U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Rafael DeGuzman-Paniagua, 305th Aerial Port Squadron special handling representative, secures a pallet of equipment bound for Ukraine from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey on March 24 / credit: Air Force Senior Airman Joseph Morales / U.S. Department of Defense
Editor’s Note: This report was originally published by Antiwar.com.
CBS News retracted a documentary it briefly released on August 7 after pressure from the Ukrainian government. The original documentary (watch it here) CBS put out examined the flow of military aid to Ukraine and quoted someone familiar with the process who said in April that only 30 percent of the arms were making it to the frontline.
We removed a tweet promoting our recent doc, "Arming Ukraine," which quoted the founder of the nonprofit Blue-Yellow, Jonas Ohman's assessment in late April that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/EgA96BrD9O
“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30 percent of it reaches its final destination,” said Jonas Ohman, the founder of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that CBS said has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with aid in Ukraine since the start of the war in the Donbas in 2014. “30-40 percent, that’s my estimation,” Ohman said.
After the documentary sparked outrage from the Ukrainian government, it was removed from the internet by CBS. In an editor’s note, CBS said it changed the article that was published with the documentary and that the documentary itself was being “updated.”
The editor’s note also insisted that Ohman has said the delivery of weapons in Ukraine has “significantly improved” since he filmed with CBS back in April, although he didn’t offer a new estimate on the percentage of arms being delivered.
The editor’s note also said that the Ukrainian government noted U.S. defense attaché Brig. Gen. Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kyiv in August for “arms control and monitoring.” Defense attachés are military officers stationed at U.S. embassies that represent the Pentagon’s interests in the country. Previously, it was unclear if there was any sort of military presence at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv after it reopened in May.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the retraction by CBS was not enough and called for an investigation into the documentary. “Welcome first step, but it is not enough … There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why,” he wrote on Twitter.
In the documentary, Ohman described the corruption and bureaucracy that he has to work around to deliver aid to Ukraine. “There are like power lords, oligarchs, political players,” he said. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘We are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, and so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”
Other reporting has shown that there is virtually no oversight for the billions of dollars in weapons that the United States and its allies are pouring into Ukraine. CNN reported in April that the United States has “almost zero” ability to track the weapons it is sending once they enter Ukraine. One source briefed on U.S. intelligence described it as dropping the arms into a “big black hole.”
Members of the Bronx Green Party joined the Bronx Anti-War Coalition on March 20 to protest against U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Adriano Espaillat hosting a “student services fair” that prominently featured U.S. military service branches at the Renaissance High School for Musical Theater and the Arts in the Bronx, NY / credit: Bronx Green Party / Twitter
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Workers World.
Dozens of Bronx public school parents, teachers, students and community activists gathered on March 20, the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to oppose a military recruitment fair, hosted by U.S. House Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Adriano Espaillat, at Renaissance High School in the Bronx. The grassroots Bronx Anti-War Coalition organized the demonstration.
The protesters aimed to educate students and parents about the violence and dangers that Black, Brown and Indigenous youth face entering the military. “A third of women in the military experience sexual harassment and assault,” said Richie Merino, a Bronx public school teacher and community organizer. “The rates are even higher for women of color. We demand justice for the families of Vanessa Guillén and Ana Fernanda Basaldua Ruiz,” two 20-year-old Latinas who were sexually assaulted and killed after speaking up at Fort Hood U.S. Army base in Texas.
Outside the AOC-endorsed military recruitment fair, Mohammed Latifu of the Bronx spoke to a group of community members. The group had gathered in memory of Latifu’s 21-year-old brother, Abdul Latifu, who was murdered on Jan. 10 at Fort Rucker, a U.S. Army base in Alabama. Abdul had been in the Army for only five months when he was bludgeoned to death with a shovel by another soldier.
Through tears, Mohammed shared how he and his family have been kept in the dark by military investigators and still await answers. He said their parents can’t sleep at night due to the senseless murder of their son Abdul.
“We really want to hear what happened,” Latifu said. “What took place? What transpired? Until today, no answers. No phone calls. We still don’t have any updates. Anybody who was thinking about enlisting their kid in the military, I think you better think again. Don’t do it. I wouldn’t dare ask my kid’s friends or anybody to join the military.”
Outside the @aoc sponsored U.S. military recruitment event at low-income public high school in the Bronx, we invited Mohammed Latifu to speak, who is seeking justice for his 21yo brother, Abdul Latifu, who was murdered in Jan at Fort Rucker, a US Army base in AL #JusticeForLatifupic.twitter.com/29xA7VZaTY
— U.S./NATO = State Sponsors of Terrorism (@bxcommie) March 21, 2023
‘They’re Killing Their Own’
“They say they ‘protect’ the country,” Latifu continued. “They’re killing their own. They’re molesting these women that go over there. These kids, young men and women that go over there, they’re sexually harassed, and then they kill them and try to cover it up.
“They’ll tell you, ‘sorry for what happened, our condolences.’ No, keep your condolences! We want answers. What we really want is justice — justice for everybody who has had to endure this and their families,” Latifu concluded.
