That day ended with a preliminary hearing set to be held Christmas Eve and
the trial New Year's Eve___oh, the
season to be jolly.
Prelim. Hearing, Wed., Dee. 24:
Reduced charges"something to the effect that I had contributed to the delinquency of a minor by causing to sell for gain or reward matter that would cause unusual harm to the morals of youth. Their task to prove "unusual harm" as well as "gain or reward". This session extremely short, less than an hour.
On my way out of the courthouse, with a new frame of reference (a detective's) in looking at nudes, I noted the "juvenile statue" in front of the court-, house. That young man was doing something mighty strange to the pole. Nasty!
Trial, New Year's Eve, Dec. 31:
More excitement, as the courthouse was full, everyone was waiting for the trial The proceedings included the LPD's star witness, Sgt. Jacobs, and I must admit I did enjoy seeing him cross-examined. When pressed, time after time, for the reason "why?" the newspaper and particularly the photo would "cause unusual harm to their morals," Sgt. Jacobs in a very decisive manner stated: "I would not show it to my sons." That was why. In another comment as to the obscenities of the btf Sgt. Jacobs emphatically stated that to "beat meat" didn't mean hamburger.
The only other testimonies of any significance were those of C.H., A.T. and W.L. Each little man came through quite well and I want to commend them and their courage under such circumstances.
"Acquittal" was the final decision with the addition "but with probable cause" which means that we could possibly go on to a higher court and a stiffer statute.
Agnew's ghost
By Ian Sven
LNS"The radio speech was never broadcast"yet old show-biz Agnew got 14,000 letters of praise the next day. No one will admit who slipped.
What happened was that UPI, a news service-also-makes-news tapes-used by-independent radio stations. A month ago they recorded a full hour of the usual hard hitting, always missing Agnew diatribe. The schedule said it was to be broadcast over dozens of stations on the week-end. But a foul up occurred"not a single station aired the speech.
Just the same, come Monday morning, ââ€"  the UPI office was buried under a flood of 14,000 letters of fulsome praise. There was not a single letter criticizing the speech. Agnew was praised for once again exposing the effete intellectual snobs that marched in the. protest prades.
14,000 American citizens went zap over a speech they never heard. Only Spiro can get that.
I know of three New York City TV stations that were forbidden by their management to air the story. Makes one think.
Come to think of it, that's the same number of letters that Nixon had on his desk the day after one of his speeches. Makes one think.
Mrs. Mitchell pulls a Spiro
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)-Emerg-ing from a strenuous gala at the Israeli Embassy recently, Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of the attorney general, settled into her limousine with Mrs. Gilbert Hahn, wife of the chairman of the city council of the District of Columbia.
"Boy," sighed Martha, "I'm glad to get away from all those Jews."
Mrs. Hah, herself Jewish, told the story to all her friends, then denied it when the newspapers began calling. Reporters at Newsweek and Time, and the Washington Post's gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire, wanted to write the story, but their editors quashed the news.
Mrs. Mitchell made the news recently when she told a CBS reporter that she resented all the "liberal communists" who took over Washington on Nov. IS for the anti-war demonstration.
blue-tail fly
By Christopher Chandler
College Press Service v
It was 4:44 a.m. on the morning of December 4. The block on Chicago's West Side was cordoned off. Police stood guard on rooftops. State's Attorney's police were stationed at the tront ana rear or tne first-floor apartment, armed with a submachine gun and shotguns.
There was a knock on the front door, and then the sound of more than 200 shots echoed through the early morning hour. When it was over, Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was dead in bed. Mark Clark, a Panther member from Peoria, UL, was dead behind the front door. Four others were critically wounded, and three were arrested unharmed. One policeman was slightly wounded.
State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan held a press conference later that day, displaying what he said was the arms cache recovered from the apartment (each bullet carefully placed on its end) and pronounced to the television earners: "We wholeheartedly commend the police officers for their bravery, their remarkable restraint and their discipline in the face of this Black Panther attack"as should every decent citizen in our community." He stressed the word "decent."
Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of it. Hanrahan, the key figure in Mayor Daley's 1968 election strategy, then man named to run the city's "war on gangs" last June, would ordinarily have enhanced his reputation as a tough-crime fighter and as the most popular Democratic vote-getter.
But there are not normal times. The story did not end with that press conference, but grew into an international scandal The glare of publicity that focused on every aspect of that eight-minute raid illuminated the workings of Chicago's law enforcement machinery and we glimpsed momentarily, as by a flash of lightning, the face of repression.
The story would not died, in part because of the stark imagery of the early morning raid by heavily armed police. "For those of us alive in the late '30's," said Professor Hans Mattick of the University of Chicago, "this brought back one of those nightmare images"the knock on the door at night, the Jews intimidated and dragged away."
It would not die because the Black Panther Party opened up the apartment at 2337 W. Monroe Street for the world to see, and the evidence was inescapable: police had massed a heavy concentration of machine-gun and shotgun fire at one living room wall and into two bedrooms. There was little if any sign of return fire.
It would not die because Hanrahan, distressed by what he said were the "outrageous" and "slanderous" statements made to the press, decided to try his case in the Chicago Tribune. But
By whom ?
evidence provided to substantiate his account of the raid turned out to be fraudulent, and the competing newspapers jumped at the chance to recover some honor by exposing the fraud. A picture purporting to show bullet holes where the Panthers shot at police in the kitchen turned out to be a picture of nail holes, and the bullet-ridden "bathroom" door turned out to be the inside of the bedroom door.
