Canada moves to extradite fugitive - Ex-Black Panther held in ’69 police shooting

A Canadian judge on Friday ordered a former Black Panther-turned-librarian back to Chicago to face charges that he tried to kill a police officer in 1969.

Joseph Pannell was picked up in Toronto last year after being a fugitive since 1974 on charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery. He was accused of shooting Chicago police Officer Terrence Knox. Pannell, who was 55 when he was arrested last year, is also charged with jumping bail.

Knox, who survived the attack, called the decision Friday by Justice David Watt "the most significant ruling in the case."

"I never thought they would ever catch this guy," Knox said. "Hopefully, when and if he comes back, this will be the end of an ongoing saga."

The bullets that authorities say Pannell fired severed nerves and arteries in Knox's arm, the former police officer said. Three doctors helped save his arm, but he said he still has pain and scars.

Knox, 58, and Cook County Assistant State's Atty. Mark Ertler said they know the extradition process might not be over.

Pannell's family said he plans to appeal the decision, The Associated Press reported. Pannell's attorney could not be reached for comment.

The Canadian minister of kustice will have 90 days to decide when he will surrender Pannell to the United States.

"Obviously, we are pleased with the judge's ruling in Toronto," Ertler said. If Pannell is extradited, the prosecutor said his office would seek to hold him without bail in Cook County.

Pannell, while living in Canada for more than 20 years, changed his name to Douglas Freeman, started a family and a life as a librarian at the Toronto Reference Library, officials said.

In re Black Panthers.

Perhaps trivia; but I'm glad to see the cases from the past, from the 70s are still being looked into. My young, naive life was changed irrevocably on August 7, 1970 in a Marin County courthouse.

http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs08022003.html

snip:

A year before his murder, his brother Jonathan was involved in an attempt to help free George and two other men known as the Soledad Brothers. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson entered the Marin County Courthouse armed with a submachine gun. He hoped to force the release of the Soledad Brothers. These were three men -- his brother George, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette -- who were charged with the murder of two guards at Soledad Prison after a black prisoner who was also a Muslim was killed by guards. Jonathan gave guns to the three prisoners who were present in the court--John McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee, a jailhouse lawyer who was testifying at the trial of fellow prisoner McClain, whose trial Jonathan interrupted. The three then took the judge, prosecutor and three jurors hostage.

The Coastal Post (http://www.coastalpost.com/96/2/marinco.htm)

snip:

The judge was pushed into an elevator along with three women jurors, the assistant district attorney, Gary Thomas, and the other two blacks who were on trial with McClain. All were forced into a van outside the courthouse.

Sheriff Montanos was called and ran down from his office, drew his gun, but he couldn't do anything because the judge had a shotgun taped to his neck which could go off at any moment.

The first shot came from inside the van, and was probably the one which killed the judge. A San Quentin guard, then fatally shot McClain, who was driving the van. The assistant D.A. seized a gun and shot the remaining two prisoners, but he himself was wounded in the spine. Officers opened the van doors and removed the living, which included the three women jurors. Thomas spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He eventually became a judge himself and took pride in dedicating a stone memorial to Judge Haley.

Thomas said, "Judge Haley embodied the ideals of the Knights of the Round Table: 'Live pure, speak true, love Christ the King'."

The black activist, Angela Davis, was arrested after the serial numbers on the guns were traced to her. After spending 322 days in the Marin jail, she was tried and acquitted in San Jose.

--end snips.

You see, assistant district attorney Gary Thomas's daughter was my friend. I knew the family.

I witnessed first hand, not just the shock and horror throughout Marin, but what happened to this family, Gary Thomas' family. I witnessed courage and dignity. A "revolutarionary terrorist" changed her family, her life. Good, wonderful family. They stood together, and tall.

Ruminating and digesting, going about my business, background assimilation of data and events.. I found myself remembering Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, Angela Davis, and the murder of the presiding judge Haley. I was there, I was young. It was madness. This Soledad moment went down in my county, Marin. And was close to me by six degrees. Flashbulb memories of all the actions, reactions.

I, my family, and all around were horrified. I cried angry tears against "Black Rage" at the "Machine" - Murdering innocent people, regardless of race, class, profession who were doing what they had sworn to do -- and just so a special "interest group" could make a "political statement". This was so wrong. And so evil.

The shock waves which saturated the overshocked Marin Countyites were seized by "liberal leaders", and redirected, and spun. Marinites took an appeasement approach. And Marin then changed. It became a place I no longer knew.

Marin County changed.. from that point on. I saw it happen. I witnessed all that happened in the afterwards. That crime, in Marin, was the nexus point. Taliban Johnny came as no surprise to me.

And I've kept 'watch' ever since August 7, 1970.

Exclusive Interview: Bernadette Dohrn & Bill Ayers

What led the Weathermen to violent action—and given the chance, would they do it again? Former Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers talked to members of the press about regret, the Sixties and student activism at the Television Critics’ Association Press Tour in January 2004 in Hollywood, California.

In the film, Mark Rudd talks about his qualms and his very divided feelings about what he did. You don’t make any equivalent statement, and I wondered why not… How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?

Bill Ayers: I’ve thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it’s impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful?… I don’t think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war… This was what was going on in our names. So we tried to resist it, tried to fight it. Built a huge mass movement, built a huge organization, and still the war went on and escalated. And every day we didn’t stop the war, two thousand people would be killed. I don’t think what we did was extreme…. We didn’t cross lines that were completely unacceptable. I don’t think so. We destroyed property in a fairly restrained level, given what we were up against.

