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September 14, 2008 - 11:03pm.
Check out this new article by Michael Richardson, who has been doing an excellent series of articles on this case… archived here at opednews.com: http://www.opednews.com/author/author3874.html FBI crime lab chief who withheld evidence from Black Panthers in COINTELPRO case also pilfered lab equipment by Michael Richardson Ivan Willard Conrad was J. Edgar Hoover’s loyalist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory and could be counted on to do Hoover’s bidding. Hoover had a 48-year career with the FBI and created a national police force during his years as director. Conrad was employed at the laboratory from 1934 until his 1973 retirement following Hoover’s death. Hoover relied on men like Conrad to carry out his orders…even when the orders violated the law. Conrad, like the other members of Hoover’s ruling inner circle, knew of the illegal and ruthless behavior under Operation COINTELPRO. After years of chasing Communist spies and mafia gangsters, Hoover turned his attention to domestic political activity in the mid-60’s and ordered agents to “disrupt” the Black Panthers and other “black nationalist” groups. COINTELPRO tactics of “no holds barred” ferocity were diverse, unethical, and often illegal. One of the COINTELPRO weapons was false convictions. Conrad was brought into a COINTELPRO conspiracy to convict two targets of the clandestine operation, the leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska affiliate of the Black Panthers called the Nebraska Committee to Combat Fascism. The case involved the bombing murder of patrolman Larry Minard, a 29-year old father of five, who was instantly killed while examining a suitcase in a vacant building. Minard and seven other officers had been lured to the lethal booby-trap by an emergency call to the police hotline about a woman screaming. It was the tape recording of the deadly call, the voice of a killer, that posed a stumbling block to the conviction of the two Panther leaders, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (then David Rice). The Omaha Special-Agent-in-Charge made an offer to Asst. Chief of Police Glen W. Gates the day of the bombing to examine the tape for clues at the national crime laboratory. Gates, who headed the investigation into Minard’s murder, agreed to an informal, oral report from the Omaha FBI office rather than a formal, forensic analysis that would have to be disclosed at trial. When Conrad got the COINTELPRO memo from the Omaha Field Office recommending the withholding of a lab report on the tape recording he talked with Hoover by phone and noted the FBI director’s answer in a scrawled notation on the memo, “Dir advised telephonically & said OK to do.” Conrad then initialed and dated the memo entry. Gates later sent another memo to Hoover, by way of the Omaha FBI office, asking that no use of the tape be made because it might be “prejudicial to the police murder trial” of Poindexter and Langa. For Gates and Hoover, the conviction of the two Panther leaders was more important than the actual identity of Minard’s killers. Conrad kept his mouth shut, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa never had benefit of the tape recording for their defense. The jury that convicted the two men never heard the voice of the man who called police into the fatal ambush. Both men are serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary and deny any involvement in Minard’s death. Hoover died in May 1972 and several investigations conducted in the following years have provided a partial picture of the scope of deceptions of the COINTELPRO operatives. The Church Committee of the U.S. Senate examined some aspects of COINTELPRO and issued a damning report on the operation. Separately, financial irregularities emerged that pointed to Hoover and his ruling directorate that led to investigation by Attorney General Griffin Bell. In January 1978, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a formal report on the United States Recording Company scandal that managed to snare Conrad. Conrad, a ham radio buff, had been taking electronic equipment for years and stocked his home with $20,000 worth of gadgets and equipment. According to the final report by Attorney General Bell, Conrad could not be prosecuted for the removal of equipment from the lab. “Mr. Conrad took many pieces of electronic recording and amplifying equipment home with him and used them for his own benefit. Mr. Conrad asserted he had the equipment for legitimate purposes. The Department recovered all the equipment, and Mr. Conrad tendered a $1,500 cashier’s check to pay for his use of the equipment.” The Justice Dept. report continued: “No further action has been taken against Mr. Conrad. Prosecution was barred, in the judgement [sic] of the Criminal Division, by the statute of limitations and because of the lack of evidence showing criminal intent on the part of Mr. Conrad.” While Conrad was able to escape prosecution, the ‘Omaha Two’ have been languishing in prison unable to get attention to the unjust trial that convicted them. A 15-year old, Duane Peak, confessed to the killing of Minard but said Poindexter and Langa helped him. Peak also claimed to have made the call that Conrad withheld a report about. The voice on the tape does not sound like a 15-year old. Eventually local authorities destroyed the original tape recording but in 1980 a copy made by a police dispatcher emerged. Although Langa appealed about the tape, it had not been subjected to independent vocal analysis and his case was denied. In 2006, Poindexter was able to have the tape examined by vocal expert Tom Owen and it was determined that Peak did not make the murderous phone call leaving an unidentified killer on the loose. Poindexter has a new trial request pending before the Nebraska Supreme Court. Oral argument is scheduled for October. No date for a decision has been announced. Permission granted to reprint Authors Bio: Michael Richardson is a freelance writer based in Boston. Richardson writes about politics, election law, human nutrition, ethics, and music. Richardson is also a political consultant on ballot access.
