for LANA I combined my journalism and my activism in the anti-war movement as one of 150 delegates from US groups participating in the largest world-wide anti-war conference. The World Peace Assembly was held in Versailles, France February 11-14, 1972.

We were 1200 delegates from 84 countries. Both US anti-war coalitions were present: People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and National Peace Action Coalition. I supported both and tried to get them to cooperate in some actions, which rarely succeeded. It was a unique event for me personally because it was here where I first met Burchett. It was also my first encounter with the people that my country was murdering in Southeast Asia, and with people from Cuba, the country that would become my true homeland in years to come.

Among several well known participants was one of Bolivia’s many generals who had seized political power, Juan José Torres. In fact, General Torres had just been ousted the summer before as the nation’s top leader by another General, Hugo Banzar, in yet another coup. I did not know it at the time but Torres had been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under yet another coup general, René Barrientos, and as such he had cast his vote to murder Che. Yet here he was a “peace” delegate.

During three days of speeches, debates, and working group sessions we adopted an extensive program of antiwar activities to occur in many parts of the world throughout the rest of the year. We were not united on priorities or tactics, however. Some wanted to concentrate on pressuring politicians to be more serious about peace negotiations; others wanted more actions against politicians for making the war in the first place, having no trust in their “peace” rhetoric.

I came under fire from some for my position to boycott the crucial war technology industry, especially war aircraft corporations. Nixon had begun to withdraw troops and was bombing all the more. While we met, in fact, the International Herald Tribune reported, on February 14:

“The US Command in Saigon announced that B-52 bombers few 19 missions in the 24 hours ending at noon today, the largest number of missions flown in a day…”

My proposal to boycott and picket war industries was denounced by the French Communist Party (supported by other national CPs) as “anti-working class”. They had control of the unions in many war plants, especially in France. If my proposal took effect, workers would lose wages and even jobs. I was seen as a provocateur, something the CIA also circulated. Divide and conquer!

There was a special meeting with the leading delegates from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for all the delegates from the United States. I felt overwhelmed with admiration for them and tearfully sad.

I also had a heartfelt meeting with Melba Hernandez, Cuba’s leading international representative. She had been a guerrilla at the Moncada barracks, Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1953.

We concluded the conference with most of us marching in Paris against the war. Between 25,000 and 40,000 participated. At a celebration in the evening, Joe Bangert sang. He was a New York delegate of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He had been a solider in Vietnam and had gone over to the people’s side, marrying a Vietnamese woman. She and her child had just been killed in a US bombing raid.

Leaving LANA, I went over to its competitor, the much larger Los Angeles Free Press, or the Freep, as it was known popularly. I was the political reporter. I continued anti-war reportage, exposing police brutality, racism in housing and in government, covering the student revolt and various liberation struggles. One of my most significant reports was about the May 1972 demonstrations, which had been called for at the World Peace Assembly.

My two-page spread in the forthcoming Freep started thusly:

“Anti-war activists say that the government of the United States is waging an all-out war against the people of Indochina and the people of this land.

On May 11, 1,800 tons of bombs were dropped on a small area outside the town of An Loc in South Vietnam. The same day, the news media reported that 1,800 Americans had been arrested during the three-day period in protests involving hundreds of thousands against Nixon’s actions.”

Furthermore, for the first time, Nixon’s generals had mined Vietnamese harbors.

In the Los Angeles area, we held demonstrations in many places, among them at Nixon’s reelection campaign headquarters. The police were extremely violent. They beat people, and choked some unconscious with truncheons. Two plainclothes policemen, who had been on the picket line, beat Ron Kovics with blackjacks as he sat in his wheelchair. I filmed the police violence.

Kovics had fought against the Vietnamese. After he was wounded and paralyzed for life, he began to see who the real enemy was. He eventually wrote an auto-biographical account, Born on the 4th of July (his birth date as well as that of the U.S. Declaration of Independence), which was made into a Hollywood movie of the same name. Kovics is still acting against US wars to this day, now in the Middle East.

On that day, four decades ago, 200 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested for “failure to disperse when ordered”. My colleague, Earl Ofari, wrote a sidebar to my coverage:

“Among those arrested…was Ron Ridenour…as soon as he began filming Ron Kovics being pushed out of his wheelchair by police officers, two plainclothes officers whom [Ridenour] knew from other demonstrations yelled at a uniformed officer to arrest him.”

I was jailed and released hours later on bail. I was later charged with the usual “disturbing the peace,” “interfering with an officer”, “resisting arrest”, and a couple more counts for good measure.

My case spurred several newspapers and media associations to support my right to report and photograph without being arrested. A defense committee was also organized. Nevertheless, I was found guilty of some of these charges and sentenced to one year in prison. One charge was “disturbing the peace.” The nature of that “disturbance”: swearing in the presence of women as I was being attacked by cops.

Kovics commented: “They beat me because I represented the undeniable truth of the war. I represented the crimes of this war. …It’s absurd that [Ron] should get one year in jail for taking pictures of me being beaten.”

We appealed the case. We had many witnesses, including the ex-wife of undercover cop Stanley Frugard, who testified that he had been an undercover policeman who had been after me for years.

Appellate judges concurred that the sentencing judge had erred in not allowing my attorney to argue that I was a victim of “discriminatory enforcement”. So, I was free again. But the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious “red squad” did not rest at that.

COINTELPRO Provocation

“Ron Ridenour’s [pen has] inspired some and angered others…a copy of [Ridenour’s] 1971 Internal Revenue Service forms…found its way anonymously to the newspaper offices. The same forms were also sent to the Staff [another “underground” newspaper], the Socialist Workers party headquarters, to the Peace Action Council, and to the Citizen Research Investigating Committee,” wrote Los Angeles Free Press editor Art Kunkin.

This was another COINTELPRO action, trying to cast me in the light of an agent for the US government. Someone(s) had taken my signature, the same one as was on my California driver’s license, and copied it onto fake tax forms. I was supposed to have earned $17, 784.54 from the “United States Army, Pentagon Building Arlington, Virginia.”

