Tag: cointelpro

Trial of Accused Tupac Shakur Murderer Brings to Light Police Coverup

On August 31, Duane “Keffe D” Davis was convicted of first-degree murder for his role in the death of famed rapper Tupac Shakur 30 years earlier.

Prosecutors argued that Davis and his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, “went hunting” for Shakur after Anderson was in a fight with him and his entourage at the MGM Grand following a Mike Tyson boxing match, Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal said.

According to Palal, Davis led the charge through his role as a “shot caller” for the Southside Compton Crips and, ultimately, was driven by self-interest in his statements.

The defense countered by saying that the evidence tying Davis to Tupac’s killing was inconclusive and that the prosecution had not presented documentation to show that Davis was even in Las Vegas at that time.

Evidently the jury did not believe this. But regardless of whether Davis was involved in the murder in some capacity, he is a small fish compared to some of the big players who were involved in Tupac’s murder, which appears to have been orchestrated at higher levels.

Like other Black artists, Tupac was a target of offshoots of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation.

He came from a radical family linked to the Black Power Movement and was considered a threat to revitalize the spirit of that movement, especially because his rap songs adopted subversive anti-establishment messaging.

The FBI, at the behest of ruling U.S. elites, deliberately provoked internecine conflict among Black rappers and groups that, if united, could have potentially mobilized Black youth in a political direction and away from the gang violence that has helped to devastate the Black community along with neo-liberal economic policies that have affected them disproportionately, racialized policing and the War on Drugs, which has spawned a new Jim Crow.

Tupac himself had expressed admiration for the Black Panther Party—the central target of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and early 1970s, and believed that he was a target of COINTELPRO.

Short for Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO was an FBI program instituted in the 1950s to covertly disrupt radical political organizations in the United States. The program is also known to have targeted artists and musicians, as well as non-violent political dissidents.

In former Black Panther Lee Lew Lee’s 1996 film All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond, FBI agent whistleblower Wes Swearingen, CIA whistleblower Phil Agee, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark detailed how U.S. intelligence operations such as the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program, murderously targeted The Black Panther Party (excerpted in Drugs as Weapons Against Us 1:00:30- 1:57).

Agent Swearingen stated fellow agents told him that their FBI CounterIntelligence (COINTELPRO) was “officially” closed in 1971 but these activities continued at least until 1995, under different names. These activities in turn are thought to be connected to Shakur’s 1996 death.[1]

According to U.S. intelligence researcher John Judge, “there’s quite a bit of evidence that has come out over the years about the surveillance of [Shakur]. Apparently there were people that were surveilling him at the time of his murder that were never questioned by police.”

U.S. Intelligence and the Black Panther Shakur Family

Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was a section leader of the Harlem Black Panthers, and his stepfather, Dr. Mutulu Shakur (Jeral Wayne Williams), was a founding member of the Republic of New Afrika.

U.S. intelligence unsuccessfully tried to frame Afeni as part of the New York Panther 21, a group of Panthers who were accused of targeting New York police officers and planning terrorist acts. Dr. Shakur was imprisoned for decades, on charges of conspiring to rob a bank (1981 Brinks robbery) and for breaking Assata Shakur from prison.

Tupac’s “Auntie Assata” was imprisoned for purportedly shooting a police officer, while his godfather, Geronimo (Ji-Jaga) Pratt, led the Los Angeles Black Panthers and was falsely imprisoned for decades.

Police shot at Assata while she had her hands raised and shot at Geronimo’s bed as, fortunately, he was sleeping on the floor due to a bad back caused by a Vietnam War injury.

After activists stole documents from an FBI office in 1971, they found that the FBI orchestrated most of these attacks on Black Panthers like Assata and many others under COINTELPRO.

Police Attempted to Murder Tupac Before: Oakland in 1991 and Atlanta in 1993

The New Afrikan Panthers, active in nearly a dozen cities, elected Tupac Shakur as their National Chairman in 1989. Tupac’s music celebrated blackness and gave voice to the frustrations and disillusionment so many black youth faced with the prevailing political-economic system while provoking empathy for the system’s victims.

Tupac continued his activism with his imprisoned stepfather Mutulu Shakur and his Black Panther extended family by helping to spread a truce between the Bloods and Crips gangs from a few areas around Los Angeles to across the country.

