From Dr. Boyce Watkins — “Facts You May Not Know About the Troy Davis Case“

A fascination with, aversion toward, and utter confusion about the United States are all paradoxically possible at the same point in time. To an extent, these seemingly incompatible feelings accompany the imperial position of hegemony that the U.S.A. currently occupies. In this context, what happens in the U.S., particularly when lives are at stake and oppression appears irresistible, deserves the world’s compassionate attention. Legal matters, especially when capital punishment is at issue, are typical of this sort of important development that mandates a closer look.

Though I’m not an attorney, as a wordsmith I know that a fascination with language and meaning is a lawyer’s stock in trade. A while back, contemplating the term ‘accessory,’ in its criminal legal sense, seemed particularly apt in regard to the State of Georgia, where until recently I resided in the Southern U.S. A wide-ranging and authoritative definition of ‘accessory’ shows up in Black’s Law Dictionary and multiple other sources: “one who is not the chief actor in the offense, nor present at its performance, but in some way concerned therein, either before or after the act committed; one who aids, abets, commands, or counsels another in the commission of a crime. Accessory after the fact–person who, knowing a felony to have been committed by another, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the felon, in order to enable him to escape from punishment, or the like. Accessory before the fact–one who orders, counsels, encourages, or otherwise aids and abets another to commit a felony and who is not present at the commission of the offense. Accessory during the fact–one who stands by without interfering or giving such help as may be in his power to prevent the commission of a criminal offense.”

Inasmuch as any Georgia resident, who is not actively protesting the pending execution of Troy Anthony Davis, either is or ought to be aware of this coming killing, such a one is quite likely about to become every sort of accessory to this still young man’s judicial murder, which, if Davis is innocent, is at the very least a negligent homicide. Let me be completely clear: this means that not only would Governor Nathan Deal and most of the State’s legislature be culpable for what is as likely as not a major felony, it would mean that the several million Peach State occupants who are doing nothing would also be chargeable, in that their silence and inattention, or, in far too many cases of misguided vengefulness, their active support and direction, provided aid and comfort to the actual executioners.

Undoubtedly, someone viciously killed Mark Allen MacPhail on August 19, 1989. Just as obviously, a Savannah, Georgia jury convicted Troy Davis of that brutal murder in August, 1991. Lacking physical evidence that Mr. Davis was the killer, however, or any circumstantial evidence other than his presence at the scene, where off-duty officer MacPhail was attempting to break up a parking lot melee, Chatham County prosecutors relied on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses to make the charges against Troy Anthony Davis stick.

Today, seven of those nine observers take back their testimony, admitting that they cannot state with any certainty who pulled the trigger and slayed an honest cop doing good work. Several recanting witnesses speak of blatant police misconduct, including threats of imprisonment if they did not implicate Troy Davis.

Mark Allen MacPhail’s death is a fact; that someone gutlessly murdered him is a fact; Troy Anthony Davis’ conviction for that soulless crime is a fact. But we should make no mistake: given copious other facts that are now at hand, including and in addition to the recantation of over three quarters of the eyewitnesses who formed the sole basis for the State’s pinning this act on Mr. Davis in the first place, his actual guilt is at best one possibility among many others to account for the cretinous and hateful destruction of Officer MacPhail’s life.

Thus, at the very least, a significant possibility exists, a possibility that any reasonable person would acknowledge adds up to a “reasonable doubt” that was unavailable to jurors in Savannah in August, 1991, that Mr. Davis, an innocent man, has served over twenty years in prison, almost all 240 of those months on death row, for something that he did not do. Moreover, of course, all Georgians who do not insist that he receive clemency are in one way or another playing a role in a murder of Troy Anthony Davis that will be, if he is guiltless, at least as sinister and cruel and stupid as the killing for which he may unjustly soon lose his life.

In a word, passively or actively, millions of Georgians are about to become accessories before, during, and after the fact to a homicide that even those who count themselves staunch advocates of capital punishment can only claim is possibly, or at most probably, a justifiable taking of human life. Obviously, these millions of ‘accessories’ will never face justice for their acts. Procedural layers of contemporary law protect them as seamlessly as a kevlar vest would fend off a BB gun.

