FBI Hunting the Dead: Can John Bowman Ever Rest in Peace?

John Bowman is a former Panther who was arrested in New Orleans in 1973 and was tortured by a task force of law enforcement officers from several jurisdictions. In 2003, some of those same agents came to his home in Oklahoma City and confronted him about an unsolved 1971 police murder in San Francisco. So began a several year journey of resisting interrogations and Grand Jury subpoenas. Shortly after getting out of San Francisco County Jail in October of 2005 for refusing to cooperate in a modern-day COINTELPRO investigation, John was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He persevered and continued to organize resistance along with four other former Black activists, formed the Committee to Defend Human Rights, and educated people about the responsibility to stay true to the precepts of the 10-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. Despite the pain of his illness and the ongoing suffering caused by his 33-year post-traumatic, post-torture pains, John Bowman educated and gave his soul to his people, community and the struggle.

Notwithstanding the innumerable war crimes committed by the neocon thugs, their little enterprise would have come to nothing without the full complicity, not to mention head start, of their "friends across the aisle," the other half of the American War Party. Nor would this glorious and historic moment in US history have been possible without decades of training, of culling the working class into the "volunteer" armed forces, militarizing every nook and cranny of society from children's fashion and toys to the Pentagon-enhanced budgets of all our major universities. Stroll through the "boys" aisle of any local toy store, strewn with plastic tanks and bombers, complete with removable missiles. Pick up a pink camouflage shirt, headband, bookbag, or any of the other items that serve to instill in our children the notion that our ubiquitous warriors are cool and fashionable. We are a culture on the warpath, though culture is a term to be used loosely.

Bush’s inappropriate invasion of Iraq

Get out your beltway dictionaries. It’s time to translate Feith-based intelligence from Pentagonese to plain English. A long delayed three year internal Pentagon review has determined that Douglas Feith orchestrated the deliberate and systematic corruption of pre-war intelligence. As a consequence, the Pentagon's inspector general has rendered the verdict that Feith’s conduct was ‘inappropriate’ but ‘authorized’ and ‘legal.’

An indignant Feith was quick to take exception to the Inspector’s finding. He defended his record of falsifying intelligence as ‘good government.’ The unrepentant Likudnik was quoted as saying "I disagree with the inspector general's opinions here mainly because, if heeded, they would discourage policy officials from asking tough questions about the quality of CIA work." Even in Pentagonese – that spells Chutzpah.

Marching On the Pentagon

The first time I remember going inside the Pentagon was in 1969 when I was 14. My dad was coming back from Vietnam and his next assignment was Germany. For some reason we had to go to the Pentagon for something having to do with our upcoming trip. The thing I remember most was its vastness. It was the largest building I had ever been in. In fact, it remains the largest building I have ever been in. A year or two earlier, I was in the locker room at the junior high I attended in suburban Maryland getting ready for gym class. A friend of mine was talking about his sister coming home from college for the weekend. Apparently, his parents were a little upset because the real reason she was leaving her school in New York was to attend the October 27, 1967 protest against the war in Vietnam at the Pentagon. I asked him what he thought and all he said was that he wished he could go. So did I.

CHIMPS IN A ZOO CAGE

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." – Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If the Bush administration and the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it's an absolute refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most part, each group is an incurious lot -- undead creatures who neither care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated, swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically but do not see -- listen intently but do not hear.

They are very good at what they do.

U.S. diplomat William Walker concurred during his mission to verify Serbian (Yugoslav) war crimes. "From what I saw," Walker said, "I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity. Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."

The Men the Authorities Came to Blame: The San Francisco 8

I recently reviewed a DVD about a group of Black Panthers who were tortured in 1973 by New Orleans police during interrogations regarding the murder of a San Francisco police officer in 1971. The DVD, titled Legacy of Torture, highlights the stories of some of these men and their experience at the hands of the police interrogators while law enforcement officials from other local and federal agencies stood by. A federal court ruled in 1974 that both San Francisco and New Orleans police had engaged in torture to extract a confession, and a San Francisco judge dismissed charges against three men in 1975 based on that ruling. The case was reopened in 2003 by the US Department of Justice using funds set aside for the Department of Homeland Security. Several grand juries were convened as part of the reinvestigation, with some of the men involved in the 1973 torture being called before the panel more than once.

Making an Example of Ehren Watada

The people running the Iraq War are eager to make an example of Ehren Watada. They've convened a kangaroo court-martial. But the man on trial is setting a profound example of conscience - helping to undermine the war that the Pentagon's top officials are so eager to protect.

