Saturday, December 24, 2022

How American Dollars Oppress Afghan Women (Afghan Report 50)

 Note: This is the latest in a series of confidential reports from a young Afghan friend inside the country about conditions since the Taliban took power in August 2021. I am keeping his identity confidential for his safety.

Dear David:

On December 20th, the Taliban finally did what they’ve wanted to do all along. They announced that girls are no longer allowed to go to university. This decision was condemned by a few countries around the world. 

Here, In Afghanistan, more than 30 university professors bravely resigned in protest against the decision, and the male students at some universities staged a boycott of class. 

But the girls I know have become deeply disillusioned by their treatment by the Taliban and the overall indifference of the world and the men of Afghanistan toward their fate. Countless videos are circulating on social media that show girls crying while being kicked out of their classrooms. Their posts on their social media are sad and heartbreaking. One of the girls wrote that she hated herself for being born as a woman in Afghanistan. Another wrote she is “disgusted by the country where women should be imprisoned so men fall not into sin."

Lost in all of this is the role America plays in propping up the Taliban rule – sending 40 million dollars of aid to the Taliban every week. The Taliban gladly take this financial support while they do not shy away from many forms of brutality. They know that the US will not take any practical steps to punish them, only issuing verbal condemnations. 

This in my opinion makes the US government complicit in the oppression of Afghan women.

RELATED LINKS:

  • The United States Has Provided More Than $1.1 Billion To Respond To Humanitarian Crisis In Afghanistan Since August 2021 (USAID)

  • Taliban minister defends closing universities to women as global backlash grows (Guardian)

  • US threatens Taliban with 'costs' after ban on Afghan women and girls from school (ABC)

  • Afghans outraged over Taliban's university suspension for women (CNN)

  • Afghanistan: Taliban university ban (DW)

  • The Taliban are taking away women’s right to learn. The world can’t afford to stay silent (Guardian)

OTHER LINKS:

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Friday, December 23, 2022

Who Ordered It?

One piece of evidence in the case that lay unnoticed by Van Patter’s family for many decades until I raised it was Betty’s mysterious note to herself on or about November 1st, 1974:  “[415] 644-6743 Police.” When I asked Tamara about it, she noted the way her mother had circled and made a mark next to the notation. She pointed to other examples of this and said it was the way her mother consistently responded when listening intently to someone on the phone.

So we concluded that she must have made or received a call from that particular number.

Tamara then located on the Internet a copy of an old police directory that connected that extension to a Berkeley Police Department Officer named Dave Frederick. She pulled out her own notes from December 19th, 1974, when she first contacted the police, and sure enough, Frederick’s name and extension show up on that list as well.

In fact, Frederick signed all the early “supplemental reports” during the extensive police hunt for Betty as a missing person. He noted that the department had had contact with Betty in the past, referring to an arrest of a former boyfriend, when she was also arrested for disturbing the peace, but did not mention any phone call from a few weeks before she went missing, or any recent contact with Betty whatsoever. 

Tamara’s brother Greg Baltar, meanwhile, searched and found that Frederick had retired after 29 years at the BPD in 2002 and had passed away in 2004, at age 54. 

It was also clear from the files in 1974 that the Berkeley Police were in touch with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which was investigating the Panthers’ financial irregularities.  (Back in 1969, the IRS had begun targeting the Panthers for intelligence purposes and for uncovering evidence of violations of any tax regulations.)

On December 26, 1974, while Betty was still missing, an entry in the police file noted that a “Ronald C. Williams S/A (IRS) 273-7255 ‘has the case on the Lamp Post.’ Later, on March 3rd, 1975, is this entry: “Fred Walter, IRS, said he was investigating the Lamp Post's books and Jimmie Ward told him the 4th quarter payroll records were missing because they were in the possession of Betty Van Patter.” (The police noted this could not be true because Betty disappeared before the fourth quarter books could have been closed.) 

So that brings us back to Betty’s mysterious notation. Is it possible that Dave Frederick had called Betty at her home to see whether she knew anything about the Panthers’ financial irregularities and/or whether she might be willing to cooperate with the IRS in its investigation? 

