Boston Terrorists were Double Agents?

The Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis April 20, 2013, 4:39 PM (GMT+02:00)

Tags:  Boston   bombing attack   Caucasus   Saudi Arabia   Terrorism   FBI  Intelligence 

TTamerlan Tsarnaev killed. His brother Dzhokhar captured

The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT - and Dzohkhar’s capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown.

The conclusion reached by DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.

Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.

By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus.

This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of.

Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands.

They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.

That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston.  “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”

Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.

The Tsarnaevs' recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:
1.  An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2.  When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.

He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media.
Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect.

3.  Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.

Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington - this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.

Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:

In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor.

He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.

On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi, having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the country.

Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a group of French military commandoes.

The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed.

An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns. President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant” and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.

According to DEBKAfile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators' agenda:

a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?

b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States - particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?
c)  What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?

Notes from the Master Teacher of Black Studies, Dr. Nathan Hare

I feel so blessed to have a daily dialogue with the father of Black Studies, Dr. Nathan Hare, my elder, comrade and colleague who wrote the introduction to my autobiography Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998, and the foreword to my manual How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, BPP, 2007.

For many years now, Dr. Hare and I have worked together on such projects as the 1980 Black Men's Conference (15 years before the Million Man March), the 2001 Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness at San Francisco State University (absent most faculty in the Black Studies Department, although it was sponsored by the department); the 2004 Black Radical Book Fair in San Francisco's Tenderloin (where I spent 12 years as a dope fiend). Dr. Hare facilitated Black Reconstruction, the prototype for my Pan African Mental Health Peer Group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy.

Today I feel especially blessed to be in possession of the archives of Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare. The Christians say God may not be there when you want Him but He's always on time. And so it is! When I recovered from Crack after a twelve year run, I wanted to catch up on Black Consciousness so I wrote various people to send me literature so I might catch up, but no one responded.

As I have been arranging the Hare archives, it is awesome to find so many original documents that are invaluable for any North American African in search of our true identity. The archives contain most of the Black Scholar magazines (founded by Dr. Hare), Negro Digest/Black World, Liberator, Freedomways, Ebony, Sepia, Jet, Phylon, Negro History Bulletin, Journal of Black Studies, etc. As one of my interns said, "Marvin, you got the Hare's whole life in his and Julia's archives."

Again, I am honored to work on this project that is the reeducation I've needed. One of my interns who studied Black Studies on the east coast, bemoaned the fact that she'd never heard of Dr. Hare until she attended his 80th birthday party. She felt culturally deprived and wondered why? We know it is due to revisionist history, wherein  important people are deleted from the narrative for ideological and white supremacy type ll (Dr. Hare term) reasons.
--Marvin X

A Note from Dr. Nathan Hare

Marvin,

Barack Obama went to Chicago in part because Frank Davis had told him about it, but also his mother had wanted to be a student there but was only fifteen so her father wouldn’t let her and she would tell Obama about it. Meanwhile he had gotten here to Loyola Marymount in LA but, where tried to get hip, but transferred to Columbia, where he was studying when his mother wrote that she was in the hospital with cancer. For reasons of his own he declined to droop everything and go wherever she was – somewhere in Indonesia as I recall – and visit her. She died.  So when he got out of Columbia, he went to Chicago, in particular the University of Chicago, and dug in around in the slum district in which the University had surrounded itself but tried to dig out of with only partial success in the mid to late 1950s, My older sister has said that people would say “that little old guy who hangs around the University of Chicago. He attended Columbia and Harvard Law but got his education and made his mark at the University of Chicago as a lecturer in the law department and life and organizing in the hood. I also knew Valerie jarrett’s father in law, the newspaper columnist, Vernon Jarrett. Indeed, when we were grappling with the Oakland superintendent movement from the National Black Men’s Conference you spearheaded with the help of John Douambia (sp?) – I was luncheon speaker – I happened to tell him on the phone when talking about the  Black Think Tank that we were doing that. I told him how the NAACP had taken up my idea  I had issued at a California Conference on black Education during a panel discussion chaired by Willie Brown. I called for raising the concept of “excellence” in black education to the level of excellence in athletics and music. You didn’t hear excellence as a buzz word for blacks in education. But I went on to say this in the same year, 1975 (when I received the Distinguished Alumni Award for my alma mater, Langston, around the country. I sent it to places like Jet and Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push (which became “Push for Excellence.” Also Marva Collins started her private school on the concept of excellence that year. Langston of course took it up full bloom for decades but now speak of “greatness” with the new regimes after the death of their 25 year president, Julia’s brother in law.

