In Live From Death Row, Abu-Jamal writes that as a teenager in the 1960s he was literally kicked into the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party by a police officer. He quickly became an active party member, speaking at rallies, writing for the party newspaper and attending demonstrations.
Almost as soon as he joined the BPP, Abu-Jamal became a subject of FBI and police surveillance and harassment, along with many other party members.
The Abu-Jamal probe was but one corner of the FBI's vast COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), under which the government monitored thousands of people whose politics were deemed dangerous. The program was itself investigated in the early 1970s and eventually dismantled in the midst of a public scandal, but the surveillance of Abu-Jamal continued.
In 1992, the FBI released a heavily redacted portion of agency documents on Abu-Jamal to defense attorney Paul Cooperstein. That file totalled 700 pages and spanned 20 years.
The surveillance began in 1969 when Abu-Jamal (then Wesley Cook) was just 15, according to Cooperstein's affidavit. It continued, via the Philadelphia police under police commissioner and then mayor Frank Rizzo, through Abu-Jamal's activities with the radical group MOVE in the 1970s and 1980s.
In a memo dated Oct. 24, 1969, Abu-Jamal was recommended by the FBI for the "Security Index," a list of people seen as threats to national security. A month earlier, he had been arrested in police raids on the party office and on a nearby bar.
In 1971, Cooperstein writes, Abu-Jamal was listed in the Administrative Index of people who would be detained in internment camps in case of a national emergency. He was still in high school.
Even as recently as 1991, an FBI memo recorded a prison visit to Abu-Jamal by a participant in a New York convention focusing on "political prisoners being held in U.S. jail."
Abu-Jamal was never charged with a serious crime, however. "Despite the many years of persistent surveillance, wiretaps, and physical observation by the FBI and Phildelphia police," Cooperstein concludes, "there was not one instance of Jamal's engaging in any illegal activity."
Abu-Jamal's defense team charges that the government's attitude toward his political activities prevented him from receiving a fair trial. It was prosecutors who first raised the issue of Abu-Jamal's past political activities during his 1982 sentencing.
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