There were at least four attempts on Tupac Shakur’s life with police foul play involved before he was murdered at the age of 25 in September 1996.

Several days after MTV released the political song “Trapped” from his solo debut CD in 1991, Oakland police stopped him purportedly for jay-walking, pounded his head against the curb and choked him into unconsciousness.

In Atlanta, Georgia, in 1993, two allegedly off-duty police officers shot at Tupac with a gun they had stolen from an evidence locker.

LA Police Detective: Police Killed Rapper Biggie to Cover up Their Murder of Tupac

An assailant fatally shot Tupac Shakur from another car in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson heavyweight championship boxing match on September 7, 1996.

Six months later, a gunman fatally shot Tupac’s former friend and fellow top rapper Christopher “Biggie/Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in Los Angeles.

After Biggie’s murder, Los Angeles Police Detective Russell Poole said that he found out that his fellow police officers murdered Biggie to distract from their murder of Tupac, trying to make it look like a rap rivalry.[2]

Detective Poole found dozens of his fellow police officers at all levels of Tupac’s last record company, Death Row Records.

When Detective Poole asked his superiors what all those LA officers were doing there, they told him you can call them “trouble shooters or covert agents.”[3]

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Gloria Steinem: The CIA, White Feminism, Intersectionality & COINTELPRO

The obituaries have settled into their shape. Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, dead at ninety-two, a life well lived. Somewhere below the tributes, below the aviator glasses and the Ms. covers, a short paragraph appears. Yes, there was the matter of the CIA. But she addressed it head-on, the paragraph says, and besides, she called the Agency liberal and honorable. That paragraph’s doing quiet work. It’s built so the reader forgives and forgets in the same breath.

We’re not here to withhold or grant forgiveness. We’re here to read the ledger.

The facts aren’t in dispute, and they were never secret. From roughly 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, an operation funded almost entirely by the CIA, whose purpose was to send non-Communist American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to blunt Soviet influence. The money moved through a chain of cutout foundations before it reached her. Ramparts exposed the arrangement in March 1967. Steinem didn’t deny it. She defended it, and said that if she had the choice she’d do it again. Take her at her word. The question that matters isn’t what was in her heart. The question is what the state was buying, and what it was destroying at the same time.

Because there’s a second column in this ledger, and the tributes never print it.

While the CIA was underwriting a liberal, gender-first, anti-Communist internationalism through people like Steinem, the same state was running COINTELPRO. That program operated from 1956 to 1971, and its Black nationalist directive, opened in 1967, named the goal plainly in Hoover’s own memos: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the movement. This wasn’t surveillance in the abstract. It was Fred Hampton dead on his mattress in December 1969 in a raid coordinated with the FBI. It was the systematic gutting of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It was Assata Shakur driven into exile and Angela Davis put on trial for her life. Reach further back and the pattern holds. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist who in 1949 theorized the superexploitation of Black women, the triple burden of race and class and sex decades before the vocabulary caught up, was deported by that same state in 1955.

Set the two columns side by side. One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets.

Both statements are literal. This is what we mean when we say the state has a revealed preference. You don’t need to prove that any single person engineered anything. You only need to read what was resourced and what was repressed.

This is where the hagiography’s favorite complaint collapses. Mainstream liberal feminism is often faulted, correctly, for abstracting gender away from class and race, for treating the boardroom ceiling as the frontier while the floor gave way underneath poor and colonized women. The usual explanation is intellectual immaturity, a movement that simply hadn’t yet learned to think in more than one variable. That’s a comforting story, and it’s false. The analysis existed the entire time. It was never missing from feminism. It was carried by the tradition the state was busy dismantling.

Claudia Jones named the interlocking structure in 1949. Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy in 1969 out of SNCC, and the Third World Women’s Alliance built organization around it. The National Black Feminist Organization formed in 1973. The Combahee River Collective, in 1977, stated it as flatly as it’s ever been stated, that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that a politics adequate to Black women’s lives had to confront race and class and sex and sexuality at once. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the framework its legal name, intersectionality, in 1989. None of this was a late correction to feminism. It was feminism’s most rigorous line, developed in real time, by the women the funding never found.

So the class-blindness of the feminism that got the CIA’s money and the magazine covers isn’t an accident of the calendar. It’s downstream of a choice. The currents that insisted on class and empire were the currents the state spent a decade and a fortune trying to break. What remained, what could be safely elevated, was a feminism that named patriarchy but left the ownership question alone. The single-axis frame wasn’t the movement’s growing pain. It was, in part, the movement’s survivors, the ones permitted to survive.