Anyway, at the Sacramento conference where I first raise the cry for excellence I had read in a book on Jewish education that they always pushed excvellence, Willie Brown cut me off at the five minute mark. Verna Canson, the west Coast regional director of the NAACP, sitting beside me said “I like that, how would you do it?” I said I don’t know, but I can think of academic Olympics in junior high schools and high schools,etc. A month later I was listening to KDIA as everybody in the community did of a Sunday afternoon in those days and I kept saying to Julia that the woman on Dr Fahim’s show, Margaret Busch Wilson, national chairman of the NAACP, was using my stuff. I kept saying she’s got my stuff, but I had never met her. I thought back to the California Conference and Verna Canson and recalled that I had mentioned it to her and she had passed it on. Anyway, as I started to say, a few years passed and ACT-SO (academic tournament for black kids, though mostly the middle class elite) began to flourish. So when I was talking to Vernon Jarrett, the journalist and father in law of Valerie Jarrett, I told him about all of this. I was startled to look up in a few months and see that Vernon Jarrett and the NAACP were saying that Vernon Jarrett had started ACT-SO.

Tell me how long the train’s been gone.

Nathan

University of California, Berkeley to inspect the Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare Archives

Marvin X, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare and Attorney Amira Jackmon, Agent of the Community Archives Project at Academy of da Corner, Oakland. The UCB Bancroft Library has acquired the archives of several North American African authors, including Eldridge Cleaver, Ishmael Reed, Ted Joans, Marvin X and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

The University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library will view The Dr. Julia Hare and Dr. Nathan Hare papers at the Community Archives Project, according to Marvin X, project director. We have 100 boxes ready for them to examine and another 100 not organized. This is an awesome task but our interns have been hard at work these past weeks. The 100 boxes include financial records,  a collection of the Black Scholar Magazine, founded by Dr. Hare, plus BSM documents, including Dr. Hare's letter of resignation; letters and correspondence from/to the Hares, primary documents from Dr. Hare's brief tenure at Howard University and  San Francisco State University, including his proposal for the first Black Studies program at a major college campus--he is considered the father of Black Studies; manuscripts, drafts, notes (several boxes include Dr. Nathan Hare's notes on newspaper clippings; Dr. Julia Hare's speeches and speech notes, her manuscripts and drafts; newspaper and magazines articles by the Hares, including articles in such magazines as Black Scholar Black Male/Female Relations, (the Hare's publication), Sepia, Ebony, Black World/Negro Digest, UMASS Review, Washington Post, Sun Reporter, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Sociology: records from Dr. Nathan Hare's clinical psychology practice; photos, magazine articles about the Hare's; audio and video tapes, floppy disks containing extensive emails; materials from Dr. Hare's boxing career; articles from his tenure at Howard University; dissertations from his comrades in struggle such as Max Stanford (Dr. Muhammad Ahmed, former leader of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement); awards and honors. Stanford University has arranged to view the papers as well.

