New Haven Independent

A band of supporters bought it and rallied to his side.

I might have believed it, too, had Ward Churchill not been kind enough to respond to an e-mail message I once sent him.

Instead, the episode appears to me to be a victory for an out-of-fashion notion these days — holding published assertions to some semblance of factual standards. Churchill may identify himself as a man of the left, but people of all ideological stripes should cheer his dismissal.

Churchill gained national notice after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he published an essay calling office workers killed in the Twin Towers “little Eichmanns.” An inquiry followed. This week the Board of Regents at University of Colorado, where Churchill is a professor, fired him. The Regents said his cruel Sept. 11 comment had nothing to do with the firing. They said his history of fabricating research did.

“Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories,” the university’s president, Hank Brown, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column.

Churchill blasted the firing as punishment for his expressing his views. A protest ensued as well as, of course, a First Amendment lawsuit.

From afar, the Regents’ version sounds fishy. One can only imagine the pressure that the university was under to fire Churchill amid the public outrage over his comment. As someone concerned about public intolerance of dissenting voices in the wake of Sept. 11, I would be inclined to buy Churchill’s version of the Regents’ true motives.

Except that I encountered firsthand an example of Churchill’s research method, the most egregious contempt for fact or truth I’ve ever encountered.

The example concerned the murder of a Black Panther named Alex Rackley in New Haven in 1969. Fellow Panthers killed Rackley on suspicion of being a government informant. (The Panthers involved and law-enforcement officials I’ve been able to interview say Rackley was never an informant.) The subsequent murder trial of Panther leader Bobby Seale became a cause celebre for Panther supporters concerned at the time about government repression of antiwar and black-power groups; they massed in New Haven on Mayday, 1970, vowing to burn down the city, or at least Yale. (They didn’t, in part because the Panthers worked to stop them.)

I was researching a book on the Rackley case when I contacted Ward Churchill. Churchill has written widely about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which targeted radical groups, often illegally, according to a report later issued by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

Part of my task, years later, involved trying to find out who truly was and wasn’t an informant back then. As the Rackley murder shows, playing loose with the facts - spreading false accusations about purported informants and agents - could amount to a death sentence. To this day suspicions linger among most of the people involved.

I was particularly interested in the role of one Panther leader who oversaw the torture and murder of Alex Rackley. In my research I came across passing references to this Panther having served as a government agent. Tracing those references inevitably led to one source: Ward Churchill.

Specifically, the led to a passage in a book Churchill coauthored entitled Agents of Repression. Churchill wrote there that the Panther, “as it turned out, had been a paid FBI informer for a period of time never disclosed by Bureau.” (The passage appears in a section titled, “Fabrication of Evidence,” meaning fabrication by the FBI.)

That statement is footnoted. It refers to a paper written by late Panther leader Huey Newton that in fact presents no evidence that this Panther was a paid agent.

So I e-mailed Churchill to ask him the basis for the claim. He wrote back on Dec. 2, 2004.

“I’ve no official paper naming [the Panther] as an FBI operative. The case for his having been a provocateur is entirely circumstantial, but overwhelming,” Churchill wrote.

That may sound like an admission of error. It wasn’t.

“Of the 40-odd infiltrators the FBI has indicated it inserted into the BPP [Black Panther Party], the identities of only a half-dozen have been officially confirmed,” Churchill continued. Adding in a “half-dozen or so” “self-revealed” agents, “that leaves 28 (at a minimum) unidentified, other than by their behavior and treatment by authorities. On that basis, I feel no pangs of conscience of equivocation in asserting that [the Panther in quest] was one of them.”

In a subsequent e-mail message Churchill continued to argue that “taken in combination with the overall circumstances of his behavior… it is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was a Bureau asset.”

Now this Panther may have very well have cooperated with the FBI. His behavior was indeed bizarre; he also cooperated with the government at Bobby Seale’s trial. He himself denies have ever been a government agent or informant. He wrote to me from a Michigan jail cell that his life has been threatened by other inmates because of Churchill’s published allegations.

The FBI did use informants and agents provocateur in COINTELPRO. So did local police who worked with the feds. The then-head of New Haven’s police intelligence division told me that half the members of the New Haven Panther chapter secretly worked for him at the time. I confirmed the story of one of those informers.

Panthers at the time were aware that the FBI had spies in their midst. They could never be sure who the spies were. The FBI forged letters to Panthers, purportedly from other Panthers, falsely naming members as spies to fuel the suspicions, with disregard for the possible tragic consequences. That’s the effective - and insidious - point: The suspicions crippled the ability of an already paranoid organization to function. Other groups were similarly targeted, even if, unlike the Panthers, they didn’t advocate violence. The ability of dissenters to challenge their government was destroyed.

Churchill, of course, commits the very sin of which he accuses the FBI of committing - playing dangerous games with the truth, fabricating evidence, with disregard for the fatal consequences that can have for the reputations, even the lives, of other human beings. Besides constituting an outrage in itself for any published author or university scholar, Churchill’s contempt for the truth is a slap at the targets of government repression on whose behalf he claims to speak. It compromises any effort to compile a full and credible accounting of the FBI’s undisputed excesses of the period in the hope of safeguarding the ability of dissenters to challenge their government in the future.

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