We still have political prisoners in the U.S. from the Nixon Era: One of them is my friend

Originally published on Medium.com

Ever since the start of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has invited comparisons to authoritarian figures in history.

Richard Nixon is currently enjoying favor in the media because of their shared obsession with law and order, White House leaks, and hatred of journalists.

But before the punditry glibly snags another Trump twin from its Arcade Claw Machine of Despotism, I’d like it to focus, really focus, on Nixon and the COINTELPRO era of law enforcement, because we still have political prisoners in the United States serving sentences due to the legal abuses from that era.

And one of them is my friend, Jalil Muntaqim.

As has been amply documented by authors like Peter Matthiessen, Ward Churchill, Betty Medsger and documentaries like COINTELPRO 101, the FBI under Nixon targeted activists who were part of movements like the Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement (AIM), infiltrating their activities, often marking them for assassination.

When they fought back, their experience with the judicial system was one marked by the government’s illegal tampering with evidence and with witnesses lying to judges.

In Jalil’s case, the tampering in his trial and his co-defendants for murdering two police officers involved inconsistent evidence from three witnesses, the recanted testimony of one witness who was intimidated into cooperating, the suppressed exculpatory FBI ballistics test on a .45 caliber weapon seized after he and his co-defendant Albert Washington were arrested and the perjured testimony of NYPD detective George Simmons concerning the test. The Nixon tapes contain a record of a secret White House May 26, 1971 meeting in which Richard Nixon, John Erlichman, FBI Director Herbert Hoover, and others named the murders “NEWKILL,” (for “New York killings”). Those involved with the case of Jalil and his co-defendants believe they decided to blame them on Black Panther Party (BPP) members as part of the COINTELPRO conspiracy to destroy them.

While the 1975–76 Senate Church Committee hearings disclosed some of the abuses of COINTELPRO and other intelligence agencies, it never sought redress for those prisoners framed by the FBI’s manipulations of the justice system.

So Jalil and the other COINTELPRO targets are still in prison.

Why? Because the Judges that put them there refused to grant appeals and because parole boards are made up largely of law enforcement personnel, who almost never vote for the parole of prisoners involved in the death of other law enforcement personnel. And they have a powerful lobby when it comes to petitioning governors and presidents against clemency.

Any other prisoner serving twenty-five years to life with Jalil’s record would have been paroled long ago.

While in prison he has graduated with a BS in psychology and a BA in Sociology, taught computer skills to prisoners, and helped them get their GEDs.

He has twice received commendations for quelling prison riots and was recognized by the Deputy Superintendent of Auburn Prison for his efforts to raise inmate funds for the Red Cross after 9/11.

From prison he has also co-sponsored a Victory Gardens project, enlisting Maine farmers to distribute produce to poor urban New York New Jersey and Boston communities.

Think of what this man could have done if he had not spent the last 45 years in prison.

I saw Jalil last weekend.

He had been transferred from Attica to a super max facility near the Pennsylvania border because he had been teaching a class in Black History and had compared, unfavorably, the Crips and the Bloods gang membersto the Black Panthers.

He noted how the former were not invested in supporting their communities while the Panthers’ raison detre was uplifting their neighborhoods.

Somehow, the prison authorities took from this bit of pedagogy that Jalil was promoting gang warfare.

Attica is refusing to release the tape of the session, which Jalil is certain will exonerate him — but it is in the hands of his lawyer now.

We asked him why he thought Obama, during his last days in office, had pardoned Oscar Lopez Rivera, targeted by COINTELPRO because of his activism for Puerto Rican independence and not AIM activist Leonard Peltier, also a COINTELPRO victim.

(Jalil, convicted on a state offense, is not eligible for federal pardon.) Jalil thought Jimmy Carter appealing for Lopez Rivera probably had something to do with it.

However, he thought that it probably had more to do with the quantity of votes Puerto Ricans had to offer the Democratic Party versus the quantity of votes Indigenous people have to offer.

I have followed the Free Peltier Campaign for some time on social media, and my heart broke in January for Peltier and all the dedicated activists, when they found out that Obama would not pardon Peltier, who is quite ill.They viewed Obama’s decision as a death sentence.

Because, of course, no one has any illusions that Trump will respond to appeals for political prisoners.

This is a man who still claims the Central Park 5 are guilty despite the fact they were all exonerated after DNA proved them innocent and the actual rapist confessed to the crime.

So what is our responsibility to Jalil Muntaqim, Leonard Peltier and all the remaining political prisoners in the United States?

Addressing past assaults on civil liberties that resulted in the presence of political prisoners in U.S. jails might very well equip us to face the contemporary assaults on civil liberties committed by the Trump Administration.

Learning the names of these prisoners is a start.

Here, for example are all the Black Panthers, like Jalil, currently still in jail or in exile.