The UCB Bancroft has acquired the archives of several North American African authors, including
Eldridge Cleaver, Ishmael Reed, Ted Joans, Marvin X and Pulitzer-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Personal papers of Pulitzer-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks join archives at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library
11 Jan 2001

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations

Berkeley - Personal papers of poet Gwendolyn E. Brooks, the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, are now part of the African American writers collection at the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
Brooks gave her blessing to the UC Berkeley acquisition before she died on Dec. 3 at the age of 83. Brooks packed the campus's Zellerbach Hall for a 1974 poetry reading and again in 1997 for a reading in Wheeler Auditorium. Some 700 people were turned away from the overflowing Wheeler, and Brooks signed books until nearly midnight for those who remained.
Robert Hass, a former U.S. poet laureate and a professor of English at UC Berkeley, called Brooks one of the most important African American poets of the 20th century.
"She brought the impulses of the Harlem Renaissance to focus by writing about black life in Bronzeville during the Depression and the war years with a candor and sympathy and art that was, in its quiet way, a watershed in American literary and cultural history," he said.
"Berkeley - particularly because of June Jordan's work here - is a fine place for materials on a woman who for all her life wrote 'poetry for the people,'" said Susan Schweik, a UC Berkeley professor of English who has critiqued Brooks' work. Jordan is a UC Berkeley professor of African American studies and a poet, novelist and essayist.
Brooks' emergence in the post-Harlem Renaissance period positioned her for more than five decades as a compelling voice and vitality in African American poetry. The granddaughter of a slave, she was known for poetry that explored poverty and racism while promoting an understanding of African American culture. She wrote children's books, an autobiography, one novel, a collection of poetry about South Africa, and other volumes of poetry that included one of her most popular, "We Real Cool" (1966).
"If any one American writer naturalized the facts of black life, looked at it as lives people led, lives that happened to be inescapably caught in a racialized world but not absolutely defined by that fact, it was she," said Hass. "This curiosity, this art without a social agenda, was a kind of declaration of independence."
Retrieved from a former Brooks home on the South Side of Chicago, the collection now at UC Berkeley contains manuscripts of her poems and speeches, family photos, awards, weekly journals, clippings that reflect source material for poems, 50 years of correspondence with her publishers, and letters. Library officials said the yet-to-be-catalogued 22 boxes of materials constitute a representative sample of her papers from the 1930s to 1980.
"She (Brooks) was most grateful we had these documents. She said, 'You have my blessings to buy it,'" said longtime Brooks friend Daphne Muse.
Muse is an advisor to The Bancroft Library's African American writers collection and is research coordinator for the UC Berkeley McNair Scholars Program. As an adjunct lecturer at nearby Mills College in Oakland during the mid 1970s and early '80s, Muse taught Brooks' poetry in her classes. She said the Brooks material is a significant, unifying addition to UC Berkeley's African American collection.
Launched in 1978, the library's African American writers collection provides access to thousands of books, manuscripts, correspondence and other rare works by black authors. Materials range in date from the 1790s to the present and are regularly used by students, faculty members and outside researchers.
"Without this documentation, there would be gaping holes in what future researchers do here at UC Berkeley, and this canon includes both mainstream and once-marginalized voices," Muse said. The archive provides "a trail of how a poem finds its voice and reams of materials that thread her life together," she added.
It includes letters between Brooks and poet/art critic Ted Berrigan; author/anthologist Arna Bontemps, who helped lead the Harlem Renaissance; and Robert Creeley of the Black Mountain Poets group; as well as the late writer and Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver.
Brooks is said to have launched her writing career as a child by sending poems to a community newspaper to surprise her family.
Her first book of poetry, "A Street in Bronzeville," was published in 1945 and told of ordinary life in a real Chicago neighborhood. It gained her national recognition and led to awards that included a Guggenheim Fellowship and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her second book of poetry, "Annie Allen," (1949) earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. This series of poems traced the life of a young black girl growing up in Chicago.
"Chicago really shaped her, and she really shaped Chicago," Muse said. "Long before Chicago had Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, there was Gwendolyn Brooks."
Muse noted that one group of young black poets from Chicago, the "Jump Badders," worked with Brooks to publish a poetry anthology. Haki Madhubuti (Don Lee), Johari Amini and Carolyn Rodgers were among these writers whom Brooks helped. In turn, they radicalized Brooks and, after she published "Riot" in 1969, she pledged to use only black publishing houses.
Schweik said Brooks' work is important because of her early use of traditional form for radically new ends, her mentoring of black and women poets, and her pioneering of writing on race and gender issues. Brooks is believed to have written the first published poem on abortion in the United States, Schweik said. Brooks read "The Mother" during a gathering of American poets honored at the White House by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980.
Brooks is important also because of the range and shifts in her writing style over the decades "as she responded, quickly and profoundly, to social changes and to movements for social change," Schweik said.
Brooks' awards included a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contributions to American Letters, the National Endowment for the Humanities' 1994 Jefferson Lecturer post, the Frost Medal, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. Brooks was named consultant-in-poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985-86 and was the first black woman to be so honored. Illinois named her the state poet laureate in 1968.
Despite her huge success, Brooks never became a "diva," said Muse.
"She wore it all so simply, and the remarkable thing about her was the inordinate amount of time she spent with other writers, especially young voices," Muse said. "She was a deep thinker without being tortured by it. She was intellectually honest and generous and a fabulous listener; that's why she worked so well with young people."
"Through her poetry, presence and uncomplicated demeanor," Muse said, "Brooks firmly admonished black people not to be clubbed into submission and to stand tall in their power and honor their truth."
A volume of Brooks' poetry will be published posthumously this spring. Published by Third World Press, it is titled "In Montgomery, New and Other Poems."