“A handwritten note accopanying the information said: `I think you’ll know what to do with this information about a pig agent;” signed by “a concerned friend.”

Government agents of world destruction were trying to make my fellow activists and government critics think of me as a “pig agent” and they were nearly successful, because the Staff had assigned someone to write a story that I was an agent. Fortunately, Kunkin did his homework convincingly for the reporter, and others who had received the forgery, making them realize that this was, in fact, a provocateur action.

This was becoming a common tactic, which caused several honest leftists, especially Black Panthers, to be cast aside as agents. In some cases, violence was committed against innocent people.

In my case, it was ironic that in the same period that I was being smeared, a FBI memorandum from the L.A. office, dated November 28, 1973, noted:

RIDENOUR’s long association with the `underground´ press as well as his affiliation with numerous subversive groups would both tend to preclude interview of subject since this would most surely be a futile effort.”

I continued writing exposés and acting against the wars abroad and brutality at home.

I wish to share one more issue where I was both reporter and activist, that of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee was part of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It had the highest murder rate of any area of the United States. Between 1973 and 1976, there were 170 murders per 100,000 population average, whereas the city with the highest murder rate was Detroit, Michigan with 20 per 100,000. The national average was nine per 100,000.

At Pine Ridge, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment were widespread. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local authority, Richard Wilson, and his deputies ruled over the large reservation like concentration camp guards.

The traditional Oglala Sioux chiefs called in AIM (American Indian Movement) to help them out. This resulted in an occupation of the local post office. Then the chiefs declared secession from the United States. They declared secession and initiated the Independent Oglala Nation (ION). They sought to reclaim their sovereignty which had long ago been stolen from them by the US government despite treaties that had supposedly guaranteed them self-determination.

US Marshals, FBI agents and National Guard troops were sent in. Indians held their ground with rifles. The government had 15 armored personnel carriers, .50 caliber machine guns, and helicopters, as well as light weapons. Apparently, their orders were to prevent numerous deaths. Nevertheless, in the 71 days the ION held out two Indians were killed by snipers, and two, at least, were wounded. One Marshall was wounded.

This unusual militancy created a stir across the nation. Celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, spoke out for them. In fact, during the stand-off, Brando asked Apache Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the Oscars where he was to be presented with the best actor award for “The Godfather”. She said that Marlon would not accept the award due to “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry”.

While the Free Press’s owners and I differed over politics and their sexist sex ads, they allowed me to rent a car at their expense and drive to the battlefield. Many supporters had come in stealthily as well. Among the 500 defenders of the new nation were representatives from 60 other tribes from many states. There were a few Chicanos (Mexican-Americans active in their own liberation struggle), a handful of blacks and a few Vietnam War veterans. One of those was Joe Bangert.

I came as a reporter-photographer but also helped the leadership with publicity and getting the message out. When I left, I carried information to another reservation and organized support.  One of the leaders of the movement, Carter Camp, a Poncha Indian from Oklahoma, told me:

“We’re going to revive our roots; return to the ways we always lived and complete the hoop that was broken when our whole nation was broken…The new nation shares what it has. There will be no accumulation of goods. No one will have so many horses that some do not have any.”

“We identify with the oneness of all people. Black, yellow, red and white are the four scared colors and are the colors of all people.”

These Native Americans felt kinship with the 200 Indians massacred at Wounded Knee by U.S. government troops in 1890. They now declared that, “The right to life belongs to each man. By remaining a separate nation we choose to live.”

But it was not to be that way. On May 5, a peaceful negotiation had been worked out. Some leaders were arrested but allowed to make bail, and some courts dismissed the charges. U.S. government “spin doctors” understood that the Native peoples had a lot of sympathizers around the world.

In December 2007, some activists from the 1973 takeover restarted a move to secede from the US. Representatives take their message to international bodies. I met some in Bolivia, in 2010, at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—about which I write further on in this series.

Besides my writings at the Freep, I was somewhat more successful at organizing a Newspaper Guild union there than I had been at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. But as we were negotiating a contract, the publishers fired me. They were angry about my organizing and also because I supported radical feminists who were protesting the paper’s sexist ads. Shortly after they fired me, Kunkin was fired and many workers left. The union fell apart.

Freelancing

Graham Greene’s writings influenced me deeply. One of the philosophical pearls that Greene wrote became a motto for me as well as that of Burchett’s: “I try to understand the truth even if it might compromise my ideology.”

I met Greene in Panama where he wrote a talk to launch a solidarity march with Central America for which I was an organizer and media coordinator, in 1985-6. We were 400 people from a score of countries joined to support the Contadora peace process—a Latin American initiative to pressure the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments to stop repressing their own people and to end the US-sponsored Contra war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We crossed through much of Central America and ended in Mexico City “marching” mainly in buses we hired. The last demonstration attracted 50,000 people in Mexico City. Most of us stopped to shout our anger at the Embassy of Death, as Mexicans call the US Embassy.

For me, as a solidarity activist and Marxist thinker, the most decisive motivation to struggle is the issues and not what any political party or government advocates—first an activist and then an advocate journalist for the underdog, for the invaded peoples.

So, after being fired from several jobs both in the mass media and the alternative/left media, I went about making a so-so living freelancing rather than kow-towing to MSM ideology or too simplistic leftist ideological media.

During the next years I wrote and/or edited for scores of US newspapers, news agencies,
magazines and alternative media as a stringer, correspondent or freelancer.

One of the most popular pieces I did as a freelancer was my Playboy scoop–an interview with Jane Fonda, and her radical husband Tom Hayden. I knew them from the anti-war movement and convinced Fonda to do this interview. She had despised Playboy for publishing a nude or semi-nude photo of her without permission. She had always refused their interview requests.

The Washington Post’s west coast bureau chief Leroy Aarons joined me. I had to miss the fifth and final session because I started serving a six-month jail sentence for supporting striking textile workers in Los Angeles. Four plainclothed policemen had jumped me as I stood before a busload of Mexican workers brought in from across the border. They had not been told that the Mexican-American workers at the plant were on strike. As I spoke to them in Spanish about this and encouraged them not to become scabs, the cops took me down. I was arrested for “resisting arrest”, of course.

