MINISTER OF DEFENSE, HUEY P. NEWTON- HE WON THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE PEOPLE
HUEY P. NEWTON: HIS REPUTATION HAD PRECEDED HIM
When I graduated from high school, I had been pretty much colonialized. I was a Manchild caught in a dilemma between being a street hustler, thug or a factory worker. My high school experience at a predominately white school had only reaffirmed and reinforced my interiority complex. Being Black, I truly believed that I had no other options.
I wasn’t a hustler. I truly loved my sisters. To me, my sisters were truly beautiful and fascinating. I didn’t have the heart or desire to live a life taking advantage of them. I loved to read and write poetry rhymes. I was completely satisfied to find a dark counter at the public library with a stack of books and read my life away.
I couldn’t be a thug. I had gained a decent reputation as an accomplished street fighter, but I didn’t have the heart or desire to harm anyone. I was a good athlete too, but I didn’t have the money or resources to pay for a physical or the equipment to play high school sports.
I wasn’t a factory worker. Most of my in-laws made a pretty good living at the Chevrolet Plant in Fremont or other factories. I loved the outdoors. My favorite past time was being in the open air and basting in the sun at a local city park like Lincoln Square Recreation Center in Downtown Oakland. I loved exploring the shores of Jack London Square where I spent vast hours alone walking along the shores of the coastal waters. Growing up to be a self realizing Blackman wasn’t an option.
After graduating from high school, I didn’t know what to do with my life. My dream was to be a railroad Pullman porter and melt away into a life of invisibility and interiority. I was hopelessly confused.
One day, I followed a couple of sisters that graduated with my class to a local college. They were twins, Brenda and Glenda. My cousin had married Glenda as a high school sweetheart joined the military and left for the Vietnam conflict in Southeast Asia. I had a puppy dog crush on Brenda. I had dreams of marrying Brenda and joining my cousin in Southeast Asia and returning home a decorated war hero. I had no idea what war was other than a stage show on a Hollywood set. I was in a fantasy and extremely naïve.
When I broke through the glass double doors of Merritt Jr. College at 59th and Grove, my life changed. I had never been on a college campus in my life. There were girls of every description everywhere. It was another playground for a Manchild. I decided then that I wanted to be a college student.
I had absolutely no idea how to read a college schedule. I picked my classes regardless of the times, days, units or prerequisites. I picked my classes by looking at the titles, “hum-hum-this sounds good, this looks good, and this sounds good.” I had no idea what a prerequisite was. I had no idea what a class conflict was. One day, a couple of older sisters noticed that filling out a class schedule was beyond my understanding, and sat down with me and showed me how to fill it out properly. A white college counselor had signed my class schedule conflicts and all, like 25 class credit units. He didn’t care. He assumed that I wouldn’t be there long.
At Merritt, Brenda had found another brother as a suitor. I was somewhat broken hearted that I couldn’t join my cousin in matrimony and in Vietnam. My heart and attention then went to a beautiful young lady from Richmond named Johnnie. The word in the grapevine was that she was hard as rocks. She had come up hard, very hard actually fighting grown men off her. The amazing thing was she had been successful. Nobody got close to her. Johnnie was tough as nails, but we had a lot of laughs and good times.
A relationship with Johnnie was difficult if not impossible. She had been claimed by one of the most notorious thugs in Richmond. It was suicide to be caught anyplace near her. I found Johnnie regardless of her background, sweet, gentle, quiet and kind. Our affection was mutual. Our moments together were confined to campus. I wished that I could grow wings and fly her away from her troubles. I was a Manchild full of innocent fantasy and dreams and barely able to take care of himself.
It wasn’t long before Brenda, Glenda, and Johnnie dropped out. I found myself getting high, hanging out on campus and flirting with all sorts of young ladies of all races. The Manchild had found a new playground. I became a campus playboy, a campus clown.
One day, I had spent the day drinking and getting high with the brothers. That evening I was hanging out in the hallway in front of the campus cafeteria cutting it up with a couple of brothers. One brother was giving me the campus lowdown.
That’s “Michael the Pimp.” Michael was a local fixture. Michael was a light skinned brother with a process hairdo. Michael was always good to stop, talk, laugh and for a conversation. He was a hapless heroin addict that hung around campus. I don’t think anyone took him seriously even the women found him harmless and most irrelevant.