###

Part II: A White Woman Remembers the last days of Poppa Rage, Eldridge Cleaver

By Marlene Lily

*INTO THE FIRE*

My closest Panther connection was with Eldridge. In 1968, Eldridge was married and he had jumped bail and left the country, leaving me with a huge reservoir of unprocessed feelings. He contacted me a few times after he left, once to send me a large shipment of unreadable books by Kim Il Sung, once to make arrangements for the return of a pistol he had given me (a pistol that later resulted in the conviction of Panther George Murray) and once to send me a lace face veil from Algeria. He also asked me to come to Algeria, but I had no interest in doing that.

It was probably decades before I knew that Eldridge’s nickname was “Rage,” but I now think I was attracted to him in part because he freely expressed the rage that I didn’t have a clue I was feeling in 1968 when I first knew him, rage particularly toward Jerry, who on the same day he married me told me our marriage was a mistake. Eldridge also had a quality that I observed
most clearly when I saw him with my sister-in-law in 1991 and noticed how she lit up: he was capable of giving another person his undivided attention. It was probably that quality that won the love of Christians and Mormons, blacks and whites, women and men. As for me, I felt that he knew me better than anyone I had ever known. I also loved his sense of humor, his imagination, and his ability with language. Every time I cut a watermelon, I still think of his answer to the question, “Where’s Eldridge?” from the Black Panther paper back in 1969: “He’s free, eating watermelon, and the pigs can’t get him!” No one else would have thought of adding “eating watermelon” to that statement.

And we had moments of hilarious fun, watching Ronald Reagan and SF Mayor Joseph Alioto ranting on television about things Eldridge had said about them (what he called “woofing at the authorities”). Or the time in the early nineties when we collected bottles and cans for recycling in the U.C. stadium after the Big Game, or the time he filled my whole garage with toilets he had taken out of dumpsters at U.C. (I had told him I needed one toilet.) I still have a beautiful hatch-cover table top that we scored on a dumpster dive on Solano Avenue.

I spent a lot of time in the 80s and 90s trying to get to the bottom of my feelings about Eldridge, and also to find out who he “really was.” Was he really a Republican? A born-again Christian? A Moonie? A Mormon? An under-cover leader of the Black Liberation Movement? Once he took me to the Mormon Temple in Oakland and was greeted with warmth and enthusiasm by the congregation there even though the papers had reported that he’d already
moved on to the Moonies. Whenever we stopped at the Black Muslim Bakery for a carrot pie, my favorite, he was received there just as warmly.

