Hundreds of Armed Right-Wing Militia Members Take Over Federal Building

The FBI, determined to prevent any enhancement of the [Black Panther] leadership's effectiveness, decided to set up an arms raid on Hampton's Chicago apartment. FBI informant William O'Neal provided them with detailed information about Hampton's apartment, including the layout of furniture and the bed in which Hampton and his girlfriend slept....

The raid was organized by the office of Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, using officers attached to his office.[19] Hanrahan had recently been the subject of a large amount of public criticism by Hampton...At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, divided into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45 a.m., they stormed into the apartment.

Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the south bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to awaken as a result of the barbiturates the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his fiancée, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child....Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder...Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood....Two shots were heard, which were later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Johnson, one officer then said:
"He's good and dead now."

The officers then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who had been sleeping in the north bedroom (Satchel, Anderson, and Brewer).[21] Verlina Brewer, Ronald "Doc" Satchel, Blair Anderson, and Brenda Harris were seriously wounded,[21] then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of the officers.

At a press conference the next day, the police announced the arrest team had been attacked by the "violent" and "extremely vicious" Panthers and had defended themselves accordingly. In a second press conference on December 8, the assault team was praised for their "remarkable restraint", "bravery", and "professional discipline" for not killing all the Panthers present.

Shortly afterwards, Cook County coroner Andrew Toman began forming a special six member coroner's jury to hold an inquest into the deaths of Hampton and Clark. The blue-ribbon panel convened for the inquest on January 6, 1970 and on January 21 ruled the deaths of Hampton and Clark to be justifiable homicide. State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan said the verdict was recognition "of the truthfulness of our police officers' account of the events". The federal grand jury did not return any indictment against anyone involved with the planning or execution of the raid. The officers involved in the raid were cleared by a grand jury of any crimes.

In 1970, a $47.7 million lawsuit as filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark stating that the civil rights of the Black Panther members were violated. Twenty-eight defendants were named, including Hanrahan as well as the City of Chicago, Cook County, and federal governments. After its conclusion in 1977, Judge Joseph Sam Perry of United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit against 21 of the defendants prior to jury deliberations. Perry dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants after jurors deadlocked.

There was a little bad news for the cops and FBI, though: "We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark."— FBI Special Agent Gregg York

. . . "We feel like we need to make sure the Hammonds are out of prison, or
well on their way." . . .

Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap, was on security duty. He was shot in the heart and died instantly.[21] His gun fired a single round which was later determined to be caused by a reflexive death convulsion after the raiding team shot him; this was the only shot the Panthers fired.

I wrote:

Yes, it is interesting (the excerpts that is) and it makes sense.

You wrote:

Yes, that's why I posted it . . .

And you, for some reason, seem annoyed or puzzled that I confirmed your reason? You know, it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might have responded that it was deadly dull and incomprehensible. This place can be maddening sometimes in that you can't win for losing. I acknowledged you gave us an interesting sensible cite and you can't simply accept the compliment?

I wrote:

There is a place for federal ownership of land, but it must be for specified purposes and not for indefinite periods.

You wrote:

Why are you repeating what the contents of the link I have already provided have stated?

I am restating the contents in a more concise fashion. Why do you care?

I wrote:

(I would think that anything and everything the federal government does should be guided by the requirement that it must serve the interest of the entire country)

You wrote:

Yes, that, too, was in the linked material I provided.

What was actually in the linked material was the requirement that in disposing of any land it holds, the federal government must consider the interest of the entire country. Does it not make sense that the government should be guided by this requirement in everything it does, and not simply the disposal of federally held land? It almost should go without saying, but apparently, someone thought it was necessary or else the government might do otherwise. This suggests a lack of trust in the intentions behind government actions.

I wrote:

Of course we have been, much to our own peril, moving steadily away from the Founder's wise and prudent concerns over a federal leviathan, largely because such a governmental beast is necessary to advance progressive precepts.

You wrote:

Could you please provide some examples of the progressive precepts of which you speak that require a governmental beast?

The most obvious is that the government should provide social safety nets for citizens. In order to provide the financial assistance inherent in these programs there must be considerable resources and an extensive bureaucratic network to to administer them. The need for greater pools of money requires a more extensive ability to collect it, and again the federal bureaucracy must grow.

