*Once Again, Free Laaman And Manning- The Last Of The Ohio Seven In Jail- In Honor Of Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning

Click on title to link to a little off-hand information about the Ohio 7.

Markin comment:



Needless to say, the organization that I support, the Partisan Defense Committee, has over the years supported the last two imprisoned members of the group, Jan Laaman and Tom Manning, in their struggles for freedom. While we spent time on this site recording and remembering various events from our youth, the 1960s, we should not forget those who are behind the walls of the class enemy. I will repeat what I have mentioned on previous occasions, and the PDC has as well in their publicity on the case; the Ohio did nothing that can be considered a crime by the international working class movement. Moreover, the roll call of crimes, great and small, from war to torture by the American imperial state in that time since Vietnam remain to be opposed, including today's Obamian war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Free Laaman and Manning- Do Not Let Them Die In Prison!

*Partisan Defense Committee- 23rd Holiday Appeal- Free All Class War Prisoners i

Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive's copy of his articel on the Scottsboro Boys from 1932, as an example of his keen understanding of the need for the international labor movement to protect its own and other oppressed segments of society. An injury to one is an injury to all!

This is a repost of the 22nd Holiday Appeal in 2007. Unfortunately this issue of freedom and support of these class war prisoners is still with us. Donate generously, if you can, to this important component of the struggle for a more just, socialist world. This is our duty to those militants in prison, it is not charity.

23 November 2007


22nd Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!


“The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.”

—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,”
Labor Defender, September 1926

For the past 22 years, the Partisan Defense Committee has been sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression. In doing so, we have revived the tradition initiated by the International Labor Defense (ILD) under Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party and the ILD’s first secretary (1925-28). This year, as in years past, the PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black rights, radical youth and defenders of civil liberties to join us in building our annual Holiday Appeal, which raises funds for this unique program.

The Holiday Appeal benefits will focus particularly on our campaign to mobilize mass protest demanding freedom for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia currently awaits a decision by a federal appeals court on whether to reinstitute the death sentence, keep him entombed in prison for life or grant him a new trial or other legal proceedings. For those fighting for Mumia’s freedom, there must be no illusions in capitalist “justice.” Earlier this year, the capitalist courts again turned down appeals by class-war prisoners Leonard Peltier, Ed Poindexter and Mumia’s son Jamal Hart. Build the Holiday Appeal! Free all class-war prisoners!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” The fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner has reached a crucial juncture. This past May, oral arguments were heard before the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals—the last stage before the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision could come at any moment.

9 December 2007 marks the 26th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. More than six years ago, Mumia’s attorneys submitted to the courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, but to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.

Mumia faces the racist death penalty or life in prison because he has always spoken for the oppressed, like the Jena 6 or those left to die in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Workers, immigrants, minorities and all opponents of racist oppression must redouble their efforts to free Mumia now!

Leonard Peltier is an internationally revered class-war prisoner. His incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial for the deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone at the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted: “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 63-year-old Peltier is still locked away. In separate lawsuits, early this year federal courts in New York and Minnesota kept under government seal thousands of FBI documents, once again covering up the racist frame-up that has already stolen 30 years of his life.

Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania laws, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal laws. Hart was transferred to Minersville, PA, where prison officials subjected him to repeated provocations and improperly adjusted Hart’s security level to deny him transfer to a lower level security facility; a transfer to Loretto, PA, has finally been granted. In October, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals summarily turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition which would have freed him after more than ten years in prison.

Eight MOVE members, Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa, are in their 30th year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. In 2008, the MOVE prisoners will be eligible for parole, but without massive calls for their freedom can only expect continued imprisonment.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings in the late 1970s and ’80s against symbols of U.S. imperialism such as military and corporate offices. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.

The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the deadly FBI COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo, railroaded to prison for a 1970 explosion which killed a cop, were sentenced to life and have now served more than 35 years in jail. In September, a Nebraska court denied a new trial for Poindexter despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with his comrade and mentor, George Jackson, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite hundreds of letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 26 years, Pinell has repeatedly been denied parole, most recently in November 2006. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

* * *

(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 903, 23 November 2007)

Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.

From The Jan Laaman Blog- On Tunisia and Egypt- Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio Seven Now!

Click on headline to link to the Free Jan Laaman Blog - Free Jan Laaman and Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio Seven Now!

From The Free Jaan Laaman Blog-On Libya-Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio Seven Now!

From The Free Jaan Laaman Blog- On Libya

Markin comment:

Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio Seven Now!

*IN HONOR OF RICHARD WILLIAMS OF THE OHIO SEVEN

Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Ohio 7. As always with this source and its collective editorial policy, especially with controversial political groups like the Ohio 7, be careful checking the accuracy of the information provided at any given time.

COMMENTARY

THIS NOTICE IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE, P.O. BOX 99, CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NY 10013-0099. Check link at right. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT THE LAST OF THE OHIO SEVEN, LAAMAN AND MANNING MUST NOT DIE IN PRISON.

Richard Williams, one of three remaining Ohio 7 prisoners, died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, on 7 December 2005, one month after his 58th birthday. The cause was complications resulting from cancer and Hepatitis C. Prison and government authorities hounded Williams—who maintained to the end his anti-imperialist, anti-racist beliefs—to his grave. When he could barely walk, he was still shackled and chained any time he left the Butner facility. Interferon treatments were delayed until it was far too late.

This is bitter news. Williams had been held at U.S. Penitentiary Lompoc, California, and was remanded to solitary after the September 2001 terror attacks. As his son, Netdahe Williams Stoddard, wrote in a recent letter: "Richard was a strong and healthy man up to that autumn of 2001. Fifteen months of solitary confinement, lack of exercise, medical neglect and abuse by a reactionary and vengeful federal government left dad suffering from an array of medical problems." Even after he suffered a mild heart attack in February 2002, during a short stay back in the general prison population, Lompoc authorities sent him back to solitary.