“That’s Marcellus, he is a professional boxer.” Marcellus was a bully and a self centered individual with a head full of greasy Gerri-curls, God’s gift to women. He made a beeline straight to cafeteria to impress the young ladies without looking around.
“That’s Huey.” Huey was a rather ordinary sized brother with an arm full of books. He was modestly dressed. I noticed that he buttoned his shirt all the way up to the neck. The brother suddenly straightened his back and became alert. He respectfully nodded, and the rest of us got the clue and straightened up real quick and nodded our heads in unison. In passing, Huey acknowledged us and nodded respectfully in return, and entered the cafeteria. “That’s Huey. Don’t mess with him!”
Huey’s reputation had preceded him. From that day on, when Huey passed me in the hallway it always the same, straighten up and straighten up quick no matter how high you was. Huey didn’t talk much. He talked with his eyes. Huey’s girlfriend was a tall beautiful sister with long black hair named Laverne Williams. She was an opera singer and a serious music major. Huey was prelaw.
One day, Huey and Laverne passed me in the hall. As usual, I was holding up the wall in the hallway high. Laverne looked at me and whispered something to Huey about me. I wanted to blend into the woodwork to avoid his attention. Huey glanced at me for a moment and continued down the hallway. Here it was, one of the most bad-assed brothers on campus and his significant one didn’t like me. I wanted to disappear into the walls.
One evening, I rolled around to the brothers in the hallway in front of the cafeteria. One brother told me, “man, you just missed it. Huey and Marcellus just got in it.” My heart sunk to my stomach, Huey got beat down by a professional middle weigh boxer, I thought. The brother continued in utter amazement, “man, Huey cleaned out Marcellus.” My mouth dropped wide open. I said to myself, “this Huey P. Newton cat is for real!”
From then on each time Laverne passed me, she continued to whisper something to Huey about me. It made me feel so little, miserable, and a failure not to be able to live up to her and now Huey’s expectations. I wasn’t serious about my education. I was at Merritt to get high, play and clown around with the young ladies. She could see right through me.
One day she passed me in the hallway with Huey, she said something about me again. Huey talked with his eyes. He never looked at me in a despairingly manner. On his day he sort of nodded and with reassuring look in his eye said, “He will be all right.” I knew that I had to get serious about education, and straighten my life out from then on.
Laverne didn’t know it, but I had decided that I wanted to be like Huey, manly, quiet, respected, and a serious student. I would ultimately win her respect and friendship. That really meant a lot to me.
THE BEGINNING: SOUL STUDENTS ADVISORY COUNCIL
It was 1966. A new awareness was breaking out all over campus, each day there were spontaneous groups of black and white students engaging in vigorous political debates about Civil Rights, and the Vietnam War. One of several Black students that stood out in the debates in regards to having an incredible cyclopedia-like recall of references and historical details was Bobby Seale. I had never seen Black men stand up to debate whites regarding any subject, whether history, psychology, philosophy, it didn’t matter. There didn’t seem to be subject that the brothers weren’t aware of. The heated debates lasted into the evenings, and I tried not to miss a moment.
There was Isaac Moore, Ken Freemen, Leo Bazile, Ernie Allen, and others. They were brilliant and beautiful in debate. Isaac Moore and Ken Freeman became my wise, faithful and patient mentors and teachers. Bobby, Ken and particularly Isaac Moore, took time to school and mentor me through the draft. I wouldn’t have made it without them. I subsequently discovered that Bobby Seale was Huey’s closest confidents. They were a prefect match. Bobby was charismatic, outgoing, boisterous, and an extremely fluent public speaker. Bobby had once been a comedian. Huey was intellectual, modest, and extremely reserved.
The brothers and sisters on campus began to find a common cause among them, and agreed that there was a need to organize on campus around their causes, issues and needs. Some of brothers reasoned that there were numerous student groups with a common union funded by student fees, but none of them addressed the needs and issues of Black people. Why not organize a student group that would meet on campus around a common cause and union to regularly discuss and address issues important to Black students and people of color. It was Bobby Seale that always constantly emphasized the significance and uniqueness of the “soul” of people of color; soul music and soul food. It carried the day. The brothers and sisters formed Soul Students Advisory Council of the Associated Students of Merritt Jr. College. I believe that Leo Bazile became the first president of the new student union. I was in another world. It was a beautiful educational experience for me. I was like a fly on the wall. I tried not to miss anything.