In between freelancing for magazines and newspapers over a decade, I worked 18 months for the American Civil Liberties Union as its media chief. I got our civil liberty court cases and general message out to the media, often successfully. I also edited and wrote for our newspaper-journal.

In the mid-1970s, I had a stint as an editor/reporter at the rebellious and investigative reporting weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard. We were a handful of full and part-time editors and writers but we put out a good rag. We even won an award for pieces Dave Lindorff wrote. My forte was police brutality investigations. This was, perhaps, the best newspaper I worked on, but we couldn’t last long without advertisers. Newspapers can’t survive in the capitalist world on sales alone.

Four or five years after I was fired from the Los Angeles Free Press, the iconoclastic Larry Flynt of Hustler and Chic magazines hired me as its managing editor. Flynt had recently bought the Freep and gotten rid of the sex ads. He wanted an investigative reporting, ass-kicking newspaper.

Soon after my coming aboard, a whistle-blower handed me a copy of the former LA Police Department chief’s auto-biographical manuscript, Hang `Em at the Airport, which was a reference to what chief Ed Davis had remarked regarding how he would handle the airplane hijacking problem:

“I’d move a portable courtroom, complete with judge, jury and executioner, out to the airport. Once a skyjacker was taken into custody, he could have the benefit of a swift and sure justice. If he was found guilty, he could be hung on the spot.”

This crazy man was running to be governor at that time, and he had the audacity to entitle his biography with that hanging judge message. Fortunately he didn’t win, but not because he was crazy, I think, since several other crazy men became California governors: Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them.

There wasn’t much revealing about the manuscript and Davis hadn’t found a publisher, but we had a scoop anyway. The reporter I assigned to do the story, Bruce Henderson, called Davis’ agent-lawyer to get a response. The response came quickly in the form of an injunction against publishing any material from the book. So we wrote around it and when indicating a citation from the book, we had blank spaces around the words: “Deleted by order of commissioner Arnold Levin”.

Unfortunately, Larry Flynt was soon shot walking out of a courtroom, one of many he was forced to appear in by authorities opposed to his magazines. This was in Georgia, where he and his lawyer were shot by yet another crazy man. Both men survived, but Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt’s executives did not like Flynt’s maverick ideas about radical, muckraking journalism, so they closed down the Freep. I was out of a job again and went back to freelancing.

At the end of 1978, I traveled to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to cover the liberation war fought by the Sandinistas (FSLN). This was the era of President James Carter. He realized that the Somoza family dictatorship was coming to a close, and an alternative had to found—much like the imperialists have recently decided to get rid of Gaddafi. There was no alternative, other than the leftist FSLN guerrillas, and they would not do for imperialism. Among those I met in death-soaked Nicaragua was Carter’s government messenger, who told me that they were working on an alternative. But before they could create one, the Sandinistas won their revolution on July 19, 1979.

Before their victory, I had met with some guerrilla fighters. Among those I interviewed were the future Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, who also became the United Nations General Assembly president years later; the poet and liberation priest Father Ernesto Cardenal, who became the Minister of Culture; and the future Vice-President Sergio Ramirez.

My writings appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. I left the United States soon thereafter, in 1980. In 1984, I worked for President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, for a while. She was the director of the Sandinista Cultural Workers Association (ASTC). I wrote public relations pieces for them, including from the war zone by the Honduran border. I also did a report about censorship affects for the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge.

When I moved to Denmark my pen continued painting sketches of US-caused pain.

RON RIDENOUR, who was a co-founder and editor with Dave Lindorff in 1976 of the Los Angeles Vanguard, lives in Denmark. A veteran journalist who has reported in the US and from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America, he has written Cuba at the Crossroads, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, and Yankee Sandinistas. For more information about Ron and his writing, go to www.RonRidenour.com

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Chronicles of Participatory Journalism—

Sun, 04/17/2011 By Ron Ridenour

(This article is the first of seven pieces dedicated to the Cuban revolution and its defeat of the US imperialist invasion 50 years ago, April 17-19, 1961, and embraces my half-century struggle.)

I. Sharing Che’s Activism

Che’s penetrating eyes stare at me seriously as I write about him. It is strange that I have never written about him before, other than to quote him. Perhaps it is because Che has been too large a figure for me to tackle? I don’t know. This writing, though, is a commemoration of Che and of my 50 years in our common struggle.

Ernesto Guevara was my greatest personal inspiration and Cuba’s revolution was my greatest collective inspiration—along with the Vietnamese resistance fighters. Nicknamed Che, an Argentine expression, he lived and died as he preached. Che’s internationalist ideals, his consequent actions, his integrity and charm, have influenced my life all these decades.

What immediately attracted me was his forthright manner of speaking and writing, and his bravery and fairness in battle. Che’s dream was to liberate Latin America from the shackles of United States imperialism and its lackey national dictators and murderous straw men. This would be followed up by worldwide socialist revolution.

“I am Cuban and also Argentine…patriotic for Latin America…in the moment it might be necessary, I am disposed to offer my life for the liberation of whichever of the Latin American countries without asking anything of anyone.”

Those are his prophetic words printed on a calendar of photos, which I recently bought in the school room at La Higuera, Bolivia where he was murdered. The images of Che on my walls are important to me, as are some slogans, such as Fidel’s: “To be internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity”—a moral displayed on Cuban billboards.

I began to share Che’s dream as my first life, that of a follower of the brutal and chauvinist American Dream, drew to a close. In my family, you were either an active American Dreamer, like my career militarist father, or a passive one like my grandmother, whose motto was: “Ignorance is Bliss”. I came to feel that these codes rejected other people. When I severed that knot, I entered a world of humanistic vision and struggle. I still see myself as a youth of the 60s, when many of us across the world fought the profiteering war-making empire-builders.