Updates since this this article was written in March.

April 2, 2017 Update:

Jalil reports that he has finally received all of his property, except for TV. The typewriter is broken and has been sent out for repairs.

March 22, 2017 Update from Jalil:

I’m out of SHU, however, phones, commissary and packages won’t be restored until March 29, 2017.

They released me from SHU and placed me in the “Close Supervision Unit” (CSU) absent any notice or due process procedure. At the surface, prisoners are treated like all other prisoners, go to school, programs, recreation, etc., as all other prisoners. But they are scrutinized more closely, searched more often, and, I imagine, reported on more frequently.

I intend to file a FOIL request for all documents regarding the unit and the arbitrary and capricious decision to place me in the CSU. Once I get the documents, I’ll file a grievance to exhaust administrative remedies and proceed with a petition in the Court.

Still haven’t received my property, hopefully by the end of the week at the latest.

Revolutionary Love and Unity,
Jalil

In the Spirit of Nelson Mandela
in Apartheid NYS Prison System!

Please take the time to write to Jalil and let him know he is in our hearts and on our minds.

Anthony J. Bottom #77A4283
Shawangunk C.F.
P.O. Box 700
Wallkill, NY 12589–0700

My newest beta reader is a COINTELPRO prisoner

UPDATE: We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again. He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people. I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

In previous blog posts I wrote about a visit to Attica prison and my conversation with Jalil Muntaqim, a member of the Black Panther Party who was swept up in the COINTELPRO prosecutions/persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1970s and has been incarcerated since 1973.

During our visit in April, we were talking about our writing and my husband brought up, a little to my chagrin, my novel, The Price We Paid, and suggested that Jalil’s opinion on it was worth having.

Now, the thing is, my main character, Islam Goldberg-Jones is a political prisoner incarcerated for three decades for a crime he did not commit. Even though the fascist Christian Republic government has fallen by the end of the novel, he remains in jail because the federal judiciary remains filled with Christian Republic appointees. I actually had in mind COINTELPRO prisoner Leonard Peltier when I subjected Iz to life in prison. (I had this fantasy that if the novel were published I would follow up with a novella or short story that frees Iz on the condition that Obama pardon Peltier—but it looks unlikely at this point that the book will be published while Obama is still in office.)

So, I never thought I’d have the chance to have an actual COINTELPRO prisoner read the novel and offer suggestions—and he was someone I did not know well to boot, always a bonus in a beta reader. (People most willing to read your manuscripts are usually people who like you, and they will try to be objective, but they will also always cut you a little slack.)

Within a few days of his receiving my manuscript, I had Jalil’s first letter. It was exactly the sort of critique that any writer hopes to receive from a reader, one that shows the reader has read the manuscript carefully, noticed gaps in logic, and sees ways that it can be improved. He followed it with two more letters containing some afterthoughts—again, gratifying to the writer, because it shows the novel has stuck with the reader.

The flaw he pointed out that I most want to remedy was the omission of how the African slave trade, 400 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow etc would have fed into the rise of the Christian Republic theocracy—even though the people participating in the government, including people of color, might not understand this history.

Additionally, he wrote

As you may recall, I mentioned there was an absence of the African diaspora experience and how it shaped the U.S. existence. What I failed to mention as a method for you to include this dynamic is the reality of how the slave trade miscegenation created a New Afrikan. The Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Mandigo, Mandika, etc. etc. were chained, shackled and brought to the country, denied the right to practice their indigenous religions (Yoruba, Islam, Animism, etc.) were told to Christianize their names, not permitted to read or write, until they were integrated into the Christian religion, soon being allowed to read the Bible and Christian literature, etc. until they were able to have Black Christian churches and other forms of worship. This method of creating a New Afrikan, including Native American and European DNA in the Afrikan bloodline, wrapped in the Christian belief system was an important plan/procedure to domicile these Africans, which lead to the U.S. becoming an international economic power.

So this has given me the idea to go back to the Ralph section, when he is meeting the young people from all the various youth groups in the DC area to plan public witnesses that are veiled critiques of the government, and having one of them be a New Afrikan youth group, who view Christianity as a slave religion. I was thinking that Jerry, Ralph’s boyfriend, could become fascinated by the New Afrikan kids and interested in that history. Hank, on the other hand, devout African Methodist Episcopal Zion member that he is, would frown on this talk, and that could increase the sense of alienation that Ralph begins to feel towards Hank, who has been a mentor and father figure to him.

Last summer, I wrote about the pleasure of revising future Canadian history in the manuscript after my colleague Jim Loney read it. I will feel some of the same pleasure incorporating Jalil’s suggestions, especially since Iz and most of the people in my novel’s resistance movement are people of color.