One issue was common and pressing to most the brothers and sisters on campus was the unjust Vietnam War, and the draft. Ernie Allen called a press conference on campus, and publicly declared his opposition to the war and became one of the first to refuse to be drafted into a war against his conscious and the Yellow brothers and sisters of Southeast Asia fighting the same enemy that people of color were facing in this country. I was absolutely in wonder of these brilliant, courageous, and worldly brothers.
Huey and Bobby wanted to take the group further beyond intellectualizing to take concrete and direct actions to help organize the community around issues that affected them. They wanted to expand the scope of the union to address police brutality, but most of the other brothers and sisters didn’t want to go that far. Unfortunately, some of the brothers began to assume that Huey and Bobby were too far out and militant for a campus organization.
Things came to a boil when Huey and Bobby used some of the union’s funds as bail money in regards to arrests that occurred protesting a police shooting in Richmond. It wasn’t that they pilfered the money it was that the brothers and sisters of the union demanded a democratic process before using the council’s money. They demanded the right to vote on it. Huey and Bobby argued that it was a time of the essence emergency and a paramount and revolutionary right existed to use the money to come to the aid of the Black community. It was Huey and Bobby on one side and the intellectuals like my mentors, Moore and Freeman and other brothers and sisters of the council, on the other side.
My heart was for unity with all of them. We needed the intellectuals and revolutionaries united for one cause, the liberation of our people. It was like a dark cloud had formed over my head. I was torn between them. I truly loved all of them, but for pragmatic reasons my soul had to go with Huey and Bobby. I was a young mis-educated and poor Manchild. I felt I had little to contribute to further the movement among the brilliant intellectuals. I had nothing to give the movement to liberate our people, but my love, body and soul.
THE SPLIT: THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF DEFENSE
Huey and Bobby branched out of the Soul Students Advisory Council and formed an off campus organization, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD) in October of 1966. Huey, Minister of Defense, and Bobby, the Chairman, developed the 10 Point Plan as the party’s platform to rally the people around. [1] The intellectual criticism was that the man could meet all the demands of the 10 Point Plan and we still wouldn’t be free. However, I thought it was a brilliant idea. Bobby and Huey targeted population were the ordinary brothers and sisters of the Black Community that Bobby called the “Lumpen.” The party’s platform was straightforward, comprehendible, and easy to universally embrace.
I was a fly on the wall. Huey and Bobby was right. That 10-Point Plan platform drew into the ranks of BPPSD some of the baldest, fiercest street thugs, gang members, and ex-servicemen of color on earth under one cause, the liberation of our people.
The other criticism was that Bobby Seale was weak. In my world, Bobby was one of the boldest brothers on the planet. I didn’t quite understand that point. A couple of years later, I would have learned exactly what they had meant.
I was unable to participate in the early activities of party like the police patrols. The internal policy was that brothers had to equip themselves with their own personal guns. During this time, most of the community thugs and serious hustlers had the need for guns. I, the Manchild, never had the need or desire for a gun. For a time, I didn’t have the resources to obtain a gun.
I missed Huey’s infamous February 21, 1967 confrontation with the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) while escorting Betty Shabazz, the late wife of Malcolm X, from San Francisco Airport to the Ramparts office for an interview with Eldridge Cleaver. One of the young brothers of the escort told me that a SFPD contingent confronted Huey and brothers outside the Rampart’s office. One of the officers demanded the surrender of the escort’s weapons. An officer stepped forward as if to take Huey’s shotgun; and all that was heard was “click-click.” Huey locked and loaded a shell in his shotgun. Huey meant business and that just wasn’t going to happen. The SFPD backed down. On that day, I lot of people besides the police found out that Huey P. Newton was for real.
I also missed the infamous May 2, 1967 march on Sacramento that put the Black Panther Party for Self Defense on the international map in infinity. I learned a great deal about my life as a Manchild from Huey. Naturally at first, I didn’t have the courage that Huey and some of the other brothers had. I thought we needed more brothers. I thought that there might be safety in numbers if only for myself.