Those who knew Betty well maintain that she would never have cooperated with law enforcement agencies against the Panthers so it is not credible to think she would have called them. But it seems quite credible that they would have called her. Does that explain her note?

We know from multiple sources that Betty was increasingly upset in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and that she was seeking someone she could talk over her “situation” with. We know she tried to find Tom Silk and that she did talk with Fred Hiestand, who were two of the party’s attorneys.  

We also know that Hiestand told Elaine Brown just two days before Betty disappeared about Betty’s concerns about what she’d seen at the Lamp Post, with money taken out of the till and not accounted for.

Then there is the matter of Brown allegedly firing Betty. That Brown lied about the date – claiming it was a week earlier – is obvious – but did she possibly also lie about firing her at all? According to Brown herself, Betty had left her a phone message threatening to quit.

It seems more than plausible that while she was sitting at the Berkeley Square on the night of December 13th, Betty thought she could still salvage her job and was waiting to meet someone connected with the Panthers in that effort. It could well have been Brown, or perhaps Jimmie Ward, the owner of the Lamp Post, who she hoped to meet.

The identity of the man who did come to the bar and spoke with her has never been established, although the police ran down several leads about who he might have been. Whoever he was, and whatever message he imparted, Betty did get up and leave with him and she went – somewhere. The most probable location, from all the known evidence, is the Lamp Post, but that’s where the trail grows cold.

Tamara and I met with Alameda County D.A. Tom Orloff on October 22, 1991 to discuss his theory of what happened. Orloff offered as a scenario that Betty had gone from the Berkeley Square to the Lamp Post, where she was killed either as “a spontaneous event or it was planned from there.”

While considering the various scenarios, it occurred to me to be an exceedingly odd circumstance that the Panthers changed the lock on the door to the office where Betty had been working in the days after she went missing. Why would they do this if they already had her in their custody, probably fearing she might be an agent of some kind, and while they were trying to get information from her? It is notable that the Panthers knew that Betty had her office keys with her when she disappeared.

Yet the locks were changed, as the police confirmed. 

So what if “they” (the Panthers) were not acting in concert? Consider another scenario, one that would explain this and some other inconsistencies. 

What if, as of the 17th, when Horowitz first contacted her, Elaine Brown did not yet know what had happened to Betty? Elaine Brown is very smart; smart enough to avoid incriminating herself on a phone call that might be (and in fact was) being taped. So her bitter comments about Betty, from one perspective so self-incriminating, might actually have indicated that she was out of the loop in this matter.

Betty could have, and probably did, go to the Lamp Post on the 13th. There she would have been under the province of Jimmie Ward, a man well known and feared by those who knew him best, especially women. There is evidence that among Ward’s businesses was a prostitution ring, no doubt generating much of the cash that to Betty’s dismay kept mysteriously finding its way into and out of the bar’s cash register.

Ward had plenty to hide, and Betty represented a potential loose cannon, given her expressed concerns about what she'd witnessed at the bar. What if he, and not Brown, had been the one to summon her that Friday night, possibly without Brown being in the know at all?

If that is what occurred, then it makes more sense that Brown would have had the locks to Betty’s office changed the following week. 

As she elaborated in her book, Brown was acutely aware that Betty knew too much and that she was raising her concerns with Hiestand and others. If she now was missing, she had keys to the office where the party’s sensitive information was kept.

As for the forensic and anecdotal (via David Horowitz’s sources) evidence that Betty was held, and possibly tortured for as long as two weeks before being killed, this would rule out any personal motive and further tie the Panthers into her death. Only the Panthers had a known motive for holding and torturing her. A crime of passion (by her ex-boyfriend Ken Baptiste or someone like him) would not have been carried out in this fashion.

As to who was calling the shots about her fate, Horowitz and reporters Ken Kelley and Kate Coleman, among others, all came to the conclusion that it was Huey Newton, from his base in Havana. Evaluating all of the evidence, I understand why.