So I was even more apologetic than I would have been ordinarily that it took me so long to respond to Jalil’s letters. I noted that I was feeling a little overwhelmed by my CPT work, and had been unable to do writing that really fed me for more than a month (more about this in a future post.) He wrote back that it was good to take time away from CPT work to deal with my needs and mentioned that his comrade in the struggle, Safiya Bukhari had died too young because she had not taken care of herself. (It feels weird to receive comfort and encouragement from someone who is locked up in Attica while I am living a suburban lifestyle in Rochester, NY.) I googled Bukhari and really wish she was still around. She sounds awesome. And she was a year older than I am when she died.

In a couple weeks, Jalil will be face a parole hearing for the eighth time. It is my great hope that justice will prevail and he will be able to leave prison and sit down to the family dinner his mother wants so much. If not, I am going to adjust my fantasy. If I manage to sell this book I will suggest, as part of the marketing, that I will follow up with a short story or novella about Iz leaving jail, on the condition that all of the COINTELPRO prisoners receive a pardon.

Dreams are free, right?

Why aren’t the COINTELPRO prisoners free already? My visit with Jalil Muntaqim in Attica

Attica prisoner from COINTELPRO era to face eighth parole hearing in June

The release of Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary this winter once again drew attention to the conspiracies of COINTELPRO, a program devised by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that sought to discredit and destabilize minority empowerment and self-defense groups like the NAACP, Black Panthers and American Indian Movement— sometimes to the point of assassinating members of their leadership.
The false evidence and prosecutorial misconduct used to convict high profile COINTELPRO prisoners such as Leonard Peltier is a matter of public record. But J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI also framed dozens of lesser known individuals such as Attica inmate Jalil Muntaqim (formerly Anthony Bottom) who, like Peltier, are still in jail decades after the Church Committee held hearings in 1975 exposing this misconduct.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Muntaqim on April 9, 2014 at Attica State Prison. The problem with the Church Committee hearings, he told me, was that they never proposed a remedy for the activists imprisoned by the unethical conduct of the law enforcement officers during the COINTELPRO years.

Among the irregularities in his own prosecution for the murder of two police officers in 1971 included a colleague tortured with a cattle prod and needles in his testicles to get him to testify against Muntaqim and Herman Bell both of whom were convicted of the killings. When he told the judge he was testifying only because of torture, the judge informed the prosecutor that the witness had revealed this information to him, but did not share the information with the defense. Muntaqim also knows that tapes exist of Hoover, Nixon, H.R. Haldemann, John Ehrlichman, and Mark Felt (of Watergate’s Deep Throat fame) deciding to solve the shootings of the police officers (under the code name NewKill) by setting up Muntaqim and his codefendants, but his lawyer has not been granted access to those tapes. During his trial, ballistics expert George Simmons matched a gun that Muntaqim had carried in California to the bullet that killed the police officers and testified that he was the only person who had examined this ballistics evidence. Years later, Muntaqim’s defense team found out that an FBI ballistics expert had examined the gun and the bullet and determined they were not a match. This information was also withheld from the defense. In the 1980s, three months after Muntaqim’s lawyer filed a petition for a new trial based on this new evidence, someone removed the gun and the ballistics report from the locker in New York where they had been stored.

The parole board, largely made up of ex-law enforcement personnel, has denied Jalil Muntaqim parole seven times. The first six times, they did so because he did not express remorse (this stipulation is a glitch in the system for all who take plea bargains to avoid the hazards or costs of a trial or prisoners who are wrongly convicted: they must express remorse for crimes they did not commit.) For the seventh time, because his eighty-year-old mother wants so much for the whole family to sit down for a meal together before she dies, he decided to say, “Okay, I did it,” and express remorse. The parole board then denied him parole because he had lied about committing the crime the previous six times.

Jalil Muntaqim has another parole hearing coming up in June. He has 750 letters testifying to his good character and his rehabilitation. Included among those is a letter from the family of one of the slain police officers who wrote of Muntaqim and Herman Bell, “If they did it, we forgive them. But we have serious concerns about whether they are the ones.” Muntaqim will argue the precedent set by Silman v. Travis that if remorse and rehabilitation are the only relevant factors for a parole board to make decision regarding his release, the members of the board cannot make up reasons to keep him in jail.

Aside from wanting to grant his mother’s wish, he also thinks he could do more on the outside to keep young people out of jail. “I’m wasted here,” he told me. “I feel like I’m that Dutch boy with all ten fingers and toes in the dike.”

From a justice perspective, however, Mr. Muntaqim’s plans for the future are beside the point. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was a stain on our constitution and disreputable era in our law enforcement history. The people it sent to prison should be set free.

Kathleen Kern, from Rochester, NY has worked for the human rights organization Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993, serving on assignments—and advocating for political prisoners—in Haiti, Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the U.S. and Canada.

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