Dohrn: I can iterate four or five things that I have profoundly complex feelings about. I wish that we hadn’t been hierarchical, and had a concept of leadership. I wish that I had bridged the feminist movement and the anti-war movement better than I did. I wish that we hadn’t used the language of war. You heard me saying a declaration of war. I wish we had used the language of resistance.

Obviously, we didn’t stop the war. We were part of an authentic, aroused opposition to the U.S. empire and to racism at home. Those were two issues we had a grip on…. Of course, I wish we had done better, and I wish we had stopped the war earlier, and I wish we had been more effective, and I wish we had been more unifying. Or at least fought for unity even when we couldn’t achieve it.

At the end of the day, I feel like we were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that moment where there was hope and a sense of libratory possibility.

Ms. Dohrn, how do you get off of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List?

Dohrn: That’s a very good question. A friend gave us a book, that’s in our living room if you come to visit us, about the FBI. You know, Hoover invented the Ten Most Wanted List. It was his PR machine. It was a brilliant idea, because he put people on his Ten Most Wanted List right before he was about to catch them. Then he would catch them the next day as they were going to visit their mom.

So this book is one page of everybody who was ever on the Ten Most Wanted List…. From 1922 to 1972, they were all bank robbers, and kind of the guys in wool suits, thick-necked guys. And then suddenly there are six people on the Ten Most Wanted List—Angela Davis and Rap Brown and me and these students from Brandeis and so on. It’s very strikingly strange.

They took us off, we didn’t get caught, they took us off when the federal indictments against us were dropped for governmental misconduct.

If you could take Vietnam and all that happened then, put it in 2004, would you make the same choices that you made then? Would you strategize differently?

Dohrn: I like the bridges that have been built between the feminists and the gay and the environmental movements. All the progeny of the Sixties. All the many movements that have happened since then are now part of a kind of a big tent of anti-globalization and anti-empire. So it’s a different world, but trying to act on your principles, trying to use humor, trying to tweak power, trying to be willing to take the consequences of what you believe in.

I do feel we are in a very similar situation… Isn’t it haunting? Don’t we want to know how many Iraqis are injured every day? Why are we not seeing caskets coming back? What about the Americans injured there?

Ayers: And the one thing we do know now is that, like then, our government is lying to us…. This is not the big deal, but young people know that the government lies to them routinely. Certainly, if I was looking back and saying what can we do differently, I’d say, “Let’s not be sectarian, let’s not be hierarchical, let’s not split every time we turn around.”

I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas. But at the same time, I think we would be, should be, and we should be today, activists. We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

And is there something positive that you see? I’m hearing a lot of objections, understandably, but is there some positive tack that you see the government is taking?

Ayers: No.

Dohrn: The positive energy is coming from below. I think that there is a lot going on with young people today.

As professors, do you see that same kind of passion that you had as students in your own students, who might be questioning this at this time?

Ayers: I think that young people are, in so many ways, more advanced than we were in terms of political thinking. They’re not political in a kind of ideological way, but in a cultural, social way. Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

In February (of 2003), there was the biggest outpouring of anti-war energy in the history of the world. Much bigger than anything we mobilized in the Sixties… The energy is still there, and it’s something that’s being mobilized.

Dohrn: I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we’re doing is not that. But it’s partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

Following up on that, since you are both professors, do you get a sense of how your students regard you? Is there something sort of romantic about the Weather Underground to them or are you just old farts?

Dohrn: Very much!

Ayers: The last part… that’s it!

I would agree that what you said about the people who were actually agitating, who were really involved, being a very small group in the Sixties—a relatively small group that somehow seemed larger than it was. And now we seem to have more people upset about something and yet it seems smaller. What happened? Is it the way the media covers it?

Dohrn: I think there’s a mystery about what a social movement is. All this tremendous amount of political organizing and creative alternative institutions… and yet it isn’t a movement. That was true in the early half of the Sixties, too, and it cohered suddenly into a movement…. I don’t know what makes that happen.

Ayers: There was a context also that the anti-war movement grew up in, and that was the context of the civil rights movement. And that defined the whole question of what was possible and what one could do. The anti-war movement borrowed both strategy and tactics—all kinds of things from the civil rights movement.

Even calling it the Sixties seems odd to me sometimes. Why is it the Sixties? Who lives their life by decades, you know? Oh, I’m in the Sixties, now it’s 1970, I gotta stop.

Was it easy to go underground and people not know who you were and where you were, and could you still do it today, do you think?

Ayers: It was relatively easy, in the sense that it was more a state of mind than anything. You stepped out your front door and you know, you changed a few details and you were there. But part of it is, yes, it’s easy to get lost in America. The other part was there was a mass base of opposition to war and a mass youth movement that was huge and hard to describe to people who weren’t there. So it’s not that we were never recognized. I was recognized every month, but people didn’t want to turn me in. Why should they? They weren’t on the other side.

Is it possible for old farts to go underground? I mean, is the kind of thing you did really sort of the province of the young?

Dorhn: Yes. Well, you know, of course it isn’t really. But we walked away from our families, from our so-called career paths. Hundreds of thousands of people did. It was a time of massive dropouts and multiple undergrounds.

Does the Weather Underground really have a legacy?

Dohrn: Only history can decide. I think that I don’t feel like fighting for a legacy of a particular organization; we were part of a social upheaval—and it was huge. And it joined other parts of American history that until we were in it, I didn’t know about—you know, the abolitionist type—the various struggles in American history where people hurled themselves into resisting the law and taking the consequences of it.

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