Once on campus, I was trying to convince a high school associate, Danny Crockett, to join the party. The grapevine was humming that Danny had ended a notorious thug’s, John Singleton, reign of terror with a bullet. It didn’t kill him, but from John’s own mouth it had slowed him down, and changed his life from random acts of senseless violence and hurting others needlessly.
While I was talking to Danny, Huey passed. I called Huey over and told him I was trying to recruit Danny. You couldn’t coach Huey to waste any words. Huey looked at Danny and asked if he had a gun. Danny said, “Yes.” Huey asked Danny if he was willing to protect his family with that gun. Danny said, “Yes.” Huey told Danny, “You’re a Panther,” and walked away.
Huey was right. We didn’t need a lot of brothers in the party. We needed only the few dedicated brothers and sisters that we had to be examples of un-selfness, undying and supreme love, sacrifice and courage for our people. We will ultimately win the hearts and minds of the people. Huey had been the perfect example. I wasn’t wrong to want to be just like Huey P. Newton. Slowly, the de-colonialization process of my mind and spirit was jellying. The BPPSD was molding into a fearless and internationally respected Black Liberation Warrior Clan.
HUEY P. NEWTON & Chinese Thought Reform
On October 28, 1967, at about 4:51 a.m., Oakland Police Officer John Frey allegedly at random spotted an automobile moving along his assigned beat in West Oakland. Frey ran a check on the vehicle, and within a minute it was identified as a “known Black Panther vehicle.” [2] Frey decided to the stop the car at Seventh and Willow Street. Officer Herbert Heanes heard the transmission and joined Frey to provide cover.
After the stop, Frey found the vehicle driven for Newton by a passenger, Gene McKinney. Frey attempted to arrest Newton for two parking ticket violations belonging to the car’s owner, Huey’s significant one, Laverne Williams. During the arrest, there was an altercation. Frey was fatally shot and Heanes was wounded in a brief exchange of gunfire.
That night, I had accompanied brothers to Hunter’s Point for a memorial celebration of its rebellion of September 28 to October 1, 1966 after the SFPD shooting of an unarmed Black youth. We got the word that Huey had gone down.
He was being held at Highland Hospital in Oakland. The word came down that we were going in. I had lost the fear of a Manchild. I was prepared. Sometime later, word came down that the entire hospital had been surrounded by what seemed to have been an army. It would have been suicide to go in. The brothers called the mission off.
By July 1969, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense had become the primary focus of the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s OPERATION CHAOS covert programs, and was ultimately the target of 233 of the total 295 authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions. The October 28, 1967 assault on Huey was part of the government’s secret coordinated counterintelligence operations to neutralize Huey and the BPPSD.
At a meeting of Federal prison administrators in 1962, MIT Dr. Edgar Schein, social psychologist, suggested using Chinese Thought Reform on prisoners as a policy. James V. Bennett, then Chief of the Bureau of Prisons thought it was a good idea. Dr. Schein:
This [thought reform] “model” of behavior and attitude change is a general one which can encompass phenomena as widely separated as brainwashing and rehabilitation in a prison or a mental hospital. I would like to have you think of brainwashing not in terms of politics, ethics and morals, but in terms of deliberate changing of behavior and attitudes by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captive population lives. [These changes can be induced by] isolation, sensory deprivation, segregation of leaders, spying, tricking men into signing written statements which are then shown to others, placing individuals whose will power has been severely weakened into a living situation with others more advanced in thought reform, character invalidation, humiliations, sleeplessness, rewarding subservience, and fear [emphasis added]. [3]
In 1945, James Van Benschoten Bennett , President of the American Prison Association, was in Nazi Germany visiting concentration camps and setting up American Military Government German prisons that at that time was involved in the illusionary “denazification” thought reform.[4] It’s ironic that Bennett’s thought reform program was too drastic for the BEAST, The World’s Greatest Racial Mass Murderers, but good enough for thousands of Black and Brown inmates who were guilty of struggling for freedom, and mostly economic and drug related crimes.
Dr. Schein was an S factor (Stanford University) fiend. He earned his masters at Stanford, and Ph.D at Harvard University in 1952 in social psychology. Dr. Schein is yet another scientist that migrated to the United States from Nazi-dominated countries to set national policy more consistent with Nazi Germany racial policies than American values of freedom and justice for all. He was born in Switzerland and moved into the United States in 1938, when the German General Staff and Reichsfurhrer SS Heinrich Himmler were moving in Nazi agents, the Fifth Column, into the Americas.
