Informants. Informants. Informants.

In the last few weeks, I have written on three cases, and in each, FBI and local law enforcement informants were key witnesses to the prosecution of innocent people. We have a system of justice depending on an industry of informants in uniforms or baggy pants, employed to spy on co-workers and neighbors. It is an industry in which American citizens wearing turbans or caps cocked to the side or three-piece suits spy for profit.

Informants are well paid, and in addition, these informants often receive lenient sentences and special treatment or they are exonerated of their crimes all together. They become chief of security and are hailed as “heroes” when they turn in the name of a suspected “criminal” or “terrorist.” Churches, mosques, street gangs, or families receive passes in exchange for information. But foremost, money is the enticer.

Informants! Applications are always accepted. Criminal Record - No problem. Flexible hours. Immediate employment. Witness protection is available. Pay is excellent!

We are so uniquely democratic, here in the United States.

Iraqis and Afghanis, fearful of the presence of armed desert-camouflaged U.S. soldiers in their neighborhoods, raised their arms and pointed toward a house, toward a young man, toward an Imam. Informants helped the armed, uniformed U.S. troops fill the prisons at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo with people like Dilawar, a taxi driver and farmer, labeled a “terrorist” by his militia capturers and turned over to the U.S. for money. Dilawar is dead, after he was tortured. Dilawar was innocent.

For the securing of democracy - anything is possible!

Here, in the mainland, Anglo-Protestant-Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, German Americans, Eastern-European Americans are proud to speak of their immigrant origins in the formation of the United States. We are a land of immigrants. They fail to remember how Black Americans arrived in the Americas or how the land was occupied by American Indians. Their white ancestors negotiated with Kings and elder African tribesmen who provided information and pointed to the other village, to the outcast, to the captured war prisoner. Their white ancestors captured Native Indians, and in exchange for “freedom” and their lives, these Indians became informants, clearing paths, uncovering villages of unsuspecting kinsmen, women, and children. An enslaved Black wanting to be “free,” reported on the escape plans of John and Jane, and stood behind a bush in a new dress or in a new pair of pants, chewing on a chicken bone, while John or Jane were brutally murdered. In all of these ventures, money changed hands.

The use of informants is a legacy of violence that should have been abandoned long ago. But it lives!

In the land of immigrants, informants provide information on co-workers, neighbors, families, and even friends. Money is exchanged and mothers are separated from their children, young husbands from young wives, fathers from families. Taxpayer money maintains a steady flow of incarcerated and deported immigrants. In the land of immigrants, the old immigrants are hunting down the newest immigrants, the illegals, as they are called now: Mexicans, Haitians, El Salvadorians, and Muslims.

It’s an industry wrapped in the flag and subsidize by the rhetoric of democracy and the neoconservative discourse that assures the American public that they are kept “safe” from “evil,” from tyranny. You need only witness the frightened look of a Mexican child pulled from her mother or hear a Haitian mother calling out the names of her children as she sits in a detention camp.

Recently, I heard Michael Ratners, President of CCR and Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild, and Dalia Hashad, Amnesty International’s Director, USA Programs, Domestic Human Rights, on their WBAI, Law and Disorder radio show on May 4, 2009. What is the topic: FBI surveillance and informants!

A federal judge has ordered the FBI to release 100 documents “detailing the bureau’s surveillance of Muslim leaders and organizations in Southern California.” These documents will include surveillance information on the Council on American Islamic Relations of Greater Los Angeles and its executive director, according the hosts.

An attorney with the ACLU of Southern California says the surveillance records will show how the FBI infiltrated Southern California mosques and invasively monitored members of the Muslim community as if they were criminals.

A 2007 lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California that “claimed the government’s incomplete and long delayed response violated the Freedom of Information Act” resulted in the court’s decision.

Executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, Shakeel Syed, recounted stories of members followed by the FBI. Members were asked to assist the FBI by becoming informants. Resistance was met with threats and intimidation until finally the potential informant is offered the “convenience of getting their naturalization papers expedited or immigration papers duly adjusted.”