The chain of command could have been Newton to Ward, every bit as easily as it could have been Brown to Forbes, as was communicated via the investigator Fechheimer to Lipset, and later to the family. In her book, Brown describes taking a phone call from Newton at the Lamp Post, just like the calls -- as she admitted to Coleman -- she received from him frequently at her home number.

So Newton called the Lamp Post whenever he wanted to. Other sources have corroborated that this happened, and also that Newton dispensed orders for “bad things” to be done at or from the bar. Ward was his cousin, the party funded the bar, Newton had actually killed one of Ward’s brothers in a dispute, and everyone feared the wrath of Huey P. Newton. Including Ward, Forbes and Brown.

But to this day, these various scenarios are just that — scenarios. The murder case has not been solved. And unless someone who knows the truth comes forward, it never will be.

LINKS:

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Thursday, December 22, 2022

The Motive

Fourteen years after Elaine Brown’s book came Flores Forbes’ revealing memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” in 2006. While in prison serving time for second-degree murder for the Richmond incident, Forbes had started his college education, which eventually led him onto urban planning and a job with the city of New York.

Though he was doing well in New York, Flores Forbes was not always able to contain himself as he attempted to deal with his feelings about some of his past actions. Sometime around the 25th anniversary of Betty’s disappearance, in 1999, a New York-based freelance writer, Scott Sherman, overheard Forbes bragging at a party about his past life as a Panther gunman.

That fed into Sherman’s work on an article for The Nation in 2000 about the Panthers’ role in David Horowitz’s conversion from a reliable friend of the left into an outspoken enemy.

In “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes provided an elaborate description of how he staged and executed the botched Richmond incident. That is the only criminal action he admitted to, although he stated there were others. In the book he indicated that he came to genuinely regret the things he did as a security officer in the Black Panther Party.

“Shit, if there was a witness who had the courage to testify against us, we would bribe them. Or, as we’d tried to do in Richmond, take stern steps to ensure they didn’t show or testify.”

“There was still the shadow that my past casts over my life.”

 “Upon close reflection, I realized that the passing of Huey P. Newton…meant that one less person was alive who actually knew what my past deeds were, and with each passing, that number would get smaller.”

These sound like the words of a man hoping to avoid paying any further price for his crimes beyond the time he had already served in California prisons. 

Could the murder of Betty Van Patter have been one of those deeds? After all, he was the party’s head of security at that time, and therefore responsible for doing any dirty work required. As he toured the country promoting his book, Forbes visited Oakland, where he was politely received at a reading in a bookstore at Jack London Square.

During the question and answer period after his talk, Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, raised her hand:

“Mr. Forbes, "You talked about the Lamp Post extensively in your book.  My mother, Betty Van Patter, was the Panther bookkeeper who was last seen at the Lamp Post on December 13th, 1974, and then found murdered.  Given your position in the Party, would you please comment on this?" 

Forbes, clearly taken aback, mumbled this answer to Tamara: 

“I did not know who Betty Van Patter was."

After the reading, as he was walking with his family nearby and saw Tamara approaching from another direction, Forbes steered his party aside to avoid encountering her.

***

Over the 48 years since Betty Van Patter was killed, her murder has been mentioned in several other news articles and books, as well as briefly in academic writings that mainly focus on the historical significance of Black Panther Party.

Driving much of the coverage during all those years has been the brilliant, tortured figure of David Horowitz, who used Betty’s case to argue that the Panthers were not a source of progressive change at all but essentially a gang of thugs. As more and more evidence has surfaced about the street brutality promoted by Huey Newton, Horowitz’s perspective gained a measure of credibility.

Even Elaine Brown, in her memoir, acknowledged the dark side of the Panthers: “Huey and his entourage of restless gunmen were prowling the after-hours clubs with no purpose other than to intimidate.”

On one level, Brown and others (particularly academics) who continue to defend the party’s legacy, argue that they were “armed revolutionaries” fighting repressive institutions, including police agencies that were targeting black people all over the country.