The author, Ron Ridenour

Reading about Che and Cuba’s revolution was a part of my reeducation. Participatory journalism became important to me, too, when I began reading articles by Lionel Martin in the New York-based weekly Guardian, which I later wrote for. I met the affable Lionel in Cuba years later. I recommend his book: The Early Fidel: Roots of Castro’s Communism.

Che was born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in Rosario, Argentina, June 14, 1928. Celia de la Serna y Llosa, his mother, and Ernesto Guevara Lynch, his father, were middle-class and of Spanish-Irish descent. In his youth, Ernesto read Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. He kept a philosophical diary and thought of writing a biography of Marx.

In 1953, Guevara graduated in medicine from the University of Buenos Aires. He made long travels throughout much of Latin America, hitch-hiking and by motorcycle. After witnessing and fighting against US intervention in Guatemala, in 1954, Che became convinced that the only way to bring down avaricious capitalism was through violent revolution.

In Guatemala, he had met a Peruvian revolutionary, Hilda Gadea. They married, in 1955, and had one daughter. Che had also met a Cuban revolutionary who later introduced him to Fidel in Mexico. Guevara signed on as the July 26 Movement’s doctor. In late 1956, 82 men loaded onto a small motor yacht, the Granma, and sailed to Cuba. Seven days later, on December 2, they landed near Cabo Cruz. They’d lost much of their equipment and food during storms. And then they were ambushed at Alegría de Pío by a far superior force of soldiers and aircraft.

Only Fidel Castro and 12 “disciples” (or 16, according to some accounts) survived. They made a base in the mountains of Sierra Maestra from which they attacked garrisons and recruited peasants to the revolutionary army. Che started promoting land reform and conducted educational courses in areas controlled by the guerrillas. He did less doctoring and more fighting. Despite his chronic asthma, he was not deterred by the harsh conditions and war.

Fidel made Che a major (“comandante,” the highest rank), and he led one of the forces that liberated central Cuba in late 1958. One of Che’s fighting companions was Aleida March, who became his second wife in 1959. After victory, January 1, 1959, Che gained fame as an anti-imperialist orator and as the leading figure next to Fidel in the revolutionary government.

In Che’s well known work, “Socialism and Man”, he asserts that the revolution must create the “new man”:

“To build communism, you must build new men as well as the new economic base…The goal of socialism is the creation of more complete and more developed human beings.”

Cuban revolutionaries defeated the US-equipped army of dictator Fulgencio Batista when I was 19 years old and a lowly airman in the U.S. Air Force, which I was learning to hate for its racism, lies and arrogance towards the entire world outside the U.S., and its military aggression against other nations.

One personal example of its hateful racism is what happened to me because I drank with black airmen at a “blacks only” bar in a Japanese town close to the U.S. radar station where we were assigned. The day after my “betrayal”, several white men in my barracks—all barracks were segregated—tore off my clothes and held me down on a bunk bed while they lit a can of insecticide and burned my public hairs and skin, then held me under the snow until nearly suffocating. The lesson: I was supposed to learn to be racist like them.

Two years later, when I was a college student in Los Angeles, California, I participated in my first demonstration when the Yankees backed a proxy invasion of Cuba, known as the Bay of Pigs. I held tightly onto a picket sign: “US OUT of CUBA”, and marched with a couple hundred others in front of the United States Federal Building. It was April 19, 1961, and the US backed forces were getting their asses kicked in Cuba!

Two days before, US naval ships had landed 1500 exile Cubans on a little beach, Bay of Pigs, in southwest Cuba. The CIA plan was to seize the beachhead and hold it long enough so they could fly in a provisional government of rich Cubans. The US government planned to recognize the new “democratic” government of Cuba and send in military support to smash the revolution.

Unlike the American public, the Cuban government knew such a plan was underway but did not know where it would be launched. Every family had received pamphlets explaining how to defend themselves. Thousands of local defense committees had been organized into armed militias. The CIA had grossly miscalculated the strength of this revolutionary support. It had told the mercenary invaders that they would be welcomed as liberators. Instead they met fierce resistance from civilians before Cuban soldiers could arrive. As we few indignant Usamericans were protesting the US-led invasion, it was being defeated.

I had heard about the invasion over KPFK radio, a non-commercial progressive station, and the in the Guardian. The right-wing Herald Examiner reported that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) had organized the protests, and claimed it was led by the Communist party (CP) and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party (SWP), which would have been a unique alliance for these ever- feuding groups. On the front page was a photograph of me walking in front of the CP’s southern California chairwoman Dorothy Healey. The paper used her presence to claim that all demonstrators were Communists.

At least one of the demonstrators decided to make the Hearst paper’s fiction a reality: I promptly sent in a membership application to FPCC. (I still have my membership card beside me as I write.) If I were to be accused of being a Communist for defending the right of Cubans simply to live, then I was going to find out what Communists were all about.

Dorothy’s house was in a black working-class area of south central Los Angeles. I walked past tidy houses with a nervous sensation in my stomach. Was I ready to meet a real live Communist, the enemy of my father and of the entire fatherland? I was surprised to be greeted by a tiny, white woman with bushy hair and a remarkably friendly smile. Her living room resembled a library. During the long interchange, I became enthralled with this engaging person. Dorothy had dropped out of school at 14 to become a full-time revolutionary. She knew a great deal about the US’s evil deeds against Cubans and their government. Dorothy never asked me to join her party but I did, in 1964. I resigned a few years later, in 1969, because of CP support for Moscow’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and because it had long ago ceased being communist or revolutionary or democratic.

President John Kennedy was furious about being dealt a misguided strategy and disinformation by the CIA and the preceding administration. The failed invasion only strengthened Cubans in their drive to socialize society and in their resolve to nationalization of large US and national capitalist properties, as Che had predicted. A frustrated Kennedy fired several leading and operative CIA officers.

It is understandable yet ironic that key CIA figures, some whom JFK had fired, became likely co-conspirators in Kennedy’s assassination two and one-half years after the defeat in Cuba. Their patsy was Lee Harvey Oswald, a scapegoat who faked membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I watched the assassinations of these two men on TV with my membership card in my wallet. CIA propagandists at first claimed the FPCC was involved in JFK’s murder—part of an alleged Castro conspiracy—but top government leaders decided to go with the lone man assassin lie. Nevertheless, frightened FPCC leaders closed down the committee.