I even lived wth him for a few months in the early nineties, when he was a crack addict. He called and said “I have a place for you,” at a moment when I didn’t know what to do. The Savings and Loan crisis had wrecked the housing market and I was no longer making a living in real estate. I hadn’t come up with a new game plan. I went down to Berkeley to see what he had in mind, and Eldridge offered to rent me a room. His only condition was that
I not tell him what to do. His other tenant was William Carlisle, a fortyish Black Muslim who made a living selling T-shirts at large events and peddling frozen meat and fish in the Oakland ghetto out of the trunk of his car. Eldridge trusted William because he didn’t use drugs or alcohol (and neither did I). And having all that protein in the house meant that if worse came to worst, Eldridge wouldn’t go hungry.

The house Eldridge lived in was given to him by Claire Morrison, a childless old lady he and his friend Karen had rescued from a convalescent hospital in the 1980s amid great publicity. When Mrs. Morrison was released from the hospital, Karen gave her an apartment in a building Karen owned near the U.C. campus, where Karen’s own mother also lived, and watched over her for several years until she passed away, helping her with shopping and household tasks. And when Mrs. Morrison died, her will gave Eldridge the house on Allston Way, where she and her husband had lived for many years. Mrs. Morrison’s heirs (the same ones who had tried to lock her up in the hospital against her will) sued, and after several years won the house back. In the meantime, Eldridge had a house rent free—and of course he didn’t pay the taxes or insurance either.

One day as we were having breakfast at Alta Bates Hospital, his favorite breakfast joint (good food at rock bottom prices, and a black staff that was always happy to see him), he said this, which I took to be the “truth,” maybe because I wanted it to be: “We had a war and the good guys lost.” The flicker of anguish that crossed his face, just for a second, answered my question about who he really was to the extent it ever got answered.

One of the things that often happened between us was a subtle process of language education. He would use words or phrases with double meanings and check with his eyes to see whether I got it. This was an entre into a level of black culture that I never received elsewhere. Some of the phrases were those slave owners had used on their slaves (though of course he never told me that, I had to figure it out), some of them were the current ghetto slang. I had heard other blacks “talk the talk” for many years and I had never “got it.” Much of it was “signifying,” or metaphor. And of course with metaphor, nothing is nailed down. You catch the drift, but you don’t have a “statement of facts.” You get the emotional effect, rather than information.

One day when we were in the dining room at Allston Way, he showed me a little brush. It was about six inches long, and came in a case. He told me it was what the house slaves used to brush off the master’s table. Seeing how he and William felt about that brush—it was an antique precious to them, but they also loathed it--gave me an inkling of the burden from
slavery that black men still carried, more than a hundred years after Emancipation. They wanted to share it, but just a little.

Drugs were the entry requirement for the lumpen black world of the 80s and 90s, which is the world he came from and the world he loved. (His parents, however, were not lumpen, nor is Kathleen, whom he still loved, even though they were divorced; nor are his children.) And highly addictive crack cocaine became the lumpen drug of choice. It was cheap, ubiquitous, and potent. Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury series, “The Dark Alliance,” tells the story *http://www.mega.nu/ampp/webb.html*. Those of us with a little distance could see the likelihood that crack was the weapon that succeeded Cointelpro in the government’s effort to eliminate any chance of a Black Liberation Movement. But Eldridge was an addict, and the world that became the crack world was his world. I went with him often into West Oakland,
where he scored his crack at corner stores, homes, apartments. He wouldn’t wait to get home to light the pipe, even if a cop car was right behind us. His after-midnight friends were prostitutes and hustlers. I know because I sometimes drove them home. One of them,expecting me to be jealous, was afraid I was going to push her down the porch stairs.

Once he told me that he smoked crack because it “opens the doors of perception,” a quote from Aldous Huxley. What I observed when he was stoned was not heightened perception but an advanced case of hallucinations and psychotic paranoia. I would come back to the house on Allston Way to find every light blazing, with no shades or curtains. He took off the
lampshades to make the lights brighter. As I walked through his office to get to my room, he would point and say “Look at that! Do you see that?” And of course I saw nothing. He was seeing the monsters from a Bosch painting.