Students, particularly those “flipping burgers,” were a prime target for corporation with the FBI in exchange for help with visas and naturalization papers, Syed said. As informants, Muslims are paid in U.S. dollars to appear in mosques to question and report back to the local police department or FBI agents. Muslims who spoke out against the war in Iraq, and who do so now, are “investigated,” and too often, arrested on the words of informants.

President George W. Bush once described camps of Muslims training in tactics of terror! Do we now have here in the U.S. places of employment, mosques, churches, hospitals, neighborhoods of law enforcement and FBI informants training in tactics of terror? I ask, what is the difference between the “terror” of others somewhere else and the “terror” of government-sponsored surveillance programs here - if such “terror” is meant to divide the terrified community members from the fearful, the rough-hewn individual, the enterprising entrepreneur, the good, flag-waving American?

The industry of informants has generated so much money, and most importantly, thousands have been incarcerated, deported, tortured, killed - and this just since 9/11! And do you feel safer? Is democracy secure, yet?

Are you safer with Jamie and Gladys Scott in prison since 1993? These two sisters have been away from their children because of informants!

Their car, unfortunately, ran out of gas on a road in Mississippi. The sisters were on their way to pick up heating oil. It is December, 1993. And the day before Christmas, Jamie, 22, and Gladys, 19, are arrested and charged with armed robbery. On December 1996, the Scott sisters were sentenced to double life sentences - each!

In exchange for lenient sentences for robbing a man of 10-12 dollars, the informants, three blood-related Black men, pointed to the Scott sisters.

You will think that it matters that three men were arrested for the crime? These three men implicated themselves in the crime, but fingered the Scott sisters. That should matter, but it does not because the safety of American citizens is always at stake, right? Because it pays to lie in America, right?

Dedicated Legal Analyst and Grassroots Organizer, Nancy Lockhart, working on behalf of the Scott sisters without pay, discovered affidavits in which the “Patrick Men” later testified to the innocence of the sisters. But security in the little town of Forest, Mississippi is first! The wallet re-appears with the “stolen” money! Interesting, isn’t it! But it does not matter! A trustee in an affidavit testified that a robbery did not take place! Five witnesses have now testified that the Scott sisters are innocent (www.freethescottsisters.com). But Jamie and Gladys still sit behind prison walls because the architect of this narrative of “crime,” Sheriff Melvin Williams, has already paid the informants - and what’s the life of two Black women worth anyway, when the U.S. is engaged in a war to secure democracy?

Informants help get the job done!

Informants within the Nation of Islam, in league with the NYPD and the FBI, reported on every move Malcolm made and helped stage his assassination. Informants within SCLC, working with the FBI and Memphis Police Department, encircled Martin Luther King and evidence reveals their presence near and even on that Lorraine Hotel balcony, April 4, 1968.

How many informants and agent provocateurs were members of the Black Panther Party? Wasn’t William O’Neal, acting as Black Panther security for Fred Hampton, an informant and agent who provided the floor plan of Hampton and Clark’s apartment to the Chicago Police Department?

COINTELPRO and the Black Probe never died. The informant industry is a lucrative business in the U.S., generating employment for law enforcement personnel and the judicial and legal apparatus. The industry generates construction and security contracts for corporations, and, of course, a steady flow of cheap labor.

When the Black Panthers known as the Angola 3 were not held in solitary confinement, they worked as cheap laborers at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola. Hezekiah Brown became a key witness, writes Hans Bennett, in “The Angola Three: Torture in Our Own Backyard,” against Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, two of the three ex-Black Panthers (Robert King was released in 2001). Currently, Bennett writes, Woodfox is “frail” and “sick,” but State Attorney James Caldwell called him the “most dangerous man on the planet.” For the safety of American citizens, Woodfox is in solitary confinement at Hunt Correctional Facility in St. Gabrielo, Louisiana!