To a great extent, the Betty Van Patter case has been politicized on all sides, and rarely assessed simply as an unsolved murder, which is what the family finally asked me to do. It’s impossible to shed all personal bias, of course, but I’ve spent every bit as much energy looking for evidence of a counter-theory as for corroboration that the Panthers were at fault.

The family has pretty much given up hope there will ever be charges or a trial in the case, particularly since, as Forbes noted in his book, fewer and fewer people are still alive who know the actual details of any of the Panther-related crimes.

That the Panthers killed Betty is the only scenario that fits the known facts, but without definitive proof, it remains possible that someone else could have been involved.

An obvious suspect would have been an ex-boyfriend, like Ken Baptiste, the married man who she was still emotionally entwined with when she disappeared. The anguished entries to her private journal indicate that he was the source of some of what seemed to be troubling her in her final days. But he also appears to have cooperated with the police extensively, and to have made serious efforts to locate her when she was missing.

The police appear to have never really considered any theory other than the Panthers were at fault. But they could never build a plausible case based on real evidence – -everything was circumstantial. Elaine Brown’s statements over the years have done nothing to exonerate her and the Panthers from the crime, however. 

If anything, Brown has dug herself into a rhetorical hole around the case by strongly suggesting a motive – that Betty raised suspicions by asking too many questions at a time when the IRS was already actively probing the group’s finances.

In this context, it is not known whether Betty herself even was aware of law enforcement interest in the Panthers’ financial practices. The types of questions she was raising were simply the obvious ones any accountant or bookkeeper has to ask. Where was the money coming from and where was it going? Bookkeeping is all about keeping track – money in and money out.

Part of the confusion inside the organization may have been that Brown and others apparently knew very little about financial accounting themselves, so the straight-forward questions any scrupulous bookkeeper would have asked struck them as much more suspicious than they actually were.

Another factor here is that the pressure generated by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies on the Panthers was indeed substantial. Could this have been a factor — directly or indirectly — in her murder?

I’ll examine that angle at length tomorrow.

LINKS:

  • Why Zelensky’s surprise US visit is so hugely significant (CNN)

  • Biden administration to send Patriot missile system to Ukraine (WP)

  • $1.85 Billion in Additional U.S. Military Assistance, Including the First Transfer of Patriot Air Defense System (State Dept)

  • Tens of thousands wait at border for asylum limits to end (AP)

  • National Guard troops are lining up to stop migrants from reaching El Paso. More than 500 soldiers with razor wire fanned out along the Rio Grande. (WP)

  • Ukrainian Hackers Gather Data on Russian Soldiers, Minister Says (Bloomberg)

  • Behind the Front Lines, Ukrainian Civil Society Is Fighting for Survival (Newsweek)

  • Trump tax audit: Former president's returns will be made public (BBC)

  • Jan. 6 panel's final report will tackle foreign exploitation of Trump election lies (Politico)

  • Many House Republicans 'Too Dimwitted' to Wield Power: Wall Street Journal (Newsweek)

  • Afghanistan’s Taliban Ban All Education for Girls. Afghan girls and women have been squeezed out of public and professional life since the Taliban takeover last year (WSJ)

  • Congress drops Afghan allies item, dimming evacuee hopes (WP)

  • Taliban Bar Women From College Classes, in a Stark Reversal of Rights (NYT)

  • "When there is no education for women in a society, how can we be hopeful for a bright future?" Female university students in Afghanistan were turned away from campuses after the Taliban-run administration said women would be barred. The decision drew condemnation from foreign governments and the United Nations. (Reuters)

  • Elon Musk blames Twitter cost cuts on “$3 billion negative cash flow” (Ars Technica)

  • Billionaire Elon Musk said he will resign as CEO of Twitter once he finds "someone foolish enough to take the job." A majority of Twitter users who responded to Musk's poll Sunday night said he should step down, and he pledged to abide by the result. [HuffPost]

  • Hotels say goodbye to daily room cleanings and hello to robots as workers stay scarce (NPR)

  • Some residents in Beijing face waiting days to cremate relatives or paying steep fees to secure timely services, indicating a growing death toll as the Chinese capital battles a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases. (Reuters)