"The judge in the case against the first US officer court-martialed for refusing to ship out for Iraq barred several experts in international and constitutional law from testifying Monday about the legality of the war," the Associated Press reported.

While the judge was hopping through the military's hoops at Fort Lewis in Washington State, an outpouring of support for Watada at the gates reflected just how broad and deep the opposition to this war has become.

Forgotten February (A brief peek at America's unrestrained brutality)

Just in case anyone needs reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February's Files:

February 1898
In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.

February 15, 1898 was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption-this one deafening and massive-splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air."

The Ubiquitous Sprawls of America

Once when I was touring Denmark my friend Jenka was visiting Europe at the same time. I picked her up at the airport and we headed into Copenhagen. As we were approaching the city, she got excited. “Wow,” she said, “it’s like a constant Critical Mass bike ride!”

As we wait at traffic lights at major intersections we passed through, the traffic passing by ahead of us generally includes a few cars and a lot of bicycles and pedestrians. Bike paths are as common as streets, and most people of all walks of life get around town by bicycle. Trains and buses full of passengers traverse the city, and you rarely have to wait long for the next one. Each neighborhood has a commercial center with shops, cafes, public spaces and streets off-limits to cars altogether. Most people live bicycling distance from where they work. Like so many European cities, it is a place that seems to have been designed for people. People like it that way and, to a huge extent, they keep it that way.

Resisting Corporate Power in Colombia

CHOMSKY: Tabaco was an Afro-Colombian village in the northernmost Guajira province. It was the largest of a network of small indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages, the only one with paved roads, a school, a post office, and other government services. In August 2001 this village was violently displaced as part of an expansion project by the Cerrejon coal mine, the largest open-pit coal mine in the world. The mine was then jointly owned by Exxon and a consortium made up of BHP Billiton (an Australian company), Glencore (a Swiss company), and Anglo-American (a British company).

I recently ran across a brief article in one of the daily newspapers here in North Carolina that described an effort by some of this state's legislators to begin an investigation of Aero Contractors and its involvement in the US government's rendition program. As most readers know, this program involves kidnapping, detaining and transporting individuals considered the enemy to prisons around the world where they are then tortured and kept incommunicado for months and years. The legislative effort is but one result of the efforts of a group known as North Carolina Stop Torture Now. What follows is the transcript of an email interview with Raleigh, NC resident and long-time peace and justice activist Christina Cowger, who serves as the group's coordinator.

What I heard on the W Train

I'm standing on the crowded Lexington Avenue subway platform, waiting for either the N or W Train to take me off the island of Manhattan. A drone-like female voice booms over the loudspeaker: "Ladies and Gentlemen, pan-handling is against the law. Please do not give to law-breakers. Please give instead to charities that support those in need. Thank you."

I look around to check for reactions but I get nothing. Poker faces. One might be excused for thinking the people on the platform did not even hear the announcement (those wearing iPod earphones surely haven't). We are being asked-check that-we're being told to not only view desperate humans as law-breakers but also to ignore them. No one flinches.

Google: Disabling the Politically Incorrect

As Raw Story tells us, Google has finally addressed link bombs, attempts to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. Specifically, and apparently embarrassing for the corporation, entering “miserable failure” in the search engine returned George Bush. Vladimir Putin returned “enemy of the people,” a description not too far off the mark.

“While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn’t want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model,” notes Raw Story. However, as we know, in the Bushzarro era, such objectivity is no longer acceptable. Indeed, for a profit-based corporation, it can be deadly.

CHRISTIAN FASCISM: THE JESUS GESTAPO OF ST. ORWELL

New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, has written an extraordinary book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Having survived a Christian fundamentalist background myself, I marvel at the timely urgency of Hedges’ book, but also, at the obtuse disconnect most Americans have with the pivotal thesis of his book: the power of the religious right in the United States to bring forth a nation whose totalitarian repression could dwarf that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. As Hedges notes, we are well on the path toward such a reality, and the Domionist Christian right is a principal player in the process. While the nucleus of that movement is small, measuring only about 1% of evangelicals and led by the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee, those leaders are supported by throngs of evangelicals sympathetic to their theocratic views who dutifully preach the consummate tenet of the movement, submission. Citizens must submit to their government officials, particularly the ones who claim to be born-again Christians and receiving their orders from God; wives must submit to husbands; children must submit to parents; and everyone must submit to the teachings of the bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity or burn in hell. I will herein use the term “Christian fascism” or “Cristo-fascism” as synonymous with a worldview and political philosophy which are both fundamentalist Christian and fascist in nature.