[see: http://www.alternet.org/rights/139222/the_angola_three%3A_torture_in_our_own_backyard/]

“Prison officials” withheld evidence from the jury - evidence pointing to “prison officials” who “bribed the prosecution’s key witness, Hezekiah Brown, in return for his testimony,” writes Bennett, another activist working on behalf of justice for Mumia Abu Jamal and the Angola 3, and working without pay. Rachel Morgan, State Judicial Commissioner on September 19, 2006, “recommended overturning Wallace’s conviction” based on this missing evidence. Last year, in May, Morgan’s recommendation was rejected in the State Appeals Court and the court refused to overturn the conviction, writes Bennett.

The informant, Brown, now deceased, was a serial rapist, sentenced to life without parole, writes Bennett. But he was pardoned in 1986! Miracle - in this country! Brown “didn’t know anything,” at first, Bennett writes, “but he later testified to seeing [prison guard Brent] Miller stabbed to death by four inmates,” 2 of the inmates included Woodfox and Wallace. While Brown denied he ever received special favors from prison authorities, prison documents reveal another story. Brown, Bennett writes, received “special treatment, including special housing and a carton of cigarettes given to him every week.” In 1998, at Woodfox’s retrial, “former Warden Murray Henderson admitted telling Brown that if he provided testimony helping to ‘crack the case,’ he would reward him by lobbying for his pardon.”

Pardons, money and power link informants and NARC police officers on the streets of Philadelphia, PA. Maybe this is an example of democracy? “Police smash-and-grab operations, Betsy Piette, in “Philly Cops Target Immigrant Shop Owners”, Workers World, revealed that “shop owners and their family members” were “hauled off to jail on trumped up charges.”

Capitalism is a wonderful system!

This operation began as early as March 2007, writes Piette, who writes without pay, on behalf of our human rights. Do you notice people developing another pattern of behavior toward others?

According to Piette, “Korean, Jordanian, Dominican, and Latina/a bodega and ‘mom-and-pop’ store owners were all subject to these attacks.”

One of the officers involved is Jeffrey Cujdik, who “used a paid informant to lie about drug buys in order to obtain search warrants that led to hundreds of criminal charges targeting Philadelphia’s Black community.” A report in the Philadelphia Daily News, May 6, 2009, by Wendy Rudderman and Barbara Laker, cites CI # 103, Ventura Martinez as the informant who worked [that is, pointing and lying on workers and residents in Philadelphia] with Cudjik for seven years. But, as Piette writes, Officer Cudjik is on desk duty and his “cohorts remain on active duty and have been reassigned to other units.”

An attempt has been made by public defenders to throw the cases out. But who is concerned about these victims, these, as the courts have declared, are drug criminals? So the Fraternal Order of Police’s claim that the shop owners and unsuspecting residents are liars will stand.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Along with FBI and police department informants, there are what I call informal informants - politicians and community leadership - who remain consciously silent, and by their silence, implicate the guilt of the “convicted.” The informal informants are those in community leadership positions and Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow politicians.

President Barack Obama, meeting with the FBI, April 28, 2009, said this:

“The country does not have to become like the terrorists America is fighting in order to be safe.” It does not have to become…to become?

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

We can’t count on President Obama to have a memory of this history of America!

“That is why America,” he said to the FBI, “is unique, because of that fundamental belief.”

A few days before, he assured a major employer of informants, the CIA, that he would look forward! Don’t fear the release of CIA memos that speak of “brutal interrogation techniques.”

Thirty-eight years later, Attorney General of California, Jerry Brown, is still hunting down Black Panthers. Seven former members of the Black Panthers (SF 8) face a preliminary hearing in Superior Court, on Monday, June 8, 2009, according to Ben Terrall writing in the San Francisco Guardian, May 5, 2009. “The defendants are charged in the 1971 death of a local police officer; the charges were initially brought back in 1975, and dismissed when a judge ruled that the central evidence in the case was obtained through torture” www.freethesf8.org.

Of course, torture brings us to “foreign” policy - or maybe not.

Just repeat after Big Brother -

And - Resistance is “Change” on the way!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.