Perhaps those who bother to read this missive will take comfort in their legal blamelessness, even as Troy Anthony Davis suffocates on a ‘cocktail’ of lethal poisons administered by agents of the Georgia citizenry. Nevertheless, to execute a blameless bystander for a horrifying homicide merely compounds the crime; not only does no one responsible face justice, but also all of those who impassively watch the new killing become morally bankrupt, whatever escape clauses permit them to evade proper criminal blame.

I for one refuse to stand with the murderers, and I pray for an upwelling and outpouring of support to the same effect. I’m not a particularly religious person, but if Troy Anthony Davis dies at the hands of Georgia’s criminal authorities on September 21 or the days that follow, then the vast majority of my former home-State’s citizenry deserve a common epithet delivered to the guilty: “May God have mercy on their souls.”

The equinox this year, in the event of Troy’s wanton execution, will portend an endless night of gruesome injustice. What must result from that, sooner or later, is a fulfillment, whatever particular ‘war of attrition’ comes as comeuppance for the arrogance of vicious murder by which Georgia operates, of Abraham Lincoln’s inquiry in his Second Inaugural:.

“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery(or Troy Davis’ murder by acts of omission and commission by Georgia’s people) is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives … this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash(or the hypodermic) shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

For non U.S. citizens or non Georgia residents who never ponder issues such as these, or who feel in fact that everything is more or less hunky-dory on the planet earth, the answer to the initial question about why some should care is simple. “They needn’t care a bit about Mr. Davis’ murder by the State and the accessory status of Georgia’s citizenry.”

But for anyone else, anyone who knows, with Hamlet, that “something is rotten” indeed in the State-of-Everything-on-Earth, the answer to the first interrogatory above is simple, but not quite so easy. To them, a concerned observer might suggest, “people who want significant reform need viewpoints that proffer something to fight the powers-that-be. Being able to note, with complete accuracy, that most Georgians are culpable for an innocent man’s murder, because they are too vicious, lazy, bigoted, or ignorant to be other than criminal accessories to such a crime, sounds to me like ammunition in the battle about what kind of future we hope to fashion for our progeny.”

When I investigated this story in 2004, I uncovered evidence that the Savannah Police know precisely what they’re doing. Executing an innocent man, while the killer is on their payroll is part of Departmental protocol somehow. In any event, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, with an update that is more concerned with my work on the case, and actions available to those who oppose murdering innocent men, due out early next week.

Ultimate Injustice: Meet The ‘Hangmen’ Who Will Decide The Fate of Troy Davis in Georgia

The stupidity in Right-wing media at the end of last week was suffocating. The “president” of the Republican Party, the man who ATE the GOP — Rush FAT Limbaugh, rubbished the concept of social justice, while the sharp tongued “virus” — Andrea Tantaros declared she was getting more sex than Democratic feminists.

One idiot guest at FoxNOOSE blamed “Spanish” unemployment on renewable energy and Fox anchor, Chris Wallace — congratulated and thanked America’s Dr. Josef Mengele, Dick Cheney — a pulseless, heartless sadist and war criminal — for presiding over the most murderous regime in the history of the world — the Bush regime, which murdered a seldom reported 1 million+ Iraqi women and children and 4000+ U.S. soldiers — by sending them to a war based on blatant lies and criminal falsifications.

Limbaugh: “Screw Social Justice”

Limbaugh discusses “social justice,” says Left makes “everybody equal, as in equally miserable”

Fox’s Andrea Tantaros: “A Lot” Of Feminists Aren’t Happy Because They’re “Older, They’re Not Married, And They’re Not Getting You-Know-What”

Fox Guest Falsely Blames Spanish Unemployment On Renewable Energy

Wallace Thanks [ WAR CRIMINAL ] Dick Cheney For His Service, Praises Cheney’s Memoir of LIES — As “A Very Good Read”

Fox’s [ Warthog ] Greg Gutfeld: “Are We Creating A Nation Of Wusses?” [ Beck Wannabe ] Eric Eric Bolling: “No, A Nation Of Democrats”

Fox’s Greg Gutfeld: Americans “Should Be Disgusted With Government,” “We Should Hate Those People, Even The Ones On Your Side”

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Georgia’s proportion of unionized workers is four percent, tied for forty-eighth and close to the bottom of the heap in the U.S., which is close to the bottom among nations that consider themselves “advanced” in living standards, technology, and social conditions generally.

