Author: Linn Washington

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate defense of being misled by staff members resembles a defense advanced in 1999 by another once top Republican NJ official to distance himself from a his role in a contentious 1990s-era scandal that roiled the Garden State: racial profiling by NJ state troopers that targeted minorities for illegal enforcement.

Christie’s defense distancing himself from Bridgegate pivots on his contention that some of his top personal staff and top political appointees kept him totally in the dark about intrigues behind the gridlock that disrupted the small town of Fort Lee last September. “Unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge,” Christie declared.

In 1999 Peter G. Verniero defended his failures as NJ’s Attorney General to forthrightly address racial profiling by troopers with the claim that he was deceived about profiling. Verniero played an ‘I-was-misled’ card.

Verniero declared that top state trooper officials – under his direct command – deceived him just like Chris Christie’s current claim that members of his executive staff deceived him.

NJ Governor Christie Todd Whitman, a Republican, elevated Verniero into the AG slot and then onto the NJ Supreme Court after he served as Whitman’s Chief of Staff.

Current NJ Gov. Chris Christie’s now ex-Deputy Chief of Staff – Bridget Kelly – is purportedly one of those at the center of the Bridgegate controversy. Christie’s bid to elevate his current Chief of Staff to NJ’s Attorney General is now on hold due to Bridgegate.

When Barack Obama, the first black president of America, delivered remarks Tuesday during a South African memorial service for that country’s first black president, he muffed a historic opportunity to right a grave wrong done by the American government – one that helped send Nelson Mandela to prison for nearly 30-years.

Obama, during his remarks at a Johannesburg, SA memorial service for Mandela, who died on December 5 at age 95, recalled how that world-revered leader had endured “brutal imprisonment.”

But the U.S. president conveniently excluded the fact that America’s CIA had helped South African agents capture Mandela, leading to the very imprisonment that Obama and other world leaders were decrying during that service.

A few miles from the soccer stadium where that memorial service for Mandela was held is the house in Soweto where Mandela lived before he went underground in the early 1960s to ramp up the fight in his homeland against apartheid – that racist system modeled on U.S. segregation laws.

That small four-room house on Vilakazi Street in Soweto’s Orlando West section is now a museum commemorating the life and sacrifices of the man credited universally hailed as the ‘Father’ of modern South Africa.

Schoolchildren visit Mandela House Museum in Soweto, where the South African leader lived before going underground (Linn Washington photo)

Florida U.S. Congressman Trey Radel, recently convicted of possessing cocaine, rightly wears the label of Drug War hypocrite. But assigning that title to just that one prominent felon helps hide the long-standing stench of Drug War hypocrisy that extends from Capitol Hill to the White House and state capitals nationwide, including members of both parties.

Yes, Tea Party-backed Radel (R-Fla.), busted recently in a federal sting operation in the act of purchasing cocaine, deserves his hypocrisy dunce cap for antics like siding this year with a Republican seeking to require food stamp recipients to first receive mandatory drug testing.

Philadelphia Democratic Congressman Bob Brady notes what many of his Capitol Hill colleagues (hypocritically) refuse to acknowledge publicly. “An elected official who calls for drug testing for poor people trying to feed their families with the support of food stamps while knowing that he is himself a drug user is an absolute violation of the public trust,” Brady stated.

The mean-spirited initiative from Radel and his GOP confederates for pee-tests from persons impoverished enough to need government food assistance has, it should be noted, proved a costly failure in the Sunshine State.

Rank hypocrisy, thy name is Radel…

  Ed Forchion, recognized as America’s foremost black marijuana legalization activist, freely admits that he “agitates” people – powerful people from prosecutors to politicians and even more mainstream anti-pot prohibition advocates who bristle at his antics.

The activism of Forchion, often outrageous like his March 2000 stunt of smoking a marijuana joint inside the New Jersey State Assembly chamber while dressed in bold black and white stripped jailhouse garb, has drawn praise and prison terms.