Another is that the government and it's army of experts are in the best position to know what is best for the well being of the citizenry and society and should actively work to protect them from all manner of risks, not the least of which is exploitation and endangerment from an irresponsible and unscrupulous private sector. This requires the constant, continuous promulgation of regulations and the accompanying forces to investigate possible compliance failure and enforce whatever consequence are deemed appropriate.

A government that seeks to do more for the citizenry must increase in size and an increasing degree of involvement creates an increase in complexity for the processes and transactions in which the government involves itself.

The primary reason for the federal government to divest itself, as soon as possible, of land it takes hold of is the belief that the land can be put to better use in private hands, however a secondary benefit would be a decrease in the costs of the federal government. With almost half the land in the Western part of the nation in the hands of the federal government the BLM has become a massive and complex bureaucracy.

Quote:

Left to the States, massive pockets of injustice and inequity would exist throughout the nation, and a mere pittance, if anything, would be spent on the disadvantaged.

Quote:

Could you explain how you came to this conclusion?

This is not a conclusion I reached, it is a fear that progressives have. I was being facetious with what I wrote. Progressives, generally, do not trust State and local governments to properly care for the disadvantaged and protect the rights of minorities. It is one of the reasons they have continuously insisted on extending the Special Provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required certain States to have all changes to their election laws approved by the federal government. It took the Supreme Court, in 2013, to rule unconstitutional the coverage formula which determined what States were deemed untrustworthy and required federal oversight. Their reasoning was that after 38 years (Congress updated the coverage formula in 1975) it was not responsive to current conditions.

I wrote:

It is also interesting how the Founders notion that the government could never be trusted, but the people, generally, always should be, has, after a little less than 240 years, been completely turned on its head.

You wrote:

Explain.

As outlined in my original post, progressives favor an expansive and powerful federal government because ultimately, they do not trust the American people in general, and, more specifically, anyone in private enterprise. Virtually all of their goals could be met without a large and powerful federal government. The States have the means and administrative infra-structure to provide their citizens with the full social safety net promoted by progressives; indeed they already fund (with federal assistance) and administer a great many of these programs. They also have the means to insure that the civil rights of minorities are protected. Clearly, as indicated previously in the discussion of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, progressives still do not trust the States to legally protect their minority citizens. It's not a coincidence that they are the first ones to call for a federal civil rights investigation when a Grand Jury or a trial court doesn't reach the decision they favor in a murder case.

We can find throughout the Founders' writings expressions of their concerns for an overreaching, excessively powerful central government, and they formulated a system of governance designed to restrain the government. It should be noted that I am not saying that the Founders feared a central government. If they did, why would they have created one? They did, however, have an inherent distrust of a government wherein power was consolidated in one place, and so the system they created contained numerous way in which power was dispersed, and diffused. A government is nothing more than the people who run it and while some or all of the Founders may have believed government service over a long period had a corrupting effect on people ( most people agree that they did not contemplate today's career politicians who hold office for decades and have no other profession), they also had a healthy degree of distrust in the the nature of people in general. We are a republic and not a pure democracy for this reason. However, given the choice between the interest of the people and the interests of the government, let alone a bloated and too powerful government, I believe they would opt for the people all day long.

"Better to have one tyrant, thousands of miles away, than thousands of tyrants one mile away" (some guy in some movie, eh?)

This is not a conclusion I reached, it is a fear that progressives have. I was being facetious with what I wrote.

But as a matter or both courtesy and integrity, you ought to have acknowledged that your presumptions regarding what media sources I attend to were in error.

I don't make these remarks because you hurt my feelings. Nor because I'm bragging. Nor to suggest I'm without biases. We all have biases and blind-spots. But how can this endeavor we are engaged in have any value if we don't try to do it carefully and as honestly as possible? The value I see in boards like this one is the potential to learn. None of us is going to alter the result of any election anywhere.

Is it painful?

Funny how there's not onle single fact in that op-ed. It's pure verbal abuse.

Y
ou want to invite this guy to A2K?

I doubt though that he would have remained here very long.

"I am a great mayor; I am an upstanding Christian man; I am an intelligent man; I am a deeply educated man; I am a humble man." -- M. Barry, Mayor of Washington, DC

"First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl. Bitch set me up." -- M. Barry, Mayor of Washington, DC