Richard Williams came of age politically in prison. A working-class kid from Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1967 he chose prison over joining the Army when convicted of marijuana possession. In prison again in the early '70s, he organized protests and strikes for better conditions. After his release, he joined other activists in protecting the homes of people in the Boston area who were targeted by anti-busing racists. In 1979, he and his comrades went to Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest the Klan's murder of five unionists, civil rights workers and supporters of the Communist Workers Party. In 1981, he joined what he called "the armed clandestine movement."

Williams was convicted in 1986 of five bombings of military recruitment and corporate facilities and sentenced to 45 years. But an effective life sentence wasn't enough for a government that wanted to bury such radicals in prison. The next year he went on trial for the 1981 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. Fellow Ohio 7 defendant Tom Manning testified that he had shot the officer in self-defense and that Williams was not even present. The result was a hung jury.

In 1989 Williams was tried on charges of conspiring with fellow Ohio 7 defendants Ray Luc Levasseur (released from prison in November 2004) and Patricia Gros Levasseur to overthrow the government of the United States. The charges of "seditious conspiracy" were based on a 1948 law designed to criminalize left-wing political and labor activity (see "RICO Witchhunt Targets Ohio 7," WV No. 476, 28 April 1989). But despite spending millions on a trial that dragged on for months against an isolated handful of leftists, the government's attempt to revive "thought crime" sedition prosecutions was rejected when the jury refused to convict.

The government wasn't finished, however. In 1991 he was retried and convicted of the New Jersey killing in a courtroom packed with state troopers and their supporters. Criminally, Williams and the rest of the Ohio 7 were abandoned by the bulk of the left, including many of those who had vicariously cheered their earlier actions. As Ray Levasseur wrote in 1992: "The real deal with those that renounce us and retreat from trials and prison battlegrounds is that we are seen as anti-imperialists with guns.... The dichotomy was striking: a frenzied police power bent on exacting their pound of flesh, and the wilted response of the Left"

The actions of the Ohio 7 are not crimes from the standpoint of the working class. However, as Marxists, we do not share the political views that animated Richard Williams, Jaan Laaman, Tom Manning and the rest of the Ohio 7. Despairing of organizing the proletariat in struggle, they decided that the road to fighting this racist, exploitative system was "clandestine armed resistance" by a handful of dedicated leftists. Despite these political differences, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have forthrightly defended these militants, adding Williams, Laaman, Manning and Levasseur to the PDC's prisoner stipend program, and have always respected their commitment and integrity.

At the PDC's Holiday Appeal benefit in New York City, two days after Richard Williams' death, leftist attorney Lynne Stewart spoke movingly of her years-long association with Williams. Stewart, who faces sentencing on trumped-up charges of "aiding terrorism" for her defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, noted that Williams and his comrades "truly believed in what they were doing. And they truly believed that victory was around the corner."

Richard Williams stood up to some of the worst that the rulers' courts and prison system could inflict and never wavered. He never repudiated his road taken, and more than 20 years in prison hellholes could not break him. Honor Richard Williams! Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning!

* From The Partisan Defense Committee-FREE JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING!

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

COMMENTARY

THIS NOTICE HAS BEEN PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE, P.O BOX 99, CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NY 10013-0099. I NEED ONLY ADD MILITANTS MUST SUPPORT THE CALL TO FREE THE LAST OF THE OHIO SEVEN. THEY MUST NOT DIE IN PRISON.

In April 2005, we added Tom Manning to our prisoner stipend program along with his comrades Jaan Laaman and Richard Williams, as we had with Ray Luc Levasseur up through his release in 2004. Now Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman are the last two Ohio 7 prisoners still incarcerated, and if the U.S. government has its way, they will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Like Williams, Manning grew up poor and working class. He was sent to Vietnam, where he saw the atrocities of U.S. imperialism up close. In the 1970s and '80s, he worked with other leftist radicals in community organizing, prisoner support and welfare advocacy. In a 7 June 1999 statement, Manning wrote: "I am a Freedom Fighter who took up arms to support and defend an International Movement for Human Rights, Self Determination, Justice and Dignity for all Peoples."

Manning spent years in continual lockdown in some of the worst hellholes of the prison system—USP Marion (Illinois) and USP Florence ADMAX (Colorado),
a sensory deprivation unit of steel and concrete with no sound and minimal human contact, designed to break prisoners. Manning is currently at USP Hazelton (West Virginia).

The PDC received a letter dated 27 November 2005, from Jaan Laaman in which he wrote, "This year I came across some profound new evidence and I now have a possibility of reopening and challenging my entire [Massachusetts] conviction and sentence. I have always maintained my innocence in this case and now I may finally be able to prove it."

If Jaan can prevail in this legal challenge he may be eligible for parole on the federal conviction he is also serving. As he put it, "any legal effort is an uphill battle, especially for political prisoners." The PDC has sent a check for $500 to the Jaan Laaman Legal Freedom Fund, PO. Box 681, East Boston, MA 02128. Funds are urgently needed to hire legal defense to pursue Laaman's appeal. We encourage our supporters to help Jaan Laaman's fight for freedom.

You can read about Jaan Laaman and other class-war prisoners in the online magazine he contributes to: www.4strugglemag.org. Or write to 4strugglemag, 2035 St. Laurent Boulevard, Montreal, Quebec, H2X 2T3, Canada. •

*Free The Last Of The Ohio Seven- Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning Must Not Die In Prison!

Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee web site. The Partisan Defense Committee has defended the Ohio Seven, and particularly through the annual Holiday Appeal has provided stipends for Brothers Laaman and Manning over the years.

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON. THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.


The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution.

In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.

YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.