Capitol Hill Blue's columnists, blogs and reader comments Capitol Hill Blue is an independent, non-partisan news site that belongs to no political party and subscribes to no political or philosophical point-of-view. Our columnists are welcome to their opinions but readers should understand that their views do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of this web site. We also welcome comments to selected opinion columns and in our popular ReaderRant discussion forum. Please remember, however, that we believe in civility on this web site and comments may be reviewed, moderated or removed if we feel they contain obscenities, racism, bigotry, anti-Semitic remarks or attack other posters. Our goal is reasoned discussion on issues facing this nation and we do not feel that goal is served by personal attacks and by seeing how many cute adjectives you can attach to an elected official or politician's name. Copyright © 2008 Capitol Hill Blue
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This is a great essay by
Submitted by HansBennett on September 15, 2008 - 12:57am.This is a great essay by Ward Churchill giving some more background on the case:
Wages of COINTELPRO Still Evident in Omaha Black Panther Case
by Ward Churchill
ZNET - 3/10/99
In 1980, former FBI Director L. Patrick Grey and Edward S. Miller, one-time head of Squad 47, the domestic counterintelligence unit in the FBI's New York Field Office, were convicted of having "conspired to injure and oppress the citizens of the United States." The context of their crimes was COINTELPRO, a secret, nationwide campaign conducted by the Bureau from 1956-1971 for purposes of destroying "politically objectionable" organizations and individuals through any and every means available to it.In 1975, an invesigating committee headed by Senator Frank Church found that the operation had, from start to finish, be "fraught with illegality."
Neither Grey nor Miller ever spent a day in jail as a result of their convictions. In April 1981, President Ronald Reagan interupted their appeals to announce that he was bestowing pardons on both men. The reason stated was that their miseddeds had occurred during an especially turbulent and divisive period in American history. It was time to "put all this behind us," Reagan said, and "to forgive those who engaged in excesses" during the political conflicts of the era.
At the time, it was pointed out that if this were to be Reagan's policy, it would be at least as appropriate for him to pardon the numerous victims of COINTELPRO as to forgive its perpetrators. We noted how the Church Committee had discovered that a COINTELPRO technique had been to use the courts to "neutralize" selected activists by obtaining false convictions against them, that the FBI typically involved local police in such endeavors, and that of all the groups targeted in this manner the Black Panther Party (BPP) had been hit hardest and most extensively.
No action was take by the Reagan administration in this connection, however, and former Panthers continued to serve time, many of them in cases showing clear signs of COINTELPRO manipulation. It would be another decade before the first such prisoner, a once prominent New York BPP leader named Dhoruba bin Wahad (Richard Moore), was finally released after spending 21 years behind bars on a wrongful conviction. His case is instructive.
In 1989, it was conclusively established that the prosecution, with the active collaboration of Miller's Squad 47, had withheld exculpatory ballistics reports during the 1973 trial in which bin Wahad was found guilty of attempting to murder two police officers. It was also shown that members of Squad 47, working with detectives from the NYPD Red Squad, had suborned perjury from the state's star witness. The FBI had repeatedly denied the existence of documents confirming these facts for a dozen years (1975-87), thereby thwarting bi Wahad's right to appeal. The conviction was finally overturned in 1990.
Similar circumstances attend the case of Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, former head of the Panthers' Los Angeles chapter. Charged in 1970 with a 1968 murder in Santa Monica, Pratt always maintained that he was 350 miles away at the time, attending a BPP meeting in Oakland. At trial he argued that, since the FBI had bugged the meeting, its electronic surveillance logs would verify his whereabouts, and thus his innocence. An FBI official then took the stand and denied that any such surveillance had occurred.
Years later, after the Church Committee confirmed that the surveillence had in fact been conducted, the FBI rather implausibly claimed to have "lost" the relevant logs. Nonetheless, Pratt's conviction was not overturned until 1997, when it was proven that Julio C. Butler -- the state's star witness and, unknown to the jury, a paid FBI informant -- had perjured himself on key points. By then, Pratt had served 27 years.
This case is especially illuminating in that a career FBI agent, M. Wesley Swearingen, has testified that Pratt was deliberately framed by the FBI as part of its campain to destroy the Black Panther Party. Swearingen's testimony corroborates to a significant extent an earlier account provided by Louis Tackwood, at one time an informant paid by the PAPD Red Squad to infiltrate the Los Angeles BPP chapter. According to Tackwood, Red Squad detectives and FBI COINTELPRO personnel simply sat down one afternoon with a stack of unsolved case files, looking for the murder with which Pratt might be most feasibly charged. They then orchestrated appropriate "evidence" and had him prosecuted.