A Chinese family lived across the street and he was so paranoid about the Chinese man I was afraid he might act on his threats and shoot him. Fortunately, that never happened.

Maybe a year before I went to live at Allston Way, he had asked me to buyhim a truck. His previous truck was confiscated by the police because he had been using it to steal the items left at the curb for recycling and recycling them himself for money—i.e. stealing garbage--and he had been warned to stop. But he hadn’t stopped. His request, “Buy me a truck,” caught me at a moment when I was mentally unstable from overdosing on a homeopathic remedy (it’s definitely possible!) and I simply asked him what kind of truck he wanted, bought him a Chevy pickup, put it in his name, and delivered it, asking for nothing but a ride back home.

When I moved to Allston Way, I took my furniture to my brother’s basement in San Francisco so I could rent my side of my Santa Rosa duplex out for income. After a few weeks, Eldridge said, “Let’s go get your furniture.” I was fine with that, and wasn’t suspicious when he said he wanted to take two cars.

At my brother’s house, as we were loading my stuff, my three-year-old niece asked me about some bells that were on the top of one of my boxes. “What
are those?”

“Camel bells.”

“Do you have a camel?”

“No.”

Eldridge: “Yes you do!” I met his eyes, wondering what he was talking about. “The camel in your mind.” He was into Religious Science in those days.

We loaded up the pickup, and that was the last I ever saw of my furniture. A couple months later, when I sensed that my car was next to go, I took off and came back to Santa Rosa. (I had been warned about him by two black men, one a complete stranger, who saw us talking at Andronico’s. The other, a former Panther from the Huey faction, someone I knew and liked,
said “Still got your car?” when I ran into him on Telegraph.) Without a car I wouldn’t be able to work, and I was going to need some kind of work SOON. Once Eldridge told me I had better work habits than he did. As far as I could tell, he didn’t have ANY work habits.

He never found a way to make a living, other than giving occasional speeches or hustling his “friends.” He would sit on his porch stairs with one penny on the step next to him, and when I showed up, he’d say, “That’s my bank.” We’d chat for a while, and then he’d say, “Let’s go to Andronico’s.” We’d walk the couple of blocks to the store, and of course I would buy him lunch. Then maybe it was time for a trip to the ATM machine.

He did that with everybody—or everybody who would put up with it.

Early on, he made money from *Soul On Ice*, and after he came back from exile he had speaking engagements—whether they were his born-again Christian testimony, Black Panther reminiscences with Bobby Seale, or ecology polemics. But after *Soul On Ice*, he never wrote a major book. Karen bought him computers more than once, more than once he sold them to buy drugs or in one case threw the computer out the window when she urged him to use it to write. Writing requires discipline and willingness to be alone. He was a social animal, and being locked up was what enabled him to write *Soul On Ice*. Once he was free, the discipline just wasn’t there.

Even as early as 1968 he lacked discipline. The reason I stole his typewriter was that he had promised to give me one for the Observer office and about the same time had invited me over to his house to help put out the Black Panther newspaper. Instead of working on the paper, we sat around all afternoon with Bobby Seale and Emory, shooting the shit. My friend Jennifer, who was visiting from Chicago, was with me with her two little girls, 4 and 6. As the afternoon segued into evening, and it was time to eat, the Panther servants, women of course, called the men into the kitchen. Bobby and Eldridge got up and left, leaving Jennifer and me, invited guests with children, sitting in Eldridge’s office, unfed. Emory had his head down on the arm of his chair, but I never thought he was asleep. Either he was too polite to walk out and leave us, or he was the guard. I was pissed, and picked up the typewriter on Eldridge’s desk, covered it with our coats, and walked out. If Emory was the guard, he wasn’t guarding the typewriter.