The assassination of Kennedy was especially pertinent to me not only because I was a member of the FPCC but also because I had recently been jailed in Costa Rica and deported back to the US for “attempting to overthrow” the Costa Rican government. I had traveled there in the hope of finding a way to Cuba, where I wanted to learn first hand about the revolution. But the October 1962 missile crisis stopped me en route.

Prison leaders isolated me from all prisoners and forbade inmates and guards from speaking with me because I might subvert them. In a ritual of power, two guards shaved off my guerrilla-inspired black beard with sharp knives before all the prisoners to witness. President Francisco Orlich Bolmarcich used me as a scapegoat for a recent murderous event when national guardsmen had killed several demonstrators. He concocted an incredible story that I’d been trained in Russia and sent to Costa Rica to start a revolution. Having gotten out of my presence there what they wished, authorities deported me to the US.

Mississippi Goddamn

The most moving movement I was part of was with black and white civil rights activists in Mississippi, the Freedom Summer of 1964. Mississippi Goddamn was a 1963-recorded song by the militant singer Nina Simone, which expressed why we organized for civil rights equality there. After that “long hot summer”, as it also became known, another activist-singer, Phil Ochs, wrote the activist song, Going Down to Mississippi.

I later obtained 1000 pages of dossiers kept on me by various of the National Security Council (NSC) intelligence agencies. Some pages dealt with my participation in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) civil rights struggle for black voter registration. Here is a selection:

During the period March 10 through June 7, 1964, RIDENOUR attended the following functions of the Youth Action Union (YAU)…a party sponsored by the YAU for the benefit of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee…According to LA T-3, the purpose of this party was to raise funds for the organization…The April 11, 1964 edition of the PW contains an article which reflects that RIDENOUR was the Vice Chairman of the West Los Angeles Du Bois Club and also the Head of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, a group which was conducting demonstrations at various businesses, protesting discriminatory hiring practices.

Unaware of this surveillance, I proceeded to help empower people in Mississippi. After a week’s training in how to withstand violence without using violence, and in Mississippi racist history, conducted at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, I was assigned to a project in Moss Point. I had sat close to Andrew Goodman, who was one of three activists soon to be murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen and sheriffs from Philadelphia, Mississippi. (Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were the other two.)

Four of us who were to initiate the project in Moss Point drove there in my car. A black youth, Charles Glenn, was our director. Howard Kirschenbaum, a white Ivy League college student, was with us. We activists were all put up by brave black residents.

Howard and I stayed together at the Colley’s house. Mr. Colley was a carpenter with a wife and six children. He often dozed through the night in a rocking chair with a shotgun on hand. Howard was one of several activists who prepared black voter candidates for registration. Others taught subjects that black youths were interested in at our after-school Freedom School. I was the project’s administrative secretary and publicist.

One evening Howard and I were out walking, when a police car pulled up and the cops arrested us for “vagrancy, and we’ll see what else”. We spent a harrowing night in jail. We were told by policemen that they knew the three activists had been murdered, before this was public knowledge. We were also told lies that our director had raped a white woman activist and that he had then been tortured to death. We were lucky that our legal support staff was able to get us released the next morning.

In the summer of canvassing, registering and teaching, we were able to make a dent in the numbers of blacks registered, although authorities found devious ways to prevent most from registering. But we were successful in other ways. Bolstering people’s courage was one. Another was what Howard later wrote about as his most significant memory: “the song we sang that summer, night after night, ever so slowly, feeling each word, extending each syllable in the traditional cadence of the Negro spiritual, as we linked arms and swayed to the chant-like melody.”

We have walked through the shadow of death.
We’ve had to walk all by ourselves.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

We have hung our heads and cried,
Cried for those like the three who died,
Died for you and they died for me,
Died for the cause of equality.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

One of the most threatening moments, and yet the most moving moments of personal solidarity in my life there was when Senator John Eastland took the floor to speak against me and the civil rights movement because of me. A CIA dossier stated that I was a Communist agitator in Costa Rica two years before, and that I was “armed and dangerous”. This accusation was released to right-wing groups and individuals including Senator Eastland who used it to show that I was this fiend, a factor in the “invasion” in his good state, and that the civil rights movement was communist.

I was devastated by this. It was prime news. Beyond the validity of the content, the damage was to the community. How would this affect our civil rights work; how would the people take it? But when I was next together with people from the community, they stood and applauded me. I was honored. How grateful I felt. How gracious are the sufferers in common.

Once our project was over, I drove my reliable Chevy to New York with comrades from the struggle in Moss Point. I still have the Mississippi license plate, number: J16684. Forty-seven-year-old dirt is ground into the white metal background. It calls to me as I write.

After a short stay in New York, I drove cross-country to Los Angeles. The trip gave me time to reflect on that summer. I concurred with Lawrence Guyot, one of our leaders: “The Freedom Summer was the most creative, concentrated, multi-layered attack on oppression in this country.”

We also made strides in creating space for equality. Decades later it became obvious that because we had fought the good fight, Barack Obama would become president of the United States. Unfortunately and predictably, President Obama does the “man’s” bidding for profiteering labor exploitation and oil wars. Nevertheless, he is black and that is a positive step; as it is that women can also be bankers and “bastards” just like white men. Yes, we have more enemies now, but who can deny the universal right to equality?

Another positive aspect was the participatory democracy practiced by SNCC, and the Students for Democratic Society (SDS). This egalitarian decision-making methodology allowed for the acceptance of differences within the movement. Even in heated debates there was no belittling of those with whom one did not agree. If someone did become aggressively antagonistic, he/she was spoken to, and if necessary isolated. In contrast, in the CP, and other communist parties, there was a heavy atmosphere of self-righteous adherence to “the correct line”. Dissent was tantamount to betrayal.