As a result, Georgia’s wage earners make less money, have fewer benefits, and generally confront lower living standards. Few places on the continent would benefit more than the Peach State from a strong drive to increase trade-union representation.

Thus, the rally at Georgia’s state Capitol this past Wednesday night, called by the State’s AFL-CIO, the Atlanta Labor Council, and other organizations, was a heartening sign. On the steps of Georgia’s capitol in Atlanta, in the shadow of Tom Watson’s commanding presence, five hundred or more union members, community activists, students, and various other citizens–a widely representative sample that split fifty-fifty between men and women, was roughly equally White as Black, with a smattering of Hispanic and Native American advocates–stood up and shouted “Stop the War on Workers.” Present were peace groups, revolutionary proponents, and folks just generally angry at a system that rewards greed and privilege with money and perquisites while it squeezes everyone else out of any semblance of rights and benefits that groups like unions have fought hard to attain.

Throughout the United States, the courage and strength of thousands of workers in Wisconsin has given inspiration and leadership to wage-earners elsewhere. At times, the messages of these stalwart souls, braving frigid conditions and, as often as not, a media blackout, or at least a diminution of their struggle and a distortion of their perspective in the press, is exactly what working people need to hear.

“This Land Is Your Land” rings true with class-conscious solidarity and an uncompromising sense of democracy that must guide those who want decent lives.

Those who attended this gathering articulated these and other points powerfully. “Don’t let this be a one time rally,” said one preacher near the end. “The people inside that building(the capitol) need to know that we’ll be back, we won’t leave, we’re not going away.”

Steve Henson, a progressive-Democratic State Senator, asked, “Why is it that all sorts of associations are OK to come and lobby us in the legislature, but lobbying for working people is not OK?”

Another legislator spoke of her five year old grandson “leading the way.’ He wanted to pack up to go and join the fight in Wisconsin. She continued, factually, “If you can take a vacation; if you can take a sick day with pay; if you have a right to overtime pay; you have the labor movement to thank.”

In addition to the speakers at the front–a mix of union leaders, Democratic politicians, and religious and community activists–lively outbursts from the vociferous and boisterous crowd were constant, as if a massive labor beast, wild and fierce, were roaming the street. “The people, united, will never be defeated!” “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Union busters got to go!!”

These and other chants and catcalls were directed across the intersection of Washington Street and Martin Luther King Drive to the at most one hundred Tea Party counter-protesters whose sole coherent message seemed to be “Leave Poor Governor Walker alone.’

One of the savviest local politicians in America, Billy Mitchell, capsulized the meaning of the gathering when he said, “You always get exactly the government that you deserve,” a take-off on Frederick Douglass’ famous take on power. He continued, wry smile breaking out, “I promise you that the people inside this building are paying attention to you out here, and it will make a difference.”

A teacher’s representative, speaking of the 100,000+ American Association of Educators and American Federation of Teachers members in Wisconsin, was fierce in his call for action in Georgia. “The time has come to take back America and democracy from the billionaire’s boy club.” He was referring to the now incontrovertible behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Koch brothers, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and a working class boycott of Koch Enterprises that is coming.

A militant Black woman’s voice rang out from the podium. “A threat to justice in Ohio is a threat to justice in Georgia, and we have to remember that this is not about us, it’s about our children and our grandchildren, and if we want them to live decent lives, we have to stand up now.”

Another speaker vowed to follow through on this call. “We have to stand up on the capitol steps of every state in the union; we’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna fight, and we’re gonna win. Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” And the crowd roared its approval as it took up the chant in an electrifying shout into the sun-dappled Capitol building.

Karla Drenner, another Democrat who considers herself progressive, spoke of her own family union roots. She continued, “Instead of sending jobs to China, we need to helping out the working people here.” Her voice rising in shrill indignation, she vowed that nothing would stop the persistence of a united people. “You will hear us in the governor’s mansion; you will hear us in the legislature; and you will hear us on the street, because we are not going to go away.”

From the sidewalk, one fired-up protester rallied his misguided cohorts across the street. “Worker power is democratic power! Worker power is democracy.”