Outside the event, representatives from IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization)/Pastors for Peace informed students about alternative ways to “travel and see the world” without the military. They spoke about how to apply to the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Cuba and receive a free medical degree. Chants of “Cuba Sí, Bloqueo No!” broke out in the crowd.
Claude Copeland Jr., a Bronx teacher and member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, shared his experiences as a victim of the poverty draft. He spoke about how recruiters pitched the military as the only way to advance economically and secure safe, independent housing. They never told him about alternatives or other options. If you have no resources, “you have to sign your life away,” he said.
Community members criticized Ocasio-Cortez for abandoning her antiwar campaign promises to oppose predatory recruitment tactics by U.S. military recruiters, who target young, low-income Black and Latinx children.
“Only three years ago,” Merino said, “AOC introduced an amendment to prohibit military recruiters from targeting kids as young as 12 through online gaming. She understands the U.S. military preys on vulnerable, impressionable kids. For AOC to now use her celebrity status to headline a high school military recruitment event, in the Bronx, signals that she has turned her back on the Black, Brown and migrant working-class community that elected her into office.”
“We don’t want our children to train to kill other poor, Black and Brown people like themselves. The best thing we can do now is to grow the movement to completely remove police and military recruiters from our schools,” Merino concluded.
Attendees of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) Plenary 2017. In the front row includes recently indicted defendants Gazi Kodzo (first from left with fist on chest) and Omali Yeshitela (third from left with red beret) / credit: The Burning Spear
Activists on the left, as well as radical U.S.-based organizations, came out yesterday against the indictments of three members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), one former party member, and three Russian nationals for allegedly attempting to sow discord in the United States by working with Russia.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday, April 18, that a federal grand jury returned a “superseding indictment” charging the four people with:
…working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.
The four charged include:
Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who serves as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who is chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee;
Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who is chair of the APSP’s Uhuru Solidarity Movement; and
Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who once served as secretary-general of the APSP and is a founder of the Black Hammer Organization in Georgia.
Repressing Africans in Struggle
Hess and Nevel are white solidarity members. Nevertheless, that an African organization was targeted has raised concerns.
Anti-imperialist African organization Black Alliance for Peace yesterday issued a statement pointing to the U.S. government’s history of repressing the African liberation struggle:
Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.
It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!
Wayne State University professor Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly noted her forthcoming book, Black Scare/Red Scare, points to the APSP raid of July 2022 to draw the connection between U.S. domestic anti-communist purges of the past and repression of activists today.
“It is no coincidence that an African socialist organization is being targeted,” she tweeted.
US charges 4 Americans, 3 Russians in election discord case
I start the epilogue of Black Scare/Red Scare with this case to discuss the resonances of those scares today. It is no coincidence that an African socialist organization is being targeted. https://t.co/SnVgP94m3N
The DOJ attempted to connect the charged activists with a Russian conspiracy to interfere in U.S. elections, beginning with the 2016 election of Trump.
“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights—freedoms Russia denies its own citizens—to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division.
However, much evidence exists to show the United States interferes the most in other countries’ elections and democratic processes. Aside from invading 201 countries since the end of World War II, the United States deployed 64 covert operations to subvert governments around the world between 1947 and 1989, according to political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke. Meanwhile, political scientist Dov Levin’s work found the United States interfered in 81 elections between 1946 and 2000.
Attacking Activists
The APSP had been preparing for this moment since late December, when they received “strong indications” of indictments coming down in early 2023 after the FBI had raided the party’s properties in July 2022, as Toward Freedom had reported. Then the APSP announced last month that Regions Bank, a financial institution in the U.S. South, had closed the party’s accounts and withdrawn lines of credit. The APSP referred to that move as “U.S. economic sanctions” on Black community projects.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization also issued a statement that referred to more recent history of repression.
On September 24, 2010, the FBI raided seven homes of anti-war activists and the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War committee. All told, twenty-three activists were subpoenaed to a Chicago-based grand jury that claimed to be investigating “material support for terrorism.” As time went on, the FBI continued their attack on anti-war and international solidarity activists by targeting important veterans of the movement who worked with the Anti-war 23, including Chicano activist Carlos Montes in Los Angeles and Palestinian organizer Rasmea Odeh in Chicago. A national defense campaign defeated most of these attacks.
Toward Freedom Board Secretary and independent journalist Jacqueline Luqman commented on the danger for all activists who oppose U.S. global hegemony.
“Today it’s the APSP. Tomorrow it could be you and me,” she tweeted. “All you need to do is oppose US imperialist policy in Ukraine and Palmer Raids 2023 will be unleashed to silence you.”
Today it's the APSP. Tomorrow it could be you and me. All you need to do is oppose US imperialist policy in Ukraine and the Palmer Raids 2023 will be unleashed to silence you. #NoCompromiseNoRetreathttps://t.co/E9qb3pQz1F
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.
Millions of people in the United States believe the justice system—from the cops in the street right on up to the judges in the courthouse—is fair and unbiased. Millions of people also believe systemic racial and class biases are relics of a bygone era washed away by progressivism, the election of the First Black President, and the great healer called Time.