Our civil rights movement inspired the next phases of the black liberation movement, and all other minority liberation movements: the Mexican-American/Chicano “La Raza” movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Native-Americans’ AIM, Philippines for Philippine sovereignty, and the radical women’s movement. These were the roots of the New Left.

Shortly after the long hot summer, black nationalist Muslims, aided by the New York City Police Department, murdered one of the most articulate black liberationist voices, Malcolm X, on February 21, 1965. He was one of my teachers, indirectly. The other most prominent voice for justice of the races was Martin Luther King. He, too, had to be “taken out” (June 6, 1968). Both men who were dangerous to the white elite, for capitalism and its wars. Malcolm X had come to see the need to unify people of all colors who were exploited by capitalism.

Martin Luther King had long been convinced about racial unity and then, fatally, he began to protest capitalism’s war against Vietnam. It did not aid his chances for survival that he also took up the cause of the working class for its struggle to gain decent working conditions and a living wage. He was in Memphis on this crusade when he was assassinated.

Among my political activities was the on-going protest of police murders and racist brutality. I lived in a century of “acceptable” lynchings of black people. Between 1882 and 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, whites had murdered 4,500 blacks by lynching alone. During the latter part of that period, when J. Edgar Hoover was chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1924-72), half that official number had been lynched, but there were also many more unrecorded lynchings. Like Roman worker-citizens applauding the slaughter of slaves in amphitheaters, whole families gathered picnic-style to watch a lynching and sometimes the burning of a live human being (“Strange Fruit”, Billy Holiday). Hoover did nothing to apprehend these cruel murderers, nor did local police forces in the south—almost never.

This repulsive behavior made me sick. I sought answers. If we are not to be guilty of societal-based crimes, then we cannot be passive about them; we cannot live by my grandmother’s “ignorance is bliss” code. In 1946, Sartre wrote “Existentialism and Humanism”:

When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men…One ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception.

I chose to accept responsibility for my actions and in so doing I have never felt guilt for the state of “human nature”. And, instead of giving futile alms to poor beggars, I strive to create an economic base, a social structure where poverty would be non-existent. We have enough wealth for all to live well but many humans seek to live better.

Such a philosophy often makes me feel sad and can be isolating from most people—especially when there are lulls in protest movements. It was especially the civil rights movement that gave me the fortitude to struggle onward. It brought me the warmth of fellowship, a sense of the possibility that the goodness in some people can penetrate the hearts and actions of others and eventually win over the death machine.

Our movements had a positive impact on many Europeans too. Movements for democracy in the schools and anti-war movements forced some bourgeois governments to make reforms in schools and to criticize the US’s aggressive war in Indochina. We also helped inspire and support African liberation movements, which felt stronger with our solidarity, and which helped defeat the colonialists.

Anti-war Movement

Many of us activists, of all colors, also supported liberation movements fought by blacks, browns, Native Americans, and radical feminists. I was the organizer of a white support group (Committee United for Political Prisoners) for Black Panther Party political prisoners. I also supported Central American liberation armed struggle movements. For these struggles, I was jailed a dozen times, once for half-a-year, for supporting a textile strike.

The movement that I was most active in for the longest consecutive time was the anti-Vietnam War movement—14 years, until Vietnam freed itself, aided by our solidarity, on Mayday, 1975. I took part in hundreds of actions, advocating a diversity of tactics: mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, leafleting people at public areas, going door-to-door canvassing, direct actions.

One successful direct action was kicking Dow Chemical job recruiters off our campus at California State College at Los Angeles, December 1967. Dow was the producer of scorching-to-death napalm. We forged an alliance with black and white students, and a few Chicanos, against the war in Vietnam and against militarist recruiters. Our boisterous anger, and a dose of stink, scared the Dow men away. In fact, they departed through a window. I was suspended from school and could not graduate until the next year, but Dow Chemical said it would never return.

In a brief period of post-war Vietnam, and during the Watergate scandal, the US government lightened up a bit, hoping to dampen our movements’ anger. One concession the government “gave” to our movements was the release of some of its record-keeping, a result of the Freedom of Information Act. The spies listed me in various categories of subversive “indexes”: chaos, agitator, rabble rouser, and the highest: Security Index Priority I. Agents, and snitches within our groups, recorded my attendance and political positions expressed at innumerable meetings, rallies and demonstrations. They noted first-hand when I changed residences or jobs, and where I traveled. Here is a sample:

On February 4, 1972, a Special Agent of the FBI observed Ridenour boarding Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 351, at 4:50 p.m., at Hollywood-Burbank Airport, en route to Oakland, California.

A few weeks later, I am observed taking off for London, and then to the:

World Assembly for Peace in Versailles, France, as a delegate of the United States during the period February 11, 1972, through February 13, 1972.

The NSC did not limit itself to keeping tabs on “subversives” like me. It also leaked dossiers to civilian friends. Right-wing propagandists used these secret dossiers to fan the flames of “patriotism”. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, known as “the white voice of the south”, used secret dossiers to denounce me as a subversive in an attempt to taint the civil rights movement. LAPD red squad officer Russell D. Meltzer testified in Washington DC before a Senate committee, in 1968, that I was “the leader of that demonstration” in which Dow Chemical was ousted. The “Fire and Police Research Association of Los Angeles”, portrayed me as a “professional agitator.”

I was proud to learn that I was one of 4,000 persons singled out by the Nixon regime to be interned in concentration camps. Before we could be rounded up, however, Nixon fell from grace and had to resign.

Our militant and massive actions both embolded and frustrated US soldiers in Vietnam. Some gave up the imperialists’ war while others lost their humanity. A group of the latter systematically murdered about 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. The then Major Colin Powell was sent to investigate. He secured his future appointment as George Bush’s Secretary of State by whitewashing the wanton murder of mostly children and women, many raped and tortured before being killed.