In the summer of ’92, Eldridge asked me to reserve spots for us at Robert McKee’s script- writing class, to be held in the fall in Los Angeles. I bought the tickets, then didn’t see or talk to Eldridge for several months. When the time for the class came, I flew to L.A. alone, rented a car, and spent the night at a Youth Hostel in Santa Monica, the cheapest accommodations I could find. The next morning I walked down the aisle to my seat, and there he was. I didn’t really expect him to pull himself together and make it to L.A., but he did—after all, L.A. was his home. We spent the weekend together. Eldridge took me to Spike Lee’s store and to one of his own favorite teenage hangouts, Pink’s Drive-In, with me picking up the tab for expensive restaurant meals, the gas, the motel room. I had a great time, but when I went home I didn’t go back to Berkeley, I was too deeply in debt by that time. I couldn’t afford Eldridge.

A few months later, during a drug buy, he got mugged--clubbed on the head and robbed of his earnings from a speaking engagement; his Chevy pickup was also missing. I got a call from Karen saying that he was in Alta Bates with a severe head injury. I went down and sat at his bedside for several days. When he was transferred to rehab in San Leandro, I went there, too.

It appeared to me he was brain damaged. But he refused to go to Delancey Street when a friend pulled strings to get him admitted, even though his son, Maceo, then about 24, pleaded with him to go. Instead, he went right back to his addiction. The last time I saw him, maybe 1994, it was midday, we were in my car on University Avenue, and I stopped to make a copy at Kinko’s. He was afraid to be left alone in the car for a minute or two while I went into the shop. The fearlessness I had so loved in him was gone. In the spring of 1998, I got a call from William Carlisle, who told me Eldridge had died in Southern California--on May Day. Despite Carlisle’s urgings, I didn’t go to the funeral.

See Marvin X's memoir of Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, Black Bird Press, 2009. Search this blog or www.nathanierturner.com.

A White Woman Remembers Poppa Rage, Eldridge Cleaver

• Hello Marvin, You don't know me and I don't know you, but I believe you were at Stanford not too long ago, and I was active in the Movement there in the 60s. I'm still part of the A3M Reunion listserve, for the veterans of the Applied Electronics Lab sit-in, where Bobby Seale spoke in 1969.

  I know of your father from Eldridge, who was a close friend of mine for thirty years. I invited him and Kathleen to speak at a Be-In in the summer of '68 and they came and spoke, along with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey.

  So I thought connecting on FB would be good because I could learn things from you, and vice versa, since we're of different generations. I am actually seventy-one, not twenty-three.

  

  
  

  
  

  • Yes, real heart ache. I stayed with EC when he lived on AllstonWay, and
    had a front-row seat for his crack addiction--and it cost me big bucks, but
    I didn't lose my car (I lost all my furniture, though). And, after many
    years, I landed on my feet. God took care of me in a way no human could
    have done, and I am grateful. I used to drive EC when he copped. When I
    rented the room, he said there was only one rule: "Don't tell me what to
    do."

    Could you possibly find out what happened to our 3rd roommate, William
    Carlisle, a Muslim? He took me to see Dr. Khalid in East Oakland, before
    Dr. Khalid was "excommunicated."

    I heard Carlisle got killed, but I'm hoping that's not true. He used to
    sell meat and fish from his car in West Oakland. And he sold T-shirts at
    marches and other events. EC trusted us because we didn't do drugs or
    alcohol. I believe Carlisle was from Ohio. He was younger than me, so
    maybe 60-65 now. He was not around for the 60s or the BPP. I have tried searching for him online with no success.

    I drove past the house on Allston Way a couple weeks ago, and see it is all boarded up and the front steps are gone. I guess whoever bought it after
    it was stolen from EC didn't quite know what they were getting into--in
    addition to the financial meltdown (I'm a real estate brokerwww.sonoma-county-real-estate.com).
  • 

    7:09am
    

    Marvin X Jackmon
    

    
    

    Ancestor William Carlisle made his transition due to a fight with customers who had bought his T shirts. The beat him with a bat and he died in the hospital from a blood clot in the leg.
  • 

    9:35am
    

    Marlene Lily
    

    
    

    I went to the Newark City Plex FB page, but could not see where I can leave a message. Can you please tell me how to do that?
  • 

    11:19am
    

    Marlene Lily
    

    
    