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Secret COINTELPRO Plot to Infiltrate and Destroy the American Indian Movement: “We Wanted Them to Kill Each Other”—FBI Agent Admits After Five Decades of Silence

February 27 through May 8 marks the 50th anniversary of the occupation by the American Indian Movement (AIM) of Wounded Knee on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the site of the last great massacre of the Indian Wars in December 1890.

In a 2019 documentary that aired on PBS, From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A Reporter’s Journey, filmmaker Kevin McKiernan interviewed Tom Parker, an FBI agent working for the FBI’s counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO), who admitted that the FBI had helped to fracture and disrupt AIM during its 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.

“[W]e wanted them to kill each other, as we were in a war against AIM,” Parker said.

According to Parker, a main goal of COINTELPRO was to infiltrate informers into AIM and to publicly identify AIM activists with the FBI so that others in AIM would turn against them.

In this way, Parker said, dissension would grow among AIM, and AIM members would become paranoid about FBI infiltration and turn against one another, and there would be violence.

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Aretha Franklin and the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)

“Queen of Soul” cited in 270 pages of documents declassified by the FBI as they pursued Black revolutionary and communist influences in political and cultural life during the 1960s and 1970s

On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942, Aretha came to Detroit in 1946 with her parents, vocalist Mrs. Barbara Siggers Franklin and Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a well-known minister who originated in the Delta region of Mississippi. Franklin became a minister while he was a teenager in Mississippi.

Rev. Franklin was recruited to come to Detroit from Buffalo, New York in late 1945 and in subsequent years built the New Bethel Baptist Church into an internationally recognized religious institution located on Hasting Street on the eastside of Detroit. The community surrounding the church was later targeted in the late 1950s and early 1960s for demolition in a so-called “urban renewal” project fostered by the then City of Detroit government and the Federal Highway Administration based in Washington, D.C.

By the early 1960s, Detroit was seething with discontent over the massive displacement of more than 100,000 people from the lower east side communities known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Many small businesses, social clubs, churches and as well as thousands of homes were destroyed by the racist white city administration.

New Bethel relocated on Linwood Avenue in the Virginia Park District on the west side in the Spring of 1963. This was the same year of the massive “Walk to Freedom” down Woodward Avenue on June 23. The demonstration was the largest civil rights manifestation in the United States and would set the stage for the “March on Washington” just two months later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was led by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Albert Cleage of the Central Congregational Church, also located in the Virginia Park District on Linwood Avenue, among other community and labor leaders.

Rev. Franklin was heavily involved with the SCLC as a board member and fundraiser. Dr. King and his organization, in which he served as president, were subjected to intense spying and disruption efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with segregationist southern state governments bolstered by law-enforcement agencies and business interests.

Aretha Franklin often traveled with her father during the 1950s in his highly popular gospel tours throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. By 1960, Aretha had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. Later in 1967, she switched to Atlantic Records where her first album catapulted the soul artist to the top of the charts.

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Before They Assassinated Him This Black Panther United All Races Against The ‘Elite’

At the young age of just 21 years old, this Black Panther leader managed to pull off what many at the time considered to be impossible — uniting different races and seemingly opposed political groups in common cause against the ruling class.

Some say this is the true reason why he was assassinated.

Sadly, very few people today know who Fred Hampton really was, what he truly stood for, and how he was brutally assassinated. In this blog I will not be exploring the complexity and exceptional integrity of this man’s character in detail, since I believe he is deserving of a much more meticulous write up than I can offer at this time. Nonetheless, I would like to share his transcendent message of unity and solidarity to help remind everyone who the real enemy is. Please feel free to take and share any of these quotes from this article. His message is extremely important.

Rising quickly within the ranks of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, under Fred Hampton’s leadership they were feeding more hungry children free meals than ever before through the BPP Free Breakfast Program. The group also offered free healthcare to those in need; safe transportation for the elderly and they provided education to children and adults on subjects like political science, and other relevant topics, that were (and still are) sorely lacking from government controlled education. Perhaps most controversial, but well known today, is that they also had patrol units that would police the police, and ensure the cops were not violating anyone’s constitutional rights.

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