Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (51 page)

Inconsistencies:

1. The victim was rendered completely unconscious prior to the police raid. Medical testing revealed he was drugged with a very high dose of a strong barbiturate. He was slipped the drugs by a confessed FBI informant and he remained unconscious from the time he went to bed. Witnesses confirmed that he never even woke up, let alone fired a weapon.

2. Forensic expert Dr. Cyril Wecht was shocked when he viewed Hampton’s blood findings: “Hampton’s blood samples contained incredibly high levels of Seconal, or secobarbital—4.5 milligrams per deciliter, in fact, or about four times the amount considered toxic and potentially lethal.”
⁴⁵³

3. As Dr. Wecht notes: “This Seconal level is very important evidence that’s been overlooked. If this toxicology report is true, then Fred Hampton was in a very deep sleep or even in a stuporous state at the time the police raided his apartment. If that’s the case, then there’s no way he could have been shooting a gun, let alone initiating a gunfight. And if this is true, then the police have been lying from the beginning and this whole operation may have been nothing more than a political assassination.”
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4. Dr. Wecht immediately recognized that the bullet trajectories tell a quite different story than the Official Version: “If these trajectories were correct, then Hampton was not standing up facing the officers when he was shot; rather, he was lying on his back, and the officer who shot him was standing directly above him and slightly to his right.”
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“We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black nigger fuckers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.”

—FBI Special Agent Gregg York

“Fred understood he was a marked man ... “

—Attorney Jeffrey Haas

“As the old law enforcement saying goes, even in the most carefully thought-out crimes, a criminal will make a mistake. I suppose it is no different when police officers become criminals.”

—Dr. Cyril Wecht

Fred Hampton was a gifted student and athletic star who planned on becoming an attorney. He graduated with honors from his high school in Chicago and gradually became politically active. Hampton came to embrace the philosophy of self-defense as a legal and intelligent response to racism and overt political oppression. His murder by the police is perhaps the best example of the organized oppression he sought to socially overcome.

Hampton studied pre-Law in Junior College and used what he learned to employ justice in his own neighborhood. To combat police brutality in poor urban neighborhoods of Chicago, Hampton and his fellow group members followed police around in the city to let them know that their actions were being monitored by residents. So when the
Black Panther Party
came along, it was the perfect vehicle for Fred Hampton.

Much contrary to how it was intentionally maligned in the media, the
Black Panther Party
was actually a
political defense
organization—if
you didn’t mess with
them
, they didn’t mess with
you
.
Their complete name was actually the
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
They advocated and maintained a strict no-drugs policy (no personal use
or
trafficking) and stressed a Ten-Point Program that advocated strong educational principles, community health centers, political activism and education, a Free Breakfast Program and other assistance for those who needed it most. As Doc Satchel, founder of the
Chicago Black Panther Health Clinic
interpreted it:

“The Panthers were an armed propaganda unit that raised the contradictions, set the example, and provided the vehicle that the people could ride to revolution. We do not say the Black Panther Party will be ovethrowing the government; we heighten the contradictions so the people can decide if they
want
to change the government.”
⁴⁵⁶

Hampton galvanized national attention by engineering a strategically brilliant alliance between the
Panthers
and other groups. The first and most important was a Non-Aggression pact between the
Black Panthers
and the major gangs that controlled the streets of south and west Chicago, in neighborhoods so tough that the police were literally afraid to enter.

The truces with these huge groups—the
Blackstone Rangers
(over 5,000 members), and particularly with the
Black Disciples
(approximately 5,500 members) allowed the
Panthers
to recruit in the roughest neighborhoods of Chicago which contained the ripest audience for new members. This brilliant coup instantly supercharged
Panther
membership and solidified an incredible power base at the heart of the movement—the poorest of the inner city poor, com-posed of much disenfranchised minorities.

It was actually Fred Hampton, not Reverend Jesse Jackson, who first employed the term
Rainbow Coalition.
His coalition included not only the
Black Panthers
and the city’s two largest street gangs, but a diverse network comprised of the
Young Lords,
the
Young Patriots,
the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society,
the
Brown Berets,
and the
Red Guard Party.

Hampton’s efforts also began visibly changing the most impoverished parts of the city. He changed the activities of these street gangs from just being criminal, to becoming
political.
Instead of expanding their drug dealing, gangs like the D’s (the
Disciples)
began massive picketing campaigns protesting the lack of minority hirings at Chicago construction sites and were so successful in their socio-political efforts that they actually forced sites to shut down until they agreed to hire inner-city workers. The
Stones
street gang focused on political efforts against the well-known city political machine and actually got activists and other community members elected to posts in which they formally represented their inner-city neighborhoods. Hampton’s achievements prompted the national leadership of the
Black Panther Party
to appoint him as the party’s National Spokesman.

Hampton held a press conference in May, 1969 and publicly announced the truce among his
Rainbow Coalition;
it was a noteworthy advancement in both the unification of diverse socio-political interests and their ability to effect serious political change.

This progress, politically, brought Hampton to national attention—and not just in the
Black Panther Party
either. The threat to the power structure from Hampton’s organizational brilliance was that it united white students with inner-city blacks, and Hispanics, and people of all classes.

The FBI targeted the
Black Panther Party
with its COINTELPRO Program, generally, and targeted Fred Hampton,
specifically.

Hampton’s eloquence further advanced his young career as he coined phrases still remembered today:

“You can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.”

“I know of no other intelligent way to act in an extreme situation other than extreme.”
⁴⁵⁷

While Hampton’s eloquence was gaining him followers, it was still his organizing brilliance that made a difference in the streets and politically. He was reportedly on the verge of pulling off a huge merger with the largest street gang on the south side of Chicago that literally would have doubled membership in the
Black Panther Party
overnight.

On the night of December 3, 1969, Fred Hampton taught a Political Education course at a local church.

That night, after returning home from teaching his course, he was murdered in his sleep, under the “official cover” of a police raid. To make matters worse, the entire event was witnessed by Hampton’s girlfriend, who was 8-months pregnant with their child.

Forensic experts determined that the police version of a two-sided gunfight was an outright lie. It was scientifically determined that of the hundreds of gunshots in Hampton’s apartment, all but one had been fired by police.

This is the bed on which Hampton was shot as he slept, before being dragged onto the floor and executed at point-blank range.

Forensics also determined that a wounded and completely unconscious Fred Hampton had been dragged out of his bed and into the hallway, then executed by police with two shots to the head at point-blank range.

According to eyewitness testimony at the scene, this is how the murder of Fred Hampton was set:

“Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to wake up as a result of the barbiturates that the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his pregnant girlfriend. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

“That’s Fred Hampton.”

“Is he dead? ... Bring him out.”

“He’s barely alive; he’ll make it.”