Dr. Schein was a disciple of German Psychologist, Dr. Kurt Lewin, head of the Tavistock Institute. Tavistock was the center of trauma-based-mind control research and engineering human behavior for the military-industrial complexes.
Dr. Schein was also an important CIA/MK ULTRA military intelligence asset that worked with clandestine neutralization teams along with Dr. Fred Williams of the Air Force Psychological Warfare Division, Nazi Doctor Expert, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, Albert Bideman, and Psi specialist Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe. [5]
Dr. Schein’s Los Angeles and Bay Area military intelligence and CIA/MK ULTRA mind control colleagues were Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer. They all had worked on top secret and classified programs involving Korean and Chinese “brainwashing, “mind control” and “thought reform” techniques for the government. [6]
Dr. Schein suggested that physical, psychological, and chemical techniques could be used on prisoners to deliberately alter behavior and attitude. Schein also proposed isolation, sensory deprivation, to destroy socialization among prisoners as well as to sever the links prisoners had to the outside world. Because humans validate their existence, their personality, through contact with others, isolation has a significant impact on the human psyche. This form of psychological disorientation, the removal of others for validation of self, came to be known as the “Muttnik Principle” (so named by psychologist Nathaniel Braden) and was also called the “Psychology of Invisibility.” [7]
In 1968, Huey P. Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter for the death of Officer Frey, and acquitted of assault on officer Herbert Heanes. After the 1968 conviction, Newton was committed to the California Corrections Department to carry out his sentence. Newton was placed at the San Luis Obispo Men’s Colony on the isolated central coast of California between Oakland and Los Angeles. It was hundreds of miles from Huey’s comrades and supporters in the Bay Area. Under the Dr. Schein’s “Muttnik Principle,” it was an idea location.
During his incarceration at San Luis Obispo Men’s Colony, which was a department of corrections medical facility, he was subjected to experimental behavior modification techniques that the brothers called “Chinese Brainwashing Procedures.” It was Schein’s classified Chinese Though Reform Program.
The word came down that brothers and sisters had to make regular visits to San Luis Obispo to keep Huey’s mind together. At that time, I don’t believe very many brothers and sisters knew exactly what “Chinese Brainwashing Procedures” or ”Chinese Though Reform” really meant; and the state of art of behavior modification and mind control programs; and the government’s active covert involvement. I know I didn’t truly understand what it had meant.
By January 1969, I along with most of the original panthers and the national and internationally respected revolutionary-intellectual controversial rank of brothers like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and James Forman from SNCC were purged from the BPPSD, and harnessed by “goon squads” and ex-prison zombies with a governmental “License to Kill” us.
HUEY P. NEWTON & Clockwork Orange
I, among others, eagerly awaited the release of Huey. We expected Huey would be able to sort out the COINTELPRO, OPERATION CHAOS, OPERATION GEMSTONE, HUSTON PLAN and MK-ULTRA penetrations of the BPPSD that had caused the deaths, imprisonment, assassination attempts, and polarization of so many brothers and sisters.
On May 29, 1970, the California Court of Appeals reversed Newton’s manslaughter conviction. [8] Shortly after August 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton was released from prison. I was there along with thousands when Huey was freed at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse. The man that I once knew bolted from the courthouse jumped up and onto a top of a car. He snatched off his shirt and flexed his muscles. I knew instantly that it wasn’t the quiet and modest and quiet warrior that I once had idolized.
I wasn’t the only one that noticed. In 1973, Kathleen Cleaver was traveling throughout Europe, after Eldridge Cleaver’s California parole was revoked and escaped. During a cocktail party in Switzerland, a reporter for the magazine ‘The Christian Century’ interviewed her about Newton. [9] She reported told the reporter, “Everyone who knew Huey before he went to prison, knows that he is not the same man any more. No one changes his views so radically as he apparently has after such a short term in prison. In fact, prison life has historically tended to make political prisoners more militant, not less so.” [10]
Cleaver characterized Newton’s recent about-face in regard to establishment institutions, drug use, drug dealing, pimping and pandering as result of the “Clockwork Orange” treatment to which he was subjected to in prison.
