The Legacy of Fred Hampton

I wonder what a young black activist murdered in Chicago by J. Edgar Hoover's stormtroopers would say to the first black president about shielding federal employees from having to answer for war crimes.

Jeffrey Haas in The Nation:

December 4 marks the fortieth anniversary of the raid on a Black Panther apartment in which Chicago police shot and killed Fred Hampton in his bed. Hampton was the charismatic young chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, and under his leadership the party's membership and influence had increased dramatically. The party had instituted a popular and expanding Breakfast for Children Program and a police accountability project. At the age of 21, Hampton was able to reach and influence gang members and welfare mothers as well as college and law students. Under his tutelage, the Panthers formed a coalition with Puerto Rican and white activists.

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Two years after the murder, antiwar activists raided the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and found and distributed documents that demonstrated that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was conducting a secret war on the left--the Counterintelligence Program, or Cointelpro. Its most aggressive and lethal tactics were used against the black movement, and the Panthers in particular. Cointelpro mandated FBI agents in cities with Panther chapters to "cripple," "disrupt" and "destroy" the Panthers and their breakfast program and to prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify and electrify the black masses.

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Noam Chomsky has called the murder of Fred Hampton "the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon Administration." It is hard to imagine a more serious abuse by a government than the deliberate assassination of a citizen for his political beliefs and activity. But though we were finally able to reveal that Hampton's death had been an assassination, it has never gotten the attention it deserves. The government's cover-up and stonewalling basically worked.

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Three decades later we are watching history repeat itself. In the 1960s the enemy was domestic dissent; today the enemy is international terrorism. In both cases, however, the right used fear to increase the powers of police and government agencies to operate in secret and with impunity. Cheney and Rumsfeld used 9/11 to beat back Church Committee restrictions on intelligence activities and reporting requirements. They encouraged intelligence agencies to spy on US citizens and to ignore international and US law forbidding torture and kidnapping.

In 1978 the Justice Department argued that FBI operatives were immune from liability for killing Hampton because they were carrying out government policy. An incredulous Judge Swygert asked the US Attorney if he thought they would be immune if they had given the police a gun and told them to murder Hampton. The government retreated from the "good German" defense at that point. In our own day, Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to look into the acts of torture carried out by CIA officers amid claims they are immune because they were carrying out government policy.

One lesson we should learn from the Hampton case is that although it's important to put strong legal limitations on what police and intelligence agencies are permitted to do, that is not enough to prevent abuses. What's required is accountability, in the form of criminal prosecution, not only for those who carry out criminal policies but for those who formulate them. Thus far Holder's investigation is limited to those who carried out the policy of torture and may have exceeded its carefully hedged strictures. But the investigation we really need will look at the policy itself, which by all appearances was a criminal conspiracy by Cheney, Rumsfeld and a group of administration lawyers to subvert the Constitution.

Fred Hampton's legacy should be our continued vigilance against government crimes and secrecy and our demand that officials be held responsible and criminally liable when they violate the law. This is about deterrence and equal justice, not revenge.