It would not die because the coroner's office mis-represented Hampton's fatal wounds, because Hanrahan would not permit the FBI to interrogate his men in private. It developed that the FBI .was involved, having been wiretapping and tailing the Panthers, and the Justice Department itself had set up a special task force on the Black Panthers last August, a task force aimed at countering the threat to national security.
Events had shaken the country's trust in the social order. Calls for a thorough and impartial investigation intensified to the point that there are now some eight bodies planning such a probe. But there is little prospect that findings of the investigations will convince any large spectrum of the population.
The Panther Party would not have it otherwise. They are not interested in the findings of a "blue ribbon committee" or a "grand jury investigation" designed, or, in the words of Attorney General John Mitchell, to "put an end to rumors and speculation that surrounded this incident,." The Panthers' belief is that to restore confidence and end speculation is to mask the exposed face of a growing fascism. Last month's Chicago raid has given the party widespread new support for its viewpoint.
Fred Hampton said last June, "I just went to a wake where a young man had been shot in the head by a pig. And you know this is bad. But it heightens the contradictions in the community. These things a lot of times organize the people better than we can organize ourselves."
All of the investigations of the raid will be forced to sift through a mass of conflicting testimony. The police version, reenacted for CBS television in a special 28-minute program directed by the State's Attorney's office, must be rejected on the basis of the available evidence. One policeman in the reenactment, for example, describes three shots being fired at him as he enters the kitchen door, the film having been taped before those three bullet holes had been shown to be nail, holes.
The Panther version may never come to light in its entirety. Defense attorneys for the seven surviving Panthers (charged with attempted murder) plan to retain their best evidence until the trial, and they may be in a powerful bargaining position to have the charges dropped. Panther officers have generally confined themselves to characterizing the raid as a
"political assassination" and denying that any Panthers fired at police.
The hard physical evidence is sparse, but heavily weighted toward the worst possible construction of the raid.
* There are two bullet holes in the front door leading from a small anteroom into the living room. One is about heart high and was fired through the door from the outside while the door was slightly ajar. This shot probably killed Mark Clark, whose body was found in a pool of blood behind the door. A second hole in the door, about a foot and a half below the first, may have been made by a shotgun blast from the inside of the apartment into a far corner of the anteroom near the ceiling. The crazy angle of the blast suggests that Clark's gun may have gone off as he fell.
* The right-hand side of the living room wall is covered with 42 closely stitched bullet holes, mainly from a machine gun. The shots were fired from the doorway and from the center of the living room, the shots from the center of the room penetrating the walls of two adjacent bedrooms.
* The back door was forced from the outside. Two rear windows, in the kitchen and in Hampton's rear bedroom, were broken in from the outside. There is no sign of gunfire in the rear of the house except for the bedrooms, which are punctured with bullet holes. Standing in the entranceway between the kitchen and the dining room, you can see that four shotgun blasts were fired from that area three into Hampton's bedroom and one, penetrating two closets, lodging in the far wall of the middle bedroom.
* Hampton was shot from above while lying in bed. According to art independent autopsy conducted by the former chief pathologist for the County Coroner's office and witnessed by three physicians, two bullets entered Hampton's head from the right and from above, at a 45 degree angle.
Whatever happened in that apartment on the morning of December 4, it could not possibly have been the 20-minute "gun battle" that the police and the State's Attorney's office have described again and again. Clearly the State's Attorney's police went to the apartment heavily armed to do more than serve a search warrant for unauthorized and unregistered guns (a minor offense). But why now?
Why the Panthers?_____-
The answer furnished by many columnists and commentators"that the Panthers were an unpopular, probably dangerous group, and therefore the authorities may have overstepped the bounds of propriety in curbing their activities-does not hold up.
The Panthers were and are a popular, successful group, and it is precisely because of that success that they have become the targets of a nationwide governmental campaign of control This fact presents us with a far more serious issue of national policy. Theoretically we believe that any organization (and particularly any political organization) is entitled to win as much popular support as its platform and leadership permit. Surely this is the democratic way. But we make exceptions to that rule, particularly during periodic "red scares." Then, any group associated with an "international Communist conspiracy" or, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, a "criminal con spiracy" are denied that basic right.
So, with the rapid spread of Black Panther Party chapters across tht country in the past two years, and with the intellectual leadership that has made the Panther Party the ideological leader of most of the white radical left, and with the surprising organizational strength in cities from Hartford, Connecticut, to Peoria, Illinois, came increased governmental attention.
When Mitchell took office last January, The New York Times relates, he officially labeled the Black Panther Party a subversive threat to the national security"thereby authorizing the FBI to tap Panther phones and bug Panther offices. In July, J. Edgar Hoover gave the Panther Party the distinction of being "the greatest threat to the internal security of the extraordinary step of setting up a special task force on the Panthers, made up of representatives from its civil rights, internal security and criminal divisions.
The situation was similar at the local leveL The Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was founded in November of 1968 by Hampton and by Bobby Rush, the current chairman. Six months later, the Panthers had become the strongest organization in Chicago's black
3