Forchion’s activism has produced a few legal victories like a February 2003 federal court ruling enhancing Free Speech rights for all pot legalization advocates. That ruling also freed Forchion from a prison stint arising from his clash with NJ probation authorities over their demands that he stop publicly criticizing Drug War racism.

Forchion’s imprisonments during the past year arising from yet another pot possession conviction triggerd him to pursue perhaps his most bodacious act to date, another attempt to formally change his name, this time seeking a name change to: Just a Nigger.

Protesting for pot legalization gets him treated like "Just a Nigger" so Ed Forchion is making that his name (click photo to visit his website)

On the first day of the federal government shut-down, as hundreds of tourists were turned away from the shuttered Liberty Bell and other fabled sites within the Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia, Richard Dyost stood near the building housing the Bell and received a big laugh.

Dyost, wearing a tall hat featuring marijuana leaves, was among a group that included site-visit-spurned tourists, who watched federal park rangers and Philadelphia police get ‘punked’ like the people once targeted for pranks on the defunct cable television program named “Punk’d.” These particular law enforcers were pranked by protestors opposed to the federal government’s prohibition of pot.

Pro-pot protestors had announced a smoke-out at the Liberty Bell for the afternoon of Tuesday, October 1.

Park rangers (working despite the government shut-down), Philadelphia police, as well as representation from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Philadelphia, assembled to arrest protestors attempting to smoke the illegal substance – an enforcement spectacle that has occurred with regularity over the past few months during monthly pro-pot demonstrations outside the Liberty Bell.

Weed protester Richard Dyost pulled a fast one on Park police at a protest on Philadelphia's Independence Mall

Imagine U.S. House Speaker John Boehner blasted on weed.

Given Boehner’s teary-eyed trait, he’d probably cry uncontrollably when high on pot alternating his crocodile tears with hysterical laughter…perhaps even laughing at some of that dumb shi-tuff he and his GOP colleagues constantly do on Capitol Hill.

Imagining a stoner Boehner

With Boehner and his GOP congressional confederates battling the Obama White House over federal budget expenditures and debt ceiling limits, there could be value in putting pot legalization into this partisan wrangling if Boehner is honest when claiming these fiscal imbroglios are really about federal government expenditures exceeding revenue.

Putting an end to the federal government’s failed pot prohibition policies, now nearing the eighty-year mark, would provide tremendous sources of new revenue. The federal government could save the estimated $10-billion-plus now spent annually on just law enforcement. The federal government could reap additional billions from taxing what experts estimate is the now untaxed $113-billion per year illegal marijuana industry. Plus ending prohibition would save millions now spent on the anti-pot propaganda oozing from government agencies.

The failed 'War' on Drugs; looking for drugs on the Mexican border

I received the text message from my buddy blasting the acquittal of George Zimmerman minutes before I boarded an airplane in London in route to South Africa.

To say I was not surprised by the acquittal handed down by the predominately white, all-female jury is an understatement.

That verdict freeing wannabe cop Zimmerman, whose self-defense excuse rested on his conflicted claims that he shot a teen through the heart during a confrontation that Zimmerman started – after Zimmerman ignored explicit orders from police to stand-down – is so symbolic of so many structural problems that have corroded the core of American society since its colonial-era start.

Unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was walking to his father’s home after purchasing candy and ice tea when targeted by Zimmerman who – seeing a black teen wearing a hoodie – told police dispatchers Martin was “up to no good” and looked like he was on drugs. Zimmerman’s observations, made at night in the rain, about Martin being up-2-no-good and on-drugs reeked of racial profiling – a fact downplayed by prosecution and studiously avoided by defense during Zimmerman’s trial.

While a part of me wanted to side with my buddy’s ire at Zimmerman’s not even getting a wrist-slap conviction on a lesser charge for his punk admission that he killed a kid who he said beat him up during a scuffle, another side of me remained detached, reminded as I was of the details in so many stories that I’ve covered in thirty-plus years of being a journalist.