Currently, attention is shifting to still another case involving former Black Panthers and bearing the indelible imprint of COINTELPRO. From its inception, the allegation that one-time Omaha BPP leaders Mondo we Langa (David Rice) and Edward Poindexter were involved in the 1970 murder of Police Officer Larry Minard has been strained. Duane Peak, the only person known for certain to have particupated in the bombing that killed Minard, mentioned neither man in his original confession. Nor did he in his second, more detailed statement to the police. Indeed, he testified at a preliminary hearing that Rice and Poindexter were not involved. Meanwhile, Peak had named six other men, none of them active BPP members, and none of them ever charged. His story changed only after prosecutors offered him a deal in which he could plead as a juvenile -- thereby serving only two years -- in exchange for incriminating the local BPP leadership.
Rice and Poindexter were convicted in April 1971, mainly on the basis of Peak's testimony. There is ample indication he perjured himself. As to physical evidence supporting Peak's account, a federal court ruled in 1974 that the search through which it was allegedly found was illegal (a matter admitting to the possibility that it was planted, as Rice has insisted all along). A new trial was ordered at that time, but prevented by a jurisdictional technicality applied post hoc by the Supreme Court in 1976.
Further appeals were blocked by yet another technicality: the statutory time limit for filing in Nebraska courts had expired while Rice and Poindexter awaited an outcome in the federal process. One result has been severe constraints on their ability to reopen the case in light of FBI documents released in 1978. These reveal that police detectives collaborated with FBI personnel to suppress exculpatory evidence during the 1971 trial.
Such subversion of the judicial process is consistent with the COINTELPRO methods employed against bin Wahad and Pratt, as well as the fact that the Omaha BPP chapter -- Rice and Poindexter in particular -- were targeted for COINTELPRO neutralization in mid-1968. The motive underlying police performance in the Rice/Poindexter case was recently spelled out by Jack Swanson, the detective who headed up the 1970 bombing investigation. "I think we did the right thing at the time," he told a BBC interviewer, "because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from Omaha [after] we got the two main players."
Former Nebraska Governor Frank Morrison has observed that Rice and Poindexter "were convicted for their rhetoric, not for any crime they committed." Amnesty International, the NAACP, Jericho '98 and the Congressional Black Caucus have all taken up the case. Since 1993, the Nebraska Parole Board has voted unanimously and repeatedly to commute both men's sentences to time served. Yet, to date, the Nebraska Board of Pardons has refused to schedule a hearing in the matter. One Board member has even asserted that there are "no circumstances" under which he would consider commutation.
Simple justice demands reversal of this position. Surely, even if one believes Rice and Poindexter were involved in Minard's death, it must be conceded that 28 years of incarceration is sufficient punishment. After all, Nebraska's Board of Pardons commuted the sentence of even the notorious Caril Ann Fugate -- an admitted participant in 11 murders -- after less than 20 years. Moreover, the fact that Rice and Poindexter were denied the due process rights to which all citizens are and must be entitled leaves a quite reasonable concern that they are innocent of the offense for which they have been imprisoned for more than a quarter-century. Contrary to the sentiment expressed by the Board member quoted above, there are no circumstances in which prolonging the situation is an acceptable option.
Ultimately, and perhaps ironically, Ronald Reagan had it right. By 1981, it was indeed time to forgive those whose offenses, real or perceived, accrued from the sociopolitical vortex of the Vietnam era. Can there be serious doubt that the principle is as applicable to former Black Panthers as to former FBI officials? Anything else would be a travesty of justice, and the country has already witnessed far too many of these.
What is done cannot be undone, but the future can be changed. Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter deserve at this late date not just to be heard but to be free men, reintegrated with and contributing their undeniable talents to their community, participating fully in the ongoing process of healing and reconciliation about which President Reagan spoke so glowingly 18 years ago. Those desiring further information on the Rice/Poindexter case and/or wishing to support their petitions for commutation of sentence should contact:
RichardKanePA I think
Submitted by RichardKanePA on September 15, 2008 - 8:04pm.RichardKanePA
I think imagine a depression without FDR fits in nicely with Han's points,
see,http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/11273
*
PS Hans your blog ended with [and/or wishing to support their petitions for commutation of sentence should contact:]
How about shortening it to leave room for the ending which I am sure must be more important than all of what you managed to post
RichardKane I'm also in PA
RichardKanePA Han's you left
Submitted by RichardKanePA on September 15, 2008 - 9:11pm.RichardKanePA
Han's you left out Mumia being harassed by Couterpro. Perhaps because I might have adding a less then flattering insight, see some of what I think Hans would have liked to post,
http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COIN...
Mumia, Leonard Peltier, and US prisoners especially at Guantanamo don't complain about themselves and others being mistreated in prison, nor do prisoners in Saudi Arabia. But they do in Cuba and Turkey, where they love to complain.
Perhaps this doesn’t mean that Cuba has the worst prisons because it has the most complaining prisoners, but perhaps where they don't complain it's because they might find themselves hanging from a sheet noose in an apparent suicide or spend many years in the hole without any pens or phones around.
RichardKanePA