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<h2><font size=4><b>Attorney Robert Bartle on withheld evidence by FBI in
Omaha Two case</b></font></h2>
<ul>
<li><font size=3>October 12th, 2010 11:23 am ET
<li>By <a href="http://www.examiner.com/user-richardsonreports">Michael
Richardson</a>, COINTELPRO Examiner
</ul>Robert Bartle, a Lincoln, Nebraska attorney, represents Ed
Poindexter, an imprisoned Black Panther leader, in his effort to gain a
new trial. Convicted in 1971 for the bombing murder of an Omaha
policeman, Poindexter is serving a life sentence at the Nebraska State
Penitentiary.<br><br>
Poindexter was charged along with Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice)
for the August 1970 murder of Larry Minard who was responding to a 911
call at a vacant house. During their 40 years of imprisonment the
pair have become known as the Omaha Two and are considered political
prisoners by many.<br><br>
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa were targets of J. Edgar Hoover, the
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the focus of
COINTELPRO subterfuge because of their role as leaders of the National
Committee to Combat Fascism. The NCCF group was a Black Panther
affiliate and vocal critics of the police in Omaha. <br><br>
The clandestine Operation COINTELPRO was Hoover’s secret war on domestic
political “enemies” and the Black Panthers were at the center of
attention. Hoover had ordered Paul Young, the Special
Agent-in-Charge of the Omaha FBI office to get the two leaders off the
streets.<br><br>
Hoover had nagged Young since December of 1969 to produce results and had
required the Omaha office to submit reports every two weeks on their
progress toward eliminating the Omaha Two as a political force in the
Midwestern city. When Larry Minard was killed the opportunity
presented itself to blame the two Panther leaders.<br><br>
However, one sticky detail threatened to derail the COINTELPRO plan to
frame the two leaders, the voice of the killer.<br><br>
Minard was lured to a vacant house by an anonymous 911 caller where a
bomb waited. The Omaha Police made a recording of the call
capturing the voice of Minard’s killer. Young needed to get the 911
tape out of the way to build a case against the Omaha Two. The day
of the bombing, Young conferred with Glen Gates, the top police official
in charge of the case and offered to analyze the tape at the national FBI
crime laboratory--but not issue a report on the identity of the
killer,<br><br>
Hoover approved of the plan to let Minard’s killer get away with murder
and Hoover’s order was noted by Ivan Willard Conrad, the FBI crime lab
director, in a handwritten entry on the COINTELPRO memo .Robert
Bartle talks about the significance of Hoover’s influence on the
case. <br><br>
“The whole COINTELPRO operation under the late J. Edgar Hoover’s
administration was unknown to the folks at the time. The whole
COINTELPRO focus on Ed and Mondo…and the efforts to discredit them in the
Omaha community were a separate conspiratorial operation that was not
known to either Ed or Mondo.”<br><br>
“The fact that the tape was withheld from the defense at the time and the
fact that the FBI, under the auspices of the COINTEPRO program, first
offering to do a voice analysis and then retreated from that position
because it might “prejudice the prosecution” we believe is critical
information…that would have likely led to an acquittal in this
case.”<br><br>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMcEilwCDyw">YouTube interview
with Robert Bartle<br><br>
<br>
</a><i>Permission granted to reprint.<br><br>
<br><br>
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