Another young teacher from the Northern Atlanta suburbs where many of the “Tea-Partiers’ keep their cupboards stocked with loot, lamented the implications of their message. “Let’s go back to workin’ 80 hours a week; let’s go back to child labor, your ten year old can get a job. That’s what they’re saying if they say get rid of unions. They’re just completely misguided.”

Everywhere, in solidarity with the specifics of the fight in Wisconsin, the message was insistent. “Kill that bill! Kill that bill! Kill that bill!” an unending litany of “we’ve had enough, we’re not going to take any more, we’re drawing a line in the sand.’

Across the street, meanwhile, the so-called “Tea-Party’ counter-protesters sang Sha-na-na. Their message continues to back the reactionary idea that, at exactly the same time that working-class tax dollars give trillions to the hyper-rich, working people who are barely making ends meet should have even less of a livelihood available. They sometimes also support the explicitly fascist notion that unions should not be legal, that labor should have few or no rights compared to money and property.

Matt Stoller wrote in a similar vein in his article, “The Liquidation of Society Versus the Global Labor Revival.” His insights command attention) from anyone who has a sense of self-preservation or hope for the future.

This humble correspondent and his partner wore signs that vocalized this point of view at the rally. One pair, modest sandwich board draped over THC’s shoulders, said, “The Problem Is Not Democrats Versus Republicans–Corporate Masters Own Them Both,” & “The Problem Is Organizing a Working-People’s-Power Party.” The second duo offered these lines. “The Current Crisis Affects Not Just Union Workers or Government Workers, but ALL Workers,” & “Big Business Disempowers All the World’s Working People by Dividing Them From Each Other—Solidarity is the Only Answer.”

This humble correspondent insists that only through worker empowerment, involvement, and leadership can the faintest prayer of social equality come to pass. Thus, the events in Wisconsin, and this past Wednesday in Atlanta, like the recent outpouring of activism in the Middle East, are first steps only. Without a more completely defined agenda, one that is both resolutely local and irrepressibly internationalist, one that puts working peoples’ rights and power at the forefront, one that sets aside all jingoistic nationalism and false patriotism, all of the rallies and songs and hopes of solidarity won’t amount to much that working people can take to the bank or put on the stove.

Given such a paradigm, the time has come for a grassroots sociopolitical movement that honestly contends for power. The fake “two-party system” doesn’t come close to achieving this possibility. Working people not only deserve better, but they also will gain little or nothing unless they organize and strive to gain, for themselves, of themselves, and by themselves, a conscious leadership role in the manifestation of a transformed society, a society in which property and wealth cannot overturn the social and economic rights and needs of working people.

Fifty-three years ago, as Autumn turned chilly in the Peach State, MLK was sick; he went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist to preach anyway. He felt a critical need to deliver a November, 1957 message that has particular resonance in relation to contemporary events of war and peace and social justice and social upheaval. Most commentators on this famous sermon focus on King’s ‘love-your-enemies’ prescription. But MLK’s purpose in preaching-while-sick was more pointed than moral generality. His was a profoundly political hallelujah.

He contended that Americans failed to honor democracy. “(W)e have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. …(W)e have often … trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression. … (T)hrough our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism.” He might easily have been speaking of Egypt, just pilloried in the Suez war a year prior to his presentation.

In the fifty four years that have passed since then, the United States has ‘befriended’ nations such as Egypt, seeking to keep them away from such influences as, first, ‘communism,’ and, more recently, ‘terrorism.’ However, the political result of supposed U.S. benevolence uniformly, almost without exception, worked to enrich a thin upper crust at the expense of masses of humanity left to wallow in poverty and disenfranchisement.

Now, as if by a miraculous fiat, the U.S. ruling authorities say that ‘human rights’ are indeed important, and the ways of repression and impunity are no longer acceptable. But anyone with a sense of history will recognize that, at the first sniff of social democracy–Mossadegh, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Lumumba, and Allende are among the dozens of leaders, many deposed or ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’–the SOP of the USA is likely to be to seek out a new Mubarak, a modified version of Mobutu, a slightly-more-urbane model of thuggery than Somoza, someone like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, resplendent in tailored suits and sporting a Harvard degree to justify his following IMF and CIA directives.

In 1957, one of the ‘enemies’ that King warned against hating was Russia. He contended that anti-communism was a large component of U.S. policies and that many grassroots organizations scoffed at such mandates for ideological purity. One source that fought against such insistence was the Highlander Center, where Rosa Parks studied just before she made her historic 12/1/1955 decision to break an unjust law and go to prison in Montgomery.