I’ve seen too many racially unbalanced juries render acquittal verdicts in too many race-tainted cases where clear evidence of the white defendant’s culpability existed – culpability obscured by lack-luster prosecution and other perverse judicial system procedures/postures.
Travon Martin, 17, slain by a white gunman while buying some candy

Drug-related corruption within the Philadelphia Police Department – once again – is the target of federal authorities.

This latest action by federal authorities involves two patrolmen charged with trafficking drugs and robbing suspected drug dealers while on-duty and in full uniform.

A few days before federal authorities announced the early June indictments against those two patrolmen, Philadelphia authorities announced the arrest of a policeman arising from that officer’s scheme to rob drug dealers.

Curiously, this latest federal enforcement action against Philadelphia police tainted by drug corruption did not involve the six officers at the center of a mushrooming scandal that has resulted in Philadelphia city prosecutors refusing to prosecute drug arrests by those officers.

Philadelphia’s DA has yet to fully explain why he will no longer prosecute arrests made by those six officers, now transferred from narcotics to street patrol duty. This decision not to prosecute has led to the dismissal of over 300 cases since December 2012. This dismissal of cases involving those seemingly tainted officers exceeds even the 250 cases prosecutors dropped in the mid-1990s as a result of another a drug-related corruption scandal involving five Philadelphia policemen.

And, curiously, this latest action by federal authorities did not involve the Philadelphia policeman captured on videotape by Police Department Internal Affairs investigators stealing money from drug dealers during an investigation arising largely from evidence against that policeman provided by other police officers who witnessed several instances of his criminal conduct. That cash-copping Philly cop, fired for his corruption, was reinstated to the Police Department in early 2012 by an arbitrator following a process known to be weighted in favor of Philadelphia’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, which employed that tainted officer in the union’s headquarters until the union helped secure his reinstatement.

A stark contrast to the outrage officials nationwide always express in the wake of arrests involving police tainted by drug corruption is the consistent lack of outraged effort authorities give to a more serious issue.
Drug War: Lost before it began, but causing massive corruption in police departments across America

Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice.

This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list – the first female to have that dubious distinction.

Shakur was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a May 1973 incident on the NJ turnpike, where one of her companions was killed and another captured. Once known as JoAnne Chesimard, she escaped from a NJ prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984 where she lives today.

While Shakur,65, occasionally criticizes racist inequities in the U.S. – comparable to that of many politicians including Barack Obama prior to this election of U.S. President – she does not actively advocate or engage in terrorism.

Yet many contend she is a ‘terrorist’ because of her armed resistance decades ago to American racism that included police brutality – a deadly offense Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried twice in his seminal 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. A May 10 editorial in the conservative Washington Times declared Shakur had to “pay for her crimes” suggesting Cuba send her to a cell in Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. torture prison located on land the U.S. illegally occupies in Cuba.

Although federal authorities did double the NJ state reward for the capture of Shakur to $2-million when placing her on their “Most Wanted” terrorist list exactly forty-years after that 1973 incident, the bounty hunter incident referenced above occurred before the widely condemned listing of Shakur.
Assata Shakur as she appeared when arrested (under the name JoAnne Chesimard) and as she looks today in exile in Cuba

Was it simply a “cold business decision” or a callous act of censorship?

This is the question swirling around legendary pro-basketball player Shaquille O’Neal who put a power move on Stephen Vittoria blocking this respected filmmaker’s showing of his latest documentary at the movie complex O’Neal co-owns in downtown Newark, NJ, the city where both of these men were born.

Representatives of O’Neal’s movie complex have claimed in private conversations with Newark activists that they cancelled Vittoria’s film solely because it is inconsistent with their screening practice, countering claims their cancellation sought to squelch the film because of its content.

Vittoria planned to show his latest documentary “Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary” at the CityPlex-12 on April 26.

But as the final publicity/ticket sales push for the scheduled screening was about to go into high gear, Vittoria discovered on April 11 that CityPlex-12 management had cancelled the booking and halted all marketing efforts. Theater officials reportedly even fired a staff member who had worked with Vittoria.

Censored in Newark: 'Long Distance Revolutionary,' a new film about jailed journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal (click on image to play the trailer)