[Cdhrsupport] New Yorkers Come Out in Support of Black Panther 8

[SF-8 case]

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/03/83615.shtml

New Yorkers Come Out in Support of Black Panther 8

By Sam Alcoff


For three hours on Friday night, over 100 activists came out to 
Manhattan's Community Church of New York in support of eight recently 
arrested veteran members of the Black Panther Party. Yet the night 
skipped any mourning or weariness as host Lumumba Bandele of the 
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement quickly pledged both a new wave of 
activism to free these activists as well as a resurgence in the 
movement to free all political prisoners: the crowd's prolonged 
response suggested a willingness to fight.

Bail is set at three million dollars for each of the eight, whose 
ages range from 58 to 71, charged with the 1971 murder of a San 
Francisco Police officer. In 1975, a judge dismissed a case against 
three Panthers after it was revealed that their statements had been 
made following days of severe torture by the New Orleans Police 
Department--under the watchful eye of several government agencies, 
including the FBI. The FBI's "Counter Intelligence Program," known as 
Cointelpro, was a massive operation orchestrated to neutralize 
radical movements, prominently targeting the Black Panthers. 
Officially terminated in 1971, the program ended in a cloud of 
controversy after revelations of the broad illegality of its tactics, 
which ranged from harassment to murder. Activists have long suspected 
that reports of Cointelpro's death have been greatly exaggerated, but 
its seed is still clearly being sowed.

"People need to realize that any pictures [of abuse] that they've 
seen from Abu Ghraib, from Guantanamo, these same things have 
happened to black people in this country," said Gitanjali Gutierrez, 
a lawyer from the Center for Constitional Rights. "We need to 
understand that [the state's] torture is standardized." After 
Gutierrez spoke, the new film Legacy of Torture was shown. Made as 
the grand juries were impanelled, Legacy of Torture features riveting 
testimony of several of the men involved in the case, describing both 
their original persecution and subsequent harassment by the 
government. "The federal government doled out a lot of money after 
9-11 to open up cold cases and here it is being used to continue a 
vendetta against the Black Panther Party, individually and 
symbolically," veteran movement lawyer Bob Boyle told the 
Indypendent. "They are still trying to send the same message to the 
youth, 'that if you succumb to revolutionary teachings, you will 
become a dead revolutionary.'" This is an old warning, but as the 
veterans in the room reminded the audience, activists have 
successfully contested it in the past.

"People want to know about this. I look to our past, to our victories 
and advances. People now understand what a political prisoner is," 
said longtime Jericho Movement NYC activist Lyaluua Ferguson. "[But] 
for too long, we've let them pick the terrain and we've fought back 
in our fragmentary ways. We have to build a machine, a movement to 
stop this from happening again. This is not an intellectual exercise 
or about the harassment of a particular group. We are at war."

The arrested include Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard 
Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Herman Bell, 59, and Anthony Bottom, 55, 
both currently incarcerated in New York state; Henry Watson Jones, 
71, of Altadena; Francisco Torres, 58, of Queens, New York; and 
Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Florida.

Everyone is asked to come support Francisco Torres at his court date 
on March 6, 2007 at 9:30 AM at the Manhattan Criminal Court, Part A, 
at 100 Centre St. in Manhattan.

For more information about the case, go to 
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/panther8.html and 
http://www.cdhrsupport.org/ . For more about the film Legacy of 
Torture, go to http://www.freedomarchives.org/BPP/torture.html


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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