This is a quote from Powell’s whitewash:

“Relationships between the American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

After this atrocity finally made news, on November 12, 1969, thanks to a well-researched and documented story by Seymour Hersh (Dispatch News Service), my name was sometimes confused with the original source of information for Hersh: Ronald Ridenhour (with an “h” unlike in my name). He was a soldier elsewhere in Vietnam who had heard about the massacre, which was only one of hundreds but also one of the worst. Ridenhour wrote to politicians about it. After being ignored, he contacted Hersh. Once the story hit the mass media, some of which were becoming critical of the dirty war without end, we held massive and angry demonstrations. This media revelation was a good example of what the “fourth estate” should be about, and this information increased opposition to the war. Middle America began to wake up from its “ignorance is bliss” slumber.

And the Vietnamese took their country back. But then what happened? Slumber has returned, most significantly in the first world but also in the renewed second world. Slumber allows the same corporations to start new wars for wealth and dominance. Today, it is in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya…The “masses” in the “democracies” nod their sleepy heads as their rich leaders’ mercenaries launch one deadly missile after another.

What would Che have thought and said? What would he have done? I don’t know the answer for certain. I don’t think there is a “politically correct” slogan. But yes, solidarity must be present, always.

I am certain of one thing: he would not have stood for it!

RON RIDENOUR, who was a co-founder and editor with Dave Lindorff in 1976 of the Los Angeles Vanguard, lives in Denmark. A veteran journalist who has reported in the US and from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America, he has written Cuba at the Crossroads, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, and Yankee Sandinistas. For more information about Ron and his writing, go to www,ronridenour.com

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April 27, 2011

3rd Circuit Court of Appeals Slaps Supreme Court

By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

The federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in a stunning smack at the U.S. Supreme Court, has issued a ruling upholding its earlier decision backing a new sentencing hearing in the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted killer of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. 

The latest ruling, issued on Tuesday April 26, 2011, upholds a ruling the Third Circuit issued over two years ago siding with a federal district court judge who, back in 2001, had set aside Abu-Jamal’s death penalty after determining that death penalty instructions provided to the jury, and a flawed jury ballot document used during Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial, had been unclear.

The U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the Third Circuit to re-examine its 2009 ruling upholding the lifting of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.

The nation’s top court had cited a new legal precedent in that directive to the Third Circuit, a strange order given the fact that the Supreme Court had earlier consistently declined to apply its own precedents to Abu-Jamal’s case.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said that, honoring a “campaign promise,” he had asked Faulkner’s widow Maureen Faulkner what her wishes were, and in response to her request was appealing the decision back to the US Supreme Court.

Abu-Jamal’s current lead attorney, Prof Judith Ritter of the Widener Law School, said of the decision, “Each of the four federal judges that has reviewed Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case has found his death sentence to be unconstitutional. The Third Circuit’s most recent opinion reflects a detailed analysis demonstrating that their unanimous decision is well-supported by Supreme Court precedent. We believe this carefully reasoned analysis will stand.”

The Third Circuit’s ruling, if left standing, allows Philadelphia prosecutors to call for a whole new sentencing hearing if they want to try and reinstate the death penalty. That would require the impaneling of a whole new jury, to hear and consider evidence regarding mitigating circumstances and aggravating circumstances in the case, and then to decide for either execution of life-without-possibility of parole–the only two options legally available. Abu-Jamal has exhausted his avenues of appeal of his conviction, absent new evidence in the case.

If prosecutors opted against holding new hearing then Abu-Jamal’s sentence would be converted automatically to a life sentence, which in Pennsylvania means no chance of parole. Abu-Jamal would have to spending the remainder of his life behind bars, though not on death row.

Experts contend a new sentencing hearing would be problematic for prosecutors. Although the issue of guilt or innocence would not be on trial, the defense could bring in witnesses to explain exactly what they saw happen the night of the shooting–witnesses whose testimony could ultimately raise new questions about the validity of the underlying conviction.

The Supreme Court does not have to accept an appeal, and could opt to let the latest ruling stand, or it could again reverse the three-judge panel, whose members were appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush, Sr., and Carter. In any event, whatever happens next, prosecutors concede that current and yet unresolved legal issues in this case, which continues to attract unprecedented international scrutiny, will keep it in courts for years. For example, there are several avenues of appeal of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence which were never adjudicated by the Federal District court. District Judge William Yohn mooted them in 2001 after he had found in favor of one argument and tossed out the death sentence.

In early April 2011 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund publicly announced it was joining the Abu-Jamal defense team and working with Professor Ritter. NAACP lawyers had joined Ritter last fall during the hearing where she argued the legal point just upheld by the Third Circuit in its latest ruling.

Recently Abu-Jamal recorded yet another birthday (4/24) inside a death row isolation cell. Abu-Jamal and the 222 other Pennsylvania death row inmates spend 23-hours per day every day isolated inside minimalist cells.

Since 1983 Abu-Jamal has languished in the confinement of death row, following his controversial July 1982 conviction for the murder of Officerl Faulkner.

Now 57, Abu-Jamal has spent nearly 29 years of his life in prison for a crime he has consistently denied committing–a crime that ample evidence conclusively proves could not have occurred as police and prosecutors have proclaimed.

Authorities, for example, claim Abu-Jamal fired four shots at the policeman, while straddling the officer as he lay defenseless on a sidewalk, striking him only once with a fatal shot in the face.

However, police crime scene photos and police reports make no reference of any bullet marks in that sidewalk around the fallen officer–marks that should have been clearly visible if Abu-Jamal fired three shots at almost point-blank range into the sidewalk as witnesses and the prosecutor claimed.

As detailed in an thorough investigative ballistic test released in September 2010 by This Can’t Be Happening! (See our film at the bottom of the home page), it is impossible to fire high-velocity bullets into a sidewalk without leaving any marks. TCBH! test-fired each kind of .38-caliber bullets referenced in police reports about the 1981 crime scene into a slab of old city sidewalk, and each of those bullets left easily visible marks…marks totally contradicting claims by authorities that Abu-Jamal wildly fired into the sidewalk without leaving bullet marks.

Rulings by federal and state courts denying Abu-Jamal the legal relief routinely granted other inmates who had raised the same appeals claims are the least-examined element of this internationally-condemned injustice.