  • New COVID Subvariant Resistant to All Therapeutic Antibodies (SciTechDaily)

  • As Covid Deaths Climb, Even Seniors Skip the Latest Booster (NYT)

  • Investigation: Many U.S. hospitals sue patients for debts or threaten their credit (NPR)

  • The Black Death’s legacy, Neanderthal family ties, and other secrets revealed by ancient DNA in 2022 (CNN)

  • 120 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Fossil Hid a Surprising Meal in Its Stomach (CNET)

  • What it would take to discover life on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus (Phys.org)

  • Seven reasons our planet might not be doomed after all. Surprise! This environmental story is actually not depressing. (Vox)

  • Indigenous people slam ‘Avatar’ (again) for tropes and inaccuracies (WP)

  • Ex-Christian Makes Uncomfortable Small Talk After Running Into Jesus Christ At Store (The Onion)

 

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022

The Van Patter Files

 After he returned from Cuba, Huey Newton was frequently sighted in public drunk and/or high on cocaine. He seemingly could turn violent in a flash, reacting to minor perceived insults. He had always bragged to his Panther security contingent that he was the baddest of the bad-asses on Oakland’s tough streets, even as he presented himself to others (including me) as a soft-spoken, charming intellectual.

My earlier experiences with him were memorable for the brilliant conversations ranging from poetry to philosophy to politics and beyond. I liked him — a lot. Newton was the party’s main theoretician, extremely well versed in Marxism, even though he said he had been illiterate until his junior year in high school. 

I found that last claim hard to believe. But up until to this point I had only experienced Huey’s charming and brilliant side. Then came the occasion when I witnessed what the angry Newton could be like.

It was soon after the “Richmond incident” (October 23, 1977), where the Panthers head of security, Flores Forbes, by his own admission led a contingent of Panthers in the dead of night to a house where they thought a witness scheduled to testify against Newton in the murder of a prostitute, Kathleen Smith, was living.

In his 2006 memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes wrote: “I was not bothered by the fact I was on my way to assassinating someone.“ He continued, “In the final analysis, what I really believed was that Huey P. Newton was my ‘prince.’ I would kill or die for him at the drop of a hat.”

In Richmond, Forbes and his team got the address wrong and as they were attempting to break into the house, they awoke a middle-aged woman who heard her screen door being ripped off its hinges and then a shot outside. Thinking whoever was out there was trying to shoot off her lock, she grabbed her .38 revolver and fired.

When a hail of return fire came slamming back through her door she ran to another room and hid. When police arrived, they found a pool of blood and a shotgun. Following that trail of blood they found a dead man, but the trail continued, indicating a second assailant had been hit. 

The police also found more abandoned weapons and ammunition. It didn’t take them long to find out who the intended victim was – a prostitute who rented an apartment behind the middle-aged woman’s house and who had witnessed Huey Newton gun down her friend, Kathleen Smith.

The dead man was a Panther squad member, and team leader Flores Forbes was the other wounded assailant. He’d been shot in the hand and, with a third Panther, had fled to Las Vegas. Forbes was eventually convicted in the case and sent to prison. 

Not long after this bloody event, Paul Avery and I interviewed Newton in the Oakland hills as he sipped a glass of cognac. Newton’s lawyer, Sheldon Otis, was also present.

Newton tried to persuade us that Forbes and the other assailants had been only loosely associated with the Panthers, which was patently not true. He then claimed that they all had quit the party some weeks earlier.  His speech was somewhat erratic.

As I carefully repeated the chain of events and the trail of evidence leading back to the party for a second time during our interview, Newton lost his temper. He jumped up and stalked out of the room.

Otis followed him and for an extended period of time, Avery and I could hear him shouting in the other room, “I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!” 

Avery and I debated whether it might be wise for me make a hasty exit but we calculated that Otis would probably be able to calm Newton down. Eventually he did and Huey returned to finish the interview, still denying any knowledge of what the assassination squad had been up to that night in Richmond. He was subdued and no longer drinking the cognac, but he seemed emotionally remote.

