Note: This article represents the political thinking of Jalil A. Muntaqim, and is not a joint statement from the San Francisco 8.

The question is often asked why the government is prosecuting 8 alleged former members of the Black Panther Party ranging from age 70 to 56 for the death of a police officer 36 years ago. In January 2006, the S.F. 8 were charged with an armed assault on a police station resulting in the death of a police officer. What is not readily known is that in 1975 these charges had been brought against three former Panthers, of which one is again being accused, and those charges were dropped because the prosecution failed to inform a grand jury that information given them was due to the accused having been tortured. New Orleans police officers conducted the torture with the explicit consent of S.F. police officers investigating the alleged police station attack.

Since 1975, there has been no new evidence or information, including the absence of DNA, tainted latent fingerprint evidence, lost weapons and ballistic evidence, tortured and coerce confessions, lost FBI tape recordings, police cover-ups and perjured testimony. So, the question must be asked what is the judicial system trying to prove by disrupting the lives of 6 of the 8 who had been living peaceful family lives for over 25 years? It must be acknowledge that one of the eight have been completely dismissed from the case, having only been charged with conspiracy, a charge that has been dismissed against 5 of the accused, so only seven are now being prosecuted. Given the weakness of the prosecution’s case, it must therefore be held that the purpose for the prosecution of these men is political. Thus, we are required to look at this judicial process as a part of political system in a governmental pogrom to repress dissent, to racism and domestic police/military repression that is being codified into law.

In this regard, these musings will address the mass and popular movement on how it must be directed toward an overall political understanding of the various aspects of the judicial process, the police, court and prisons, and their functions in a corporate capitalist social structure. The demystification of the judicial system provides the mass and popular movement with an understanding of how the masses are controlled, and manipulated by the courts, congress, and legislative bodies of the corporate-government for the benefit of corporate monopoly-capitalists. As poverty begets crime and social change, it is imperative that the judicial process is reveal as an instrument of controlling the masses along lines of class divisions and national oppression. As in a Spring 1964 speech to activist by El Hajj Malik Shabazz:

Most U.S., Inc. [2] laws serve the continued morass of national oppression and class exploitation, as the police, courts and prisons preserve the system of domestic monopoly-capitalist domination, and prohibit the possibility of revolutionary social change. It is imperative that progressive and revolutionary forces expose how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense and the various branches of the military serve to maintain corporate capitalism-imperialism. In this way, it will be exposed how various branches of the judiciary creates laws which undermine equal justice and uphold the existing system of national and class oppression. This should not be a surprise when considering the FBI’s memorandum of August 25, 1967 describing the purpose and intent of Cointelpro:

In another internal FBI memorandum of March 9, 1968, it proposed neutralizing those who promoted fundamental changes challenging socio-economic conditions confronting poor and oppressed communities. The memorandum specifically encouraged neutralizing New Afrikan youths, stating: “Negro youths and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” The history of domestic civil and human rights violations by the FBI and U.S. military has been deliberately hidden from the American population, as it was from 1966 to 1975 when the Black Panther Party was a principle target. For example, Americans are unaware of the extent to which the religious pacifist and civil rights leader, Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., was a target of the FBI, other U.S. intelligence agencies and Military Intelligence Group. The U.S. Senate Church Committee Report of 1976, titled, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, informs: [T]he “neutralization” program continued until Dr. King’s death. As late as March 1968, FBI agents were being instructed to neutralize Dr. King because he might become “a messiah” who could “unify, and electrify the militant Black Nationalist movement, if he were to abandon his ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace Black Nationalism.” Steps were taken to subvert the “Poor People’s Campaign” which Dr. King was planning to lead in the spring of 1968. Even after King’s death, agents in the field were proposing methods for harassing his widow, and Bureau officials were trying to prevent his birthday from becoming a national holiday. [3]

However, since September 11, 2001, a series of laws has legalized what had been unconstitutional police, FBI and U.S. military domestic activities. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activists opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal corporate government has passed new laws broadening the Patriot Act. Specifically, these new laws severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent, as for example, the October 17, 2006, signing of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007. In a private Oval Office ceremony, the president signed the bill that permits his office to declare a public emergency and station troops anywhere in America, taking control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to suppress public disorder. On this same day, the president signed the Military Commission Act of 2006, that allows for torture and detention abroad, as Section 1076 titled, Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies, essentially puts in place the mechanism for the implementation of “martial law” according to Section 333, which states:

Most recently, 404 U.S. House Representatives passed HR 1955 titled, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which in the series of bills has substantiated the means and method for the application of martial law. This latest initiative establishes a crime for the promotion of ideological terrorism, and Section 899D creates a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States under the auspices of th Department of Homeland Security. All of these laws severely erode the U.S., Inc. constitution, violate civil and human rights, and project and promote martial law and a fascist police state agenda.

Domestically, the police, courts and prisons are the primary institutions of repressing the aspirations of human rights the mass and popular movement seeks to achieve, prisons being the last rung in the ladder of judicial coercion. Hence, the mass and popular movement must demand:

In this way, the functioning of the judicial process is inequitable, indicating how most laws serve to suppress the will of the masses' aspirations for freedom, and underlines that the police, courts and prisons are repressive coercive bureaucracies of corporate monopoly-capitalism. Ultimately, this understanding will demystify the judicial process, and broaden a mass and popular consciousness to become fearless when confronting the State. [4] The martyred Black Panther Party Field Marshall, George Jackson, advised that:

Unfortunately, the majority of young New Afrikans do not know their peoples’ history of struggle in this country beyond the civil rights movement. Therefore, they are unable to recount the conditions of heroic struggles as those of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner and the hundreds of slave rebellions pre-civil war. They are unaware of the forced migration of New Afrikans from the South after the civil war because of the Hayes/Tilden compromise and advent of the Klu Klux Klan out of the Confederate Army. They are unable to relate to the history of racist lynching of thousands throughout the South that served to bring the NAACP into existence in 1909, evolving out of the Niagara Movement with its anti-lynching program. They know nothing about the killing of nearly 100 New Afrikans during white racist riots in 1919 in Chicago and New York, or the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma. They do not truly understand how the practice of the Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation gave birth to the civil rights movement, out of which the Black liberation movement was born. It is this history of struggle, and particularly the legacy of struggle represented by the Black Panther Party, that is currently being attack with the persecution of the SF 8.

Hence, it is these concerns that offer reasons why the SF 8 must be supported and the reason why the SF 8 must be victorious, in order to undermine all efforts of the U.S. corporate-government to repress and destroy socio-political movements for true change. In this regards, the SF 8 issued a joint statement that urged their supporters to organize specific objectives:

Reopen COINTELPRO Hearings:

Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

Given these three calls for action and challenges, the SF 8 preserves and extends the history of struggle in which New Afrikans have been engaged despite U.S. corporate-government continued efforts to destroy the legacy of struggle evolving out of the Black liberation movement. However, the San Francisco 8 believes the power of the people will prevail and change is inevitable, once a culture of resistance has been institutionalized in a mass and popular movement. It must be noted that recently Archbishop Desmond Tutu and 5 other Noble Peace Prize Laureates issued an international call demanding all charges against the San Francisco 8 be dropped, and that Herman Bell and Jalil A. Muntaqim be immediately released from prison on humanitarian grounds. Moreover, on November 6, 2007, in a vote eight to none, with one abstention, the City Council of Berkeley, California, issued a resolution demanding all charges against the S.F. 8 be dismissed, as have many national legal and political organizations across the country.

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