But those millions of people need to wake up and watch Jason Pollock’s documentary, “Finding Kendrick Johnson” (2021), for a healthy and horrifying dose of reality.
Poster for documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
The film begins with Kendrick Johnson, a 17-year-old Black student, who was found dead in 2013 inside a rolled-up mat that was propped up against a little-used wall in the gymnasium of Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia.
If the justice system in this country was fair, this documentary would not exist. But it does because everything about this case—from the moment Kendrick’s body was found—reveals how this system still is excruciatingly racist and classist.
The callousness of the police, officials at Lowndes High School and even other parents is revealed early in the documentary. For example, the police dismissed Kendrick’s mother, Jacqueline Johnson, when she reported her son had not returned home, which was unlike him. Police said Kendrick was probably “laid up with some fast-tail girl.” Later, when Kendrick’s body was found in the gym during school hours, neither the police nor school administrators locked down or closed the school, allowing classes to go on as if everything was normal. Meanwhile, police refused to allow Kendrick’s mother into the gym to see her son’s body and openly disrespected her grief. Then as a local TV news station reported news of Kendrick’s death, one of the parents—a white woman—tearfully told the reporter she was thankful it wasn’t her son. She also wondered how people would retaliate, even though no one knew what happened. Why would she assume anyone would retaliate? Why did she feel comfortable saying she was thankful it wasn’t her son, rather than express any sympathy for the mother whose son had been found dead?
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
But this was the attitude of not only those at every level of authority. This also was the way much of the community that was not connected to the Johnson family related to the case as the family doggedly pursued the truth behind Kendrick’s murder.
And it is accurate to characterize what happened to Kendrick Johnson as a murder. As the documentary points out, the police quickly gave an explanation for Kendrick’s death, in what could not under any circumstances be called an investigation. That is ridiculous from a purely logical standpoint. As the documentary goes on to reveal, no physical or forensic evidence from the scene corroborated the explanation.
Kendrick’s father, Kenneth, raised grave questions about how the medical examiner’s office handled his son’s body. He also realized the official police narrative that no foul play was involved was grotesquely untrue.
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
Pollock offers a gripping examination of the similarities between Kendrick Johnson’s case and that of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman lied that he inappropriately interacted with her. Pollock also places the questionable actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) within the context of the racism upon which the agency was founded and continues to carry out.
We also witness the lonesome pursuit for justice that Kendrick’s family embarked on. We are shown a grieving family, knowing their child has died from circumstances that are neither natural nor accidental, regardless of what the police continued to say. And so, they fought for the truth the only way they knew how: Through protest and direct action. Beginning with sidewalk sign-holding and community marches, to ultimately blocking the entrance to the courthouse to demand an actual investigation into their son’s death, the contempt with which they were treated by the cops, the school administrators, and the racist community was stomach-churning to watch, but too important to turn away from. We are reminded these protests took place in 2014 and 2015 in a community where Kendrick’s aunt recounted white community members still request Black employees not wait on them in stores.
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
And Pollock also connects modern-day racism to the long history of racism and lynching in the area around Valdosta, Georgia, highlighting the town is named after a slave-owner’s plantation. It becomes clear while the town is majority Black, the political power continues to reside in the hands of the white minority, because that is what white supremacy is.
The vice-grip on power that white supremacy has in the town remains so tight, when Kendrick’s family paid an independent investigator for a second autopsy because of the sham city investigation, they found out their son’s remains were desecrated in the process and his organs were replaced by crumpled balls of newspaper. Yet, no one has been held accountable for that desecration.
Pollock goes on to expose the heights that white supremacy reaches outside of Valdosta to protect the two white boys implicated in Kendrick’s death. This is because not only are they white, they are sons of an FBI agent, Rick Bell. Bell resigned as a result of the investigation into his involvement as well as his sons’ connection. But the large web of complicity involving the people who refused to investigate Bell and his sons includes seven judges who recused themselves from the case. SEVEN.
But it is the evidence uncovered by Pollock—an independent filmmaker—that makes the documentary truly worth the emotional investment required to sit through it. Not because the evidence legitimizes the allegations of a cover-up that Kendrick’s family makes. How the facts have been tossed around like a nuclear potato over the years makes it clear a cover-up was involved.
Pollock did not find evidence because an informer clandestinely provided documents or because they were secretly accessed in a hack. All it took was researching the FBI’s case files. Just another addition to the lexicon of the FBI’s racist legacy. This entire case should serve as another reminder of why we don’t trust the police to serve the interest of the people.
Seeing the evidence the FBI refused to pursue was too much for the parents. A Black homicide detective, who once served in Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, was so shocked at seeing footage that was withheld from him during his independent investigation, he was overcome with emotion. But this should be a lesson for Black people trying to change the system from the inside: The inside won’t ever treat us like them. We are never as “inside” the system as we think we are.
The ending of the documentary, with the family talking to the now-deceased Kendrick, is just heartbreaking. But it also speaks to the strength and enduring love of family, even in the face of the horrific injustice we have had to deal with in this god-forsaken white-supremacist country. We should not still have to have this kind of strength. But as this documentary, “Finding Kendrick Johnson,” proves, we do.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”
