The USA needs to come clean about past police lawlessness

Police departments across the United States are not doing so well in the public eye. Gunning down unarmed people in the street and Walmart shopping aisles will do that but yet the police and their supporters keep pushing the boundaries of how much the general public will take of their blatant abuses of power. In the past, police could always rely on the local corporate news media to give the “official” story and put whatever spin they like on a story. Today it is not so easy for them to control the narrative as they and their spin doctors are challenged through social media.

If you believe cops are bad now, think about how much they have gotten away with during the Cointelpro years, a period between 1956 and 1971 when the US Justice Department looked the other way as police terrorized, murdered and framed members of Black communities across America because of their political leanings. Some of the victims of racist and fascist police and prosecutors are still suffering in US prisons to this day and while congress did hold the The Church Committee on Cointelpro, Congress has not taken any action to free political prisoners from the decades past.

Former political prisoner Dhoruba bin Wahad who spent 19 years in prison allegedly for trying to kill two cops until he was able to show the FBI as in many cases, withheld evidence from his defense and was able to obtain his freedom. Dhoruba bin Wahad has been pushing the international community to pressure the United States to release its many political prisoners who were targets of the FBI’s illegal activities to suppress political movements within the Black community.

In a recent interview Dhoruba bin Wahad spoke about appeals to the United Nations over the issue,

“I and other representatives of Black Political Prisoners will be in Geneva for this occasion. I should caution against spreading over-optimism or misleading anticipations of US government’s response, if any. The pitfalls of opportunism and reactionary politics are always present so we can claim no certain victories just yet. It was the racist and deceptive brutality of America’s law enforcement establishment that was deployed against the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the sixties.

COINTELPRO and similar repressive programs carried out by the federal government did not initiate and maintain “racial profiling” and a militarized police presence in African-American communities – it was local police departments and local prosecutorial agencies who did the dirty work of infiltration, disruption of grass root activists and who were responsible for controlling the fires of Black rebellion in America.

This is only a beginning of a particular struggle/campaign. The success or limitations of this campaign/initiative can and will be measured in political terms – not by international legal protocols which the U.S. has been known to disregard or flaunt. Indeed, the propaganda value of this initiative will face Western corporate media resistance and without fraternal political liaisons abroad and their relationships to global and national media networks overcoming such resistance alone is problematic at best,”

You can read more about this in an article by Michael Richardson, CointelPro Examiner.