“A Clockwork Orange” refers to a movie in which a young man serving a long prison sentence for violent and sadistic criminal activity was offered an early release in exchange for his consent to undergo experimental behavior modification, aversion therapy. The treatment was so effective that the young man was unable to function to normal human reactions and impulses to sex, violence, and self-protection.
In an interview with the reporter, Newton denied undergoing aversion therapy or behavior modification. However, Newton claimed to have witnessed the effects of shock treatment, and stress therapy during his imprisonment. He said, “They were like vegetables.” [11] The article also noted that the Urban-Black Center of the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley directed a prison ministry program. Julius Thomas, director, said that he had observed several formerly strong-willed criminals come out of prison “acting like pussycats.” [12] The graduate union is linked to Dr. Schein’s military intelligence protégé, Dr. Margaret Singer.
PRISON STRESS THERAPY & THE CIA
There is little information exposed about the “stress therapy” at San Luis Obispo Men’s Medical Facility, but “Stress Therapy” is a code word for the CIA in other California prison medical facilities, particularly Vacaville.
Clifford Jefferson (Death Row Jeff) was confined with Donald Defreeze (Cinque) of the Symbionese Liberation Army at Vacaville. In a sworn declaration to Patty Hearst’s first lawyer, Terrence Harahan, he declared, “In the early part of 1971, Defreeze stated to me that the CIA was conducting tests to try out certain drugs…Defreeze stated to me that he gone through the tests and also knew of stress tests that were given to prisoners, in which they were kept in solitary, harassed and annoyed until they would do anything asked of them to get out; then they were given these drugs and would become like robots.” [13]
Columnist Jack Anderson further revealed the CIA’s “Stress Therapy” in the California men’s medical facilities, “CIA files confirm that this spy agency did indeed conduct drug experiments on Vacaville inmates. The experiments were designed to study the effects of stress and drugs on military prisoners of war, to determine the point which they would crack. Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon said that the CIA did not conduct any experiments after 1968. However, Superintendent Clanon acknowledged that Defreeze had volunteered for medical research in July 1970 and it is uncertain just when the agency ended its testing there.” [14]
The CIA Station Chief at Vacaville was Dr. James A. Hamilton, another S Factor (Stanford University) psychiatrist. Dr. Hamilton’s chief consultant at the Vacaville’s stress cohort group (Black Cultural Association) experiment was Dr. Schein’s military intelligence protégé, Dr. Louis Jolyon West of UCLA, the Maestro of Mind Control.
INHUMANE TREATMENT & California’s Expermental Medical Psychiatric Diagnostic Units (MPDU)
At the time of Huey’s incarceration at San Luis Obispo, Raymond K. Procunier was head of the California Department of Corrections. Procunier was one of Governor Ronald Reagan’s fascist department disciples that turned the California prison system into little Auschwitzes to experiment on Black and Brown inmates by every imaginable scientific experimental method with mind altering bending drugs; psychosurgery and lobotomy; and electroconvulsive treatments to modify and engineer human behavior.
On November 19, 1971, the California Department of Corrections invited a group of psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers and prison officials to meet at the University of California at Davis to discuss prison violence and a possible new psychiatric unit at Vacaville. Dr. Edward Opton, senior research psychologist at the Wright Institute, attended the sessions.
At the meeting, corrections officials were vague about what treatments they had in vision for inmates confined at the new MPDU. The corrections research director was Dr. Lawrence Bennett, who refused to discuss moral or ethical questions in regards to MPDU. The head of MPDU was Dr. Stephen Sheppard.