    "Diane Di Prima, one of Amiri's "baby-mamas" (that term didn't exist in the
    70s) did collages with me when I was in Napa State Hospital in the 70s, and helped me express my feelings, including my Rage. She wrote, "May Our Anger Be Buddha's Anger." I was so blessed to have her, and Marge Piercy, and Denise Levertov, and Al Young, and Willie Brown, and Ahaguna Sun, and Linus Pauling supporting me in those days. As well as the friendship of Veda Harper (Veda Dwyer) and Tommy Wilson and Otis____ (with whom I walked to
    school at Napa College)."

    Marvin, I tried to post this comment under the Black Bird Press picture of Amiri Baraka, but I don't have an account on any of those services, and I really wanted it to go to you, not to the whole world. So here it is. M.L.

    Your message about Brother Carlisle popped up on my screen for a minute, but I could never find it again. The clot must have moved from his leg to his heart or his brain, or it would not have killed him, correct? I am so sorry to hear of his premature passing. Did he have any children?--M.L.

    
    

    MX: William was my very dear friend as well. He was one of the most beautiful black men on the planet, who sought knowledge at any price and he would pay me and Eldridge for knowledge to the point of being our co-dependent. William was not a dummy but a student in the Graduate Theological Seminary at UC Berkeley. 

    
    

    What nobody knew was that William had spent time in prison for murder, had become a boxer in prison, so he had no fear. I used to go with him to sell his meats in the projects of Oakland and San Francisco. He would go into the projects at night and sometimes I would be with him as we walked through the projects, but William had no fear, no fear! I can tell you absolutely that I had fear walking through the projects of East Oakland and San Francisco, but William had no fear whatsoever. 

Professor Gerold Horne on Boston Bombing and U.S. Hypocrisy on Terrorism

Gerald Horne on Bombing of Boston Marathon and U.S. Hypocrisy on 'Terrorism by Malinda Francis Gerald Horne on Bombing of Boston Marathon and U.S. Hypocrisy on 'Terrorism

San Jose State University Replies to Marvin X on Dr. Nathan Hare

Marvin X, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare and Attorney Amira Jackmon, Agent of the Community Archives Project



From: Abdul Alkalimat
Subject: Re: Hey, Dude, Where's my Black Studies Department?
To: H-AFRO-AM@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Date: Friday, April 19, 2013, 1:07 PM

From: ruth.wilson@sjsu.edu

We honor Nathan Hare by keeping the legacy of Black Studies alive on universities across the nation, and we salute those who organize the event in his honor.  It is not ironic that San Jose State was absent on Saturday, April 13th.  I do not recall that the Department was invited to the event or asked to be a sponsor.  As you may or may not know, many of the Black Studies Departments in the nation are struggling to maintain a presence in the academy, to get faculty tenured, and to serve students who are majors and minors in the discipline.  I think Nathan Hare would be proud of us, regardless of whether or not we were invited to sponsor the event in Oakland.

Reply by Marvin X: I see no mention of your community connection, a primary mission of Black Studies. We know you call on community when under attack by the white masters in academia, as is happening now from coast to coast, from San Francisco State to Columbia University in NYC to Temple University in Philly, where the Black Studies Chair has been usurped by the White supremacy administration.  Black Studies needs to set up shop in the hood so it can address some of the pressing needs such as mental health, male/female relations and economics. There needs to be a course on How to Attend a white institution and not come home hating black people. In the words of Amiri Baraka, "We send them to college and they come home hating us and everything we're about, but they don't even know what we're about!" Dr.  Nathan Hare calls it the addiction to white supremacy type II. How can the national black studies honor Dr. Hare but deny him a teaching position anywhere in America in conspiracy with the white man? Isn't it ironic that although Dr. Nathan Hare was never hired at Stanford University or University of California, Berkeley, they have expressed interest in acquiring his archives? Bay Area Poet Paradise has a classic poem entitled They Love Everything About You But You! --Marvin X, Academy of da Corner, Oakland