Many years later, when Forbes published his memoir, he took personal responsibility for the botched assassination attempt, saying that he did it without Newton’s involvement or knowledge. That prompted me to wonder whether in fact part of Newton’s anger at my questioning that day had been because he was out of the loop on the assault after all.

***
In the early morning hours of August 22nd, 1989, a coked-out Huey Newton was shot to death by a low-level crack dealer, Tyrone Robinson, on the streets of Oakland. By then, the Black Panther Party had long since ceased to exist, as virtually every leader, from Bobby Seale to Elaine Brown to David Hilliard had fled from Newton’s side during his reign of terror.

Journalist Ken Kelley, who at one point or another was friends with virtually everyone involved in this case -– Betty, Tamara, Horowitz, Newton and also me -- published the first of two articles about his relationship with Newton, including having acted as his de facto PR man for a while in the late ‘70s.

The first piece appeared in the East Bay Express soon after Newton’s death. The second came sometime later in California magazine, where I was working as Northern California bureau chief. I edited that second article.

In both pieces, Kelley claimed that Newton confirmed that the Panthers had killed Betty, and had told him: “They never should have found her body.”

Other memoirs from significant players would soon follow. First up in 1992 was Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power.” Brown opened her book by reprinting the speech she gave in August 1974, when she assumed control of the Black Panther Party in the wake of Newton’s escape to Cuba to avoid facing murder charges.

“I have control over all of the guns and all of the money of this party. There will be no external or internal opposition I will not resist and put down. I will deal resolutely with anyone or anything that stands in the way.”

Throughout the book, Brown recounted numerous violent acts she witnessed, including some that she ordered. "It is a sensuous thing to know that at one's will an enemy can be struck down," she writes at one point after describing how she threatened to blow a woman’s office “off the map.”

“We Black Panthers disregarded the law. We were, indeed, as newspaper headlines frequently suggested, outlaws.”

Brown said she “endorsed” the “kicked-in doors or shot-up facilities” of those business owners in Oakland who resisted the shakedown demands the Panthers made in order to get the funds needed to run the party’s programs.

When it came to Betty Van Patter’s case, Brown offered the following version of events. “The body of Betty Van Patter had just been found in San Francisco Bay. She had been reported missing for some time, during which, through Charles Garry’s office, I had to answer police questions about her disappearance. I had no idea where she was.”

Brown indicated that she also was concerned at the time of “intensified Internal Revenue Service surveillance of our bank accounts.”

“Betty (asked) Norma (Norma Armour, who also worked on the Panthers’ books), and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the source of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations. She continued. I knew I had made a mistake in hiring her.”

Brown stated, “There was no question that many of our money transactions could be ruled illegal.”

“Our accountants and tax lawyers could hold off the IRS,” Brown continued. “It was for the party to keep our affairs in order. Betty Van Patter was showing herself useless in that endeavor, her nose in our business more than our books.”

Then, in a curious and wholly inaccurate addition, Brown wrote this: 

“Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty’s arrest record was a prison record – on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.”

This was an entirely false allegation – Betty had no such arrest record and was never involved in any drug trafficking activity. Her only arrest ever was a minor “disturbing the peace” citation many years earlier. 

So after receiving a letter from the Baltar family’s attorney to that effect, Brown’s publisher removed Brown’s statement that Betty had a prison record for drug trafficking from subsequent printings of the book.

Still, it was an oddly gratuitous move to include it in the first place.

After Betty’s body was found, Brown claimed in her book, many white supporters of the Panthers started to fear for their own lives and told her they’d heard she was under investigation for involvement in Betty’s murder. “All I could do was say, over and over, that while it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her.”

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022

The Traitor

[NOTE TO READERS: I will return to my series on the Betty Van Patter case tomorrow.]

(Wiki Commons)

“If we are to survive as a nation of laws and democracy, this can never happen again.” — Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Jan 6th committee.

***

For the first time in U.S. history, a Congressional committee has recommended that criminal charges be brought against a former President.