After the Davis meeting, the press picked up the story that corrections officials were planning to carry out experimental brain surgery on inmates at the new MPDU. When this information was exposed, the corrections officials maintained that that it was considering only electrocauterization (by inserting needles into the brain). However, inmate support groups obtained a copy of a letter, dated September 8, 1971, from Procunier, to the California Council on Criminal Justice, which would arrange the financing of the project. Procunier’s letter spoke of brain surgery for “aggressive”, destructive” inmates. The proposal was submitted on November 11, 1971, a week before the Davis meeting. Procunier proposal referred to “serious management problem inmates” as one of its main reasons for setting up the MPDU at Vacaville:
“The control and management of these segregated inmates have become a serious problem, as shown by the recent episodes of violence and disturbance in different prisons where Adjustment Centers had been inadequate and the problem remains unsolved. New ways and perceptions are now urgently needed to provide a better approach for handling of these cases.” [15]
Under Reagan and Procunier, the electric shock and aversion therapies that Huey witnessed at San Luis Obispo was common in California prisons. Electrical shock therapy was administered at Vacaville approximately 500 times in 1971; Prolixin was injected 1, 093 times in 1970. Drugs like Prolixin are described by users as “sheer torture” and “becoming a zombie”.
Shock treatment, a form of aversion therapy, is also torture. Bear in mind that one electrical shock therapy session may include up to 40 electrical shock charges per therapy session. Reports out of the California State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Atascadero repeatedly mentioned that genital electroshock was used on sexual offenders as aversion therapy. It was reported that inmates were shown movies of explicit sexual content. If they began to display sexual arousal, their genitals were shocked. The program was entitled, “Errorless Extinction of Penile Responses.”[16]
The late Attorney Faye Stender, and the late prison activist Popeye Jackson and others viewed the MPDU as a laboratory of behavior “torture”, which in practice was designed to be performed primarily upon militant Black and Chicano organizers in prison populations.
Dr. George Bach-y-Rita, an electrocauterization specialist, was one of the research psychiatrist heavily involved in developing the MPDU. Dr. Bach-y-Rita said that the MPDU treatment would involve little more than intensive diagnosis through electroencephalogram and traditional doctor-patient and group therapy discussions; also perhaps training in Alpha-wave meditation.[17]
Dr. Bach-y-Rita was a Harvard trained psychiatrist who was a member of the American Psychiatric Task force on Violence. Dr. Bach-Rita was a Spaniard educated in Mexico. Dr. Bach-y-Rita had been slyly slipped into the department of corrections through the backdoor along with Dr. Frank Ervin to secretly advance CIA-MK ULTRA involved electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) research.
Dr. Bach-y-Rita and Ervin were part of the medical team of Dr. Vernon Mark, Dr. William Sweet of Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston General Hospital; and the notorious mind controller Spaniard, Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. These doctors invasively implanted electrodes in the brain (ESB) to experimentally control and engineer behavior for the CIA and the military-industrial complex.
In 1967, psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeon Vernon Mark proposed to prevent (Black) urban riots by brain implants. The movie, The Terminal Man, was based on one of Dr. Mark’s psychosurgery victims. Their theory was that Blacks engaging in civil disobedience were suffering from damaged brain cells.
These doctors were also to be involved in Dr. Louis Jolyon West’s UCLA Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence funded by the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Bureau of Prisons, and the CIA that was to target children and inmates of color for secret eugenic based hideous and inhuman mind control and behavior modification medical experiments.
Dr. Bach-y-Rita sent a letter to his correction department superiors that exposed the shocking truth that the California Departments of Corrections under Reagan and Procunier were not only involved in psychosurgery, electroshock, Prolixin and Anectine therapy experimental research, but they were involved in torturing inmates with sex hormone injections, brain cauterization, sound-wave control techniques, and lithium carbonate. [18]
Dr. Joseph Tupin was alleged to have used lithium carbonate treatments on Vacaville inmates for years. Dr. Arthur Nugent administered Anectine (terror drug: a sensation “worse than dying”) to prisoners at Vacaville. The MPDU funding proposal read: “There has been, for example, a study in the California Medical Facility to determine the usefulness of lithium carbonate in treating hyperaggressive, acting-out patient. Further follow-up in this area would make a significant contribution.” [19]
They, the group of fascist men, like Reagan, Procunier, Doctors Schein, West, Bach-y-Rita, Delgado, Ervin, Mark, Turbin, Bennett, Sheppard and others had relatively complete control over Huey’s prison’s environment. They could have by electrical shock, aversion, sleep deprivation, etc., so radically in a short term, transform Huey P. Newton, the modest warrior, into flamboyant drug abuse, drug dealing, pimping, murder and pandering. They had the technology, means, opportunity, and COINTELPRO motive.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE OF HUEY P. NEWTON: A Crime Against Humanity
DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, Article 5:
No person shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treating or punishment.