The same Philadelphia and Pennsylvania courts that found major flaws by either defense attorneys, police, prosecutors and/or trial judges in 86 Philadelphia death penalty convictions during a 28-year period after Abu-Jamal’s December 1981 arrest declare no errors exist anywhere in the Abu-Jamal case – an assertion critics call statistically improbable.

The federal Third Circuit, for example, declined to grant Abu-Jamal a new trial based on solid legal issues from racial discrimination by prosecutors in jury selection to documented errors by trial judge Albert Sabo, the late jurist who relished his infamous reputation for pro-prosecution bias.

The Third Circuit’s 2008 ruling faulting Sabo for his inability to provide the jury with simple death penalty deliberation instructions included the contradictory conclusion that Sabo had adequately provided the jury with instructions about a highly complicated legal issue involving misconduct by the trial prosecutor.

Faulting Sabo for that flawed instruction on prosecutorial misconduct would have required the Third Circuit to give Abu-Jamal a whole new trial. Unwilling to do that, the court sidestepped its duty to ensure justice, by deciding to just eliminate Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, instead.

Pennsylvania state courts have released three Philadelphians from death row (half of Pa’s death row exonerations to date) citing misconduct by police and prosecutors…misconduct that was less egregious than that documented in the Abu-Jamal case. One of those Philadelphia exonerations involved a man framed by police for a mob-related killing, who was arrested six months before Abu-Jamal.

While many people in Philadelphia may feel Abu-Jamal is guilty as charged, millions around the world question every aspect of this conviction, citing facts that proponents of Abu-Jamal’s conviction deliberately dismiss as irrelevant.

This widespread questioning of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is the reason why pro-Abu-Jamal activities occurred around the world commemorating Abu-Jamal’s 4/24 birthday, including people in San Francisco attending a screening of the “Justice on Trial” movie examining ignored aspects in the case, and people marching for Abu-Jamal’s freedom in the Brixton section of London.

Officials in the French city of Saint-Denis will stage a ceremony rededicating a street they named for Abu-Jamal during the last weekend in April.

The ire erupting over Abu-Jamal’s prominence on the part of advocates of his execution contains contradictions that are as clear as the proverbial black-&-white.

The U.S. Congress engaged in color-coded contradiction approving a May 2006 resolution condemning far off Saint-Denis for its honoring Abu-Jamal by placing his name on a small one block long street.

Over a decade before that anti-Saint-Denis outrage, over 100 members of Congress had battled to block the U.S. government from deporting a white fugitive convicted of killing a British Army officer in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

That officer’s killing had occurred during an investigation into the murder of another Belfast policeman.

Incidentally, the U.S. Congress did not erupt angrily when the City Council of New York City voted to place the name of that fugitive – Joseph Doherty – on the street corner outside the federal detention center then housing him.

In 1988 – six years after Abu-Jamal’s conviction – more than 3,000 Philadelphians signed petitions asking federal authorities to grant Doherty special permission to leave his federal detention cell for one day to allow Doherty to serve as Grand Marshall of Philadelphia’s St Patrick’s Day Parade.

One Philly supporter of suspected convicted cop killer Doherty was the then-President Judge of Philadelphia’s trial courts, Edward J. Bradley.

Judge Bradley told a reporter in 1988 that he had no problems as a jurist reconciling his support for a convicted felon because he questioned the “fair treatment” Irish nationals received in English courts.

Judge Bradley’s concern about fairness for IRA fighters in English courts is not parallelled by any concern about fairness in Philadelphia courts with regard to the case of former Black Panther Party member Abu-Jamal. Judge Bradley’s double standard highlights the gross unfairness of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania state court judges.

Critics who castigate those who contribute to Abu-Jamal’s defense fund, especially by Hollywood stars, did not object to fund-raising on behalf of one of the white Los Angeles policemen convicted in federal court for the 1991 beating of Rodney King. That criminal cop was allowed to keep nearly $10-million in sales from his book and from a fund-raising campaign on his behalf – monies generated mainly after that the former police sergeant’s imprisonment following a civil rights violation conviction.

One reason the decades-old Abu-Jamal case continues to generate support and rage is Abu-Jamal himself.

A charismatic figure who is articulate, with a level of education and intelligence atypical of the mainly illiterate denizens of death row, Abu-Jamal is able to explain his case, as well as to expose the horrors of the nation’s prison system and its death rows.

While on death row Abu-Jamal has written six critically acclaimed books (including one on jailhouse lawyers), produced thousands of commentaries, learned two foreign languages, earned two college degrees, including a masters, and developed a loyal support network comprising millions worldwide.

Even the prosecutor at Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial – Joseph McGill – described him during that trial as the most “intelligent” defendant he’d ever faced.

And another prosecutor, during Abu-Jamal’s tainted 1995 appeals hearing, said he didn’t think “the shooting of Officer Faulkner is characteristic of this defendant.” (Abu-Jamal had no record of violence or criminal acts before his 1981 arrest.)

Supporters applaud Abu-Jamal’s defense of the downtrodden, particularly his poignant criticisms of America’s prison-industrial complex, that incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on earth.

Abu-Jamal’s stance highlighting the deprivations of the have-nots, predated his arrest, and had earned him the title of “Voice of the Voiceless” during his professional broadcast reporting career, which ran from 1975 till his December 1981 arrest.

Abu-Jamal rarely uses his world-wide platform to speak about his own plight, preferring to focus instead on the injustices endured by others.

LINN WASHINGTON, JR. is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening. Washington ended a two-state/three-school college sojourn at Temple University. Too broke to return to Pittsburgh after graduation he stayed in Philadelphia working in newspapers. Journalism was not quite the mega-salaried career he had envisioned, but it’s a career that has provided extraordinary experiences, insights and travel. A columnist for the historic Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest African-American owned newspaper, Washington is also Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple, where he co-directs the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab that sends J-students into neighborhoods in search of stories the local establishment media ignore. In addition to his Temple degrees, Washington holds a law degree from the Yale University.

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