In fact, on Labor Day, 1957, MLK delivered an important speech to celebrate Highlander Folk School’s(HFS) founding. There, a supposed ‘freelance photographer,’ Ed Friend, spied on events for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia’s White-Supremacist governor, Marvin Griffin.

One thorough annalist has pointed out, “Th(is) attack upon HFS was part of a larger effort to discredit and demonize anyone connected to the civil rights movement — in particular to … prominent national civil rights organizations.”

In the tumultuous decade of liberation-and-struggle that followed–from sit-ins to mass demonstrations to Black Panther insistence on “self-defense,” one can see many similar scenes of upsurge and oppression as are appearing on the front pages of the press now. Throughout this process, under the auspices of Cointelpro and like machinations, a subversion and co-optation of the civil rights, peace, and social-justice movements was taking place.

Photographer-spy Friend’s pictures showed-up in bigoted, ‘patriotic’ mass-mailings, calling King Communist. The ‘grain-of-truth’ in this assertion was the support that socialists had long offered civil-rights. Red-baiting campaigns-against-King soon went national, with billboards plastered around the South, bearing the caption, “MLK at Communist Training School.”

Lifelong social-justice-proponent, Anne Braden, sent MLK a 1959 letter cautioning him that Ed Friend had just testified in hearings to close HFS. Friend lied, “The greatest objection I had was that one… Negro preacher… there said that white people should be murdered to force the Federal Government to support integration…–that was Martin Luther King.”

Those of us observing the uprisings currently occurring across a swath of the Islamic world would do well to recall the infiltration and undermining of similar surges of human passion as part-and-parcel of policies of rule by the elites and their institutional watchdogs in agencies with well-known acronyms. Martin Luther King remonstrated about the inherently class-based systems of disempowerment that have ever been the operational protocols of rulers.

Fifty four years and three months ago, he addressed the moronic assertion that he was calling for ‘death to Whitey’ when he sermonized in Atlanta, closing by noting the historical tendency for some to be oppressors and some oppressed. He continued that neither violent uprising nor passive acquiescence was an appropriate response to tyranny.

However, “there is another way. … to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. …(T)his is the only way as … . we look out across the years and across the generations… Love is the only way.” That’s what the man from Nazareth said too, obviously.

Both of them agreed with Mother Jones too, though. She stated an integral piece of the puzzle of justice. “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

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The ding-bats at “Fox and Friends” have endorsed “treating people like dogs.” A prospective Republican candidate lies to “Tea-Baggers” that Social Security, the most successful and a vital entitlement program in the history of the United States — is a “Ponzi Scheme.” And, Fox’s chief RACE-BAITER, Glenn Beck contends that if “you’re on government assistance,” the government “ha[s] every right” to regulate your life. Beck also has repeatedly equated people “on government assistance” with “slavery.” READ: Blood-Sucking BLACKS!

…. then he attacks churches that promote “Social Justice” — linking them to Socialists, Communists and Nazis! [ READ MORE ] [ CHRISTIANS URGED TO BOYCOTT GLENN BECK ]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Colorado Senate Candidate Jane Norton Calls Social Security a “Ponzi Scheme“

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

O’Reilly: “You always hear the cops are picking on African-Americans, but whites are arrested way higher than African-Americans”

Hannity’s No. 1 example of “reckless” stimulus “waste“: A project his reporter acknowledges is “important“

Glenn Beck: If “you’re on government assistance,” the government “ha[s] every right” to regulate your life. Beck also equates people “on government assistance” with “slavery“

Extreme Hypocrisy — Upping the double standard: Fox now asking if it’s “time for Speaker Pelosi to go“ — Despite presenting no evidence that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was personally aware of concerns regarding former-Rep. Eric Massa’s behavior months before those claims were made public, Fox & Friends hosted a panel on March 12 to discuss whether it’s “time for Speaker Pelosi to go.” But Fox news figures defended then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert after it became public in 2006 that Hastert had likely been personally informed of an inappropriate email then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) sent to a congressional page. [ READ MORE ]

Double standard: After defending Hastert over Foley scandal, Fox now attacks Pelosi over Massa [ READ MORE ]

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