In 1948, The United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights was created following World War II. The horrific atrocities committed by Germany through the Nazi’s racial mass murder campaigns caused the world to cry out and demand for justice. The Nazis discredited and made a mockery of notions of absolute state sovereignty which the Hitler state asserted and used to commit mass genocide as a matter of sovereign state right. The Nazis and their allies’ massive inhuman transgressions and crimes against humanity changed the worldview on human rights.
The Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture goes the farthest of any human rights instrument in directly prohibiting the use of techniques aimed at the disintegration of the personality or reduction of physical or mental capacities, which would include psychotropic drugs and brain-damaging procedures like electroshock and psychosurgery. [20]
Pursuant to Operation Paperclip, 10,000 or more Nazis and SS (Knights of the Black Sun) fiends were brought to the United States to continue their campaign of racial mass murder and genocide, and pass on their hideous and baseless pseudo- racial medical theories and practices. The neophytes, apprentices, and apostles of the BEAST were Dr. Edgar Schein, Dr. Louis J. West, Dr. Jose Delgado, Dr. Bach-y-Rita, Dr. Frank Ervin and Dr. Vernon Mark. All of these doctors had direct and secret access to the American prison-inmate population at their disposal for crimes against humanity hideous pseudo-racial medical experiments.
Even if Huey being the subject of psychological terror and a secret behavior modification/mind control program is discounted, then one must concede that while at San Luis Obispo, he had witnessed the effects of shock treatment and stress therapy during his imprisonment that turned inmates into “vegetables.” Who were the staff psychiatrists at the prison? Who was doing the shock treatment and CIA stress therapies? Who were torturing the men into vegetative states and for what reason and means? What happened to these inmates? The behavior modification and mind control operations at San Luis Obispo’s Men Medial Facility has not been disclosed or been open to public scrutiny.
The California Department of Corrections’ torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment and punishment of Huey P. Newton and inmates of color has to be exposed, disclosed and confronted. As with other human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by a sovereign state, justice dictates prosecuting those responsible for the psychological rape and torture of inmates through the reinterpretation of existing laws and the establishment of peoples’ tribunals, and “truth commissions.”
Oakland has an ugly history and dark secret regarding the persecution of the BPPSD; and the setup, prosecution, transformation and assassination of Huey P. Newton. It has an ugly history and dark secret regarding the clandestine activities of the CIA and the military-intelligence complexes in assassinating and neutralizing prominent and independent men and women of color like Charles Alex Gregory, Dr. Marcus Foster, and Dorothy King that also has be to driven to the “Light of Day.”
By the way, with Huey P. Newton and Laverne Williams as an inspiration to a Manchild Lost in the Promised Land, I graduated from Merritt Jr. College and two other colleges to earn a doctorate.
[1] http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/home/bpp_program_platform.html
[2] People v. Newton (May 1970) 8 CA3d 359; 87 Cal Rptr 394, 367
[3] Schein, Man Against Man: Brainwashing, 8 Corrective Psychiatry & J. Social Therapy 90 (1962).
[4] http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Archives+and+Manuscripts/fa_bennett.htm
[5] http://www.xs4all.nl/~sm4csi/nwo/MindControl/Search.for.the.Manchurian.Candidate.htm#_ftnref23
[6] http://www.freedomofmind.com/stevehassan/refuting/
[7] http://www.1union1.com/shucontrolunits.html
[8] Supra at Footnote 2
[9] Rogers, Cornish, ‘Clockwork Orange’ in California: Fact or Fancy?, The Christian Century, August 1, 1973
[10] Supra
[11] Supra.
[12] Supra.
[13] Jack Anderson, Strange CIA Tale, Oakland Tribune, October 1978
[14] Supra, footnote 9.
[15] Weiner, Bernard, The Clockwork Cure, The Nation, April 3, 1972, page 433
[16] Supra, page 434-435
[17] Supra, page 435
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] See Organization of American States, Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, Sept. 12, 1985, O.A.S.T.S. No. 67, 25 I.L.M. 519.
Torture shall also be understood to be the use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish.
The concept of torture shall not include physical or mental pain or suffering that is inherent in or solely the consequence of lawful measures, provided that they do not include the performance of the acts or use of the methods referred to in this article.
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