If tried and convicted of the four charges referred by the committee, Donald J. Trump would never be allowed to hold office again.

The committee’s final hearing on the U.S. Capitol attack lasted just over an hour and can be viewed on C-span.

I watched all of the committee hearings end-to-end. They were fair and non-partisan and extremely restrained, given the gravity of the matter.

But let’s face the facts: It will be very difficult for the Justice Department to obtain a conviction of Trump, though the prosecution of his lieutenants like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani should be easier.

Trump’s allegedly criminal actions include the speech he gave on Jan. 6th urging his supporters to go to the Capitol. He may be able to claim this was merely a political speech regarding a political matter, and that he didn't encourage them to use violence to overthrow the results of the election.

He also will no doubt claim “executive privilege” to protect many of his other communications that are relevant to this case.

In any event, many legal steps remain. First the Justice Department has to indict Trump, then try him, then convict him. All of that will take time.

And even if he is eventually let off on what would be essentially technicalities by the criminal justice system, Trump will forever be viewed by history for what he most definitely is— a traitor.

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Monday, December 19, 2022

Inside the Case File

 Four days after Betty Van Patter’s body was identified in January 1975, Berkeley Police Officer Dave Frederick contacted John Conomos of the U.S. Geological Survey in an attempt to understand the probable drift of the body in the bay. 

Conomos told Frederick that the average net drift of anything caught up in the tidal action from the central bay region, which would include Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, would be about a mile and a half to a mile and three-quarters a day south towards San Jose.

That Betty’s remains were found near Foster City is therefore consistent with her body having been dumped somewhere in the central bay region.

Within days of identifying Betty as a murder victim, the Berkeley Police held an interview with Elaine Brown and Joan Kelley of the Black Panther Party, as well as their lawyer, Charles Garry. 

Kelley was the EOC official who supervised Betty’s work and issued her paychecks. She told police she generally saw Betty about once a week at the Panther school when she was dropping off or picking up papers related to her work.

For her part, Brown insisted to the detectives that she fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. The police noted in their files that this was contradicted by all known evidence. Strangely, Brown then added that she ran into Betty unexpectedly at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

The evidence indicated that Elaine fired Betty on the 13th, not the 6th. And it seems most likely, though not conclusive, that the night of December 13th was the time that Elaine would have seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoken with her. It also is logical to think that Betty would have gone there to meet Elaine, courtesy of the note handed to her by the man at the Berkeley Square.

These details matter. We do know Betty was at the Lamp Post the night of the 13th. That is the last place she was seen. But we don’t know why she went there.

Before the police got an opportunity to ask Brown more questions along these lines, her attorney, Charles Garry, terminated the interview. 

And that effectively concluded the most active part of the investigation into the case by the Berkeley Police. They did not have enough evidence to arrest Elaine Brown for the murder of Betty Van Patter. And in any event, she may well have been innocent. But it is reasonable to say from this distance that she could have been much more helpful in solving the case had she wanted to be. 

Over the weeks and months to follow, police did track down and interview many of the people who had known Betty over the relevant time period. The consistent picture that emerged was that she had seemed excited to be working for the Panthers, admired Brown, but was concerned about some of the financial irregularities she witnessed, especially at the Lamp Post, and was trying to get things cleaned up to save the party from possible legal troubles.

The police did not seem to delve very deeply into any alternative scenario – such as her love life or a stranger killing. They did follow various leads that went nowhere, such as the identity of the man who talked to Betty and handed her a note at the Berkeley Square the night she disappeared. Despite numerous conversations with witnesses, rumors and leads, they were never able to identify this man.

As the months went by, new entries to the case file started tapering off, and eventually all activity on the case ceased. Thus it joined the many other cold cases that remain unresolved year after year, decade after decade, probably forever.

David Horowitz, meanwhile, publicly completed his odd personal transformation from a prominent leftist into an outspoken advocate of ludicrous right-wing ideas, and in interviews, said that Betty’s murder had been a major precipitating factor behind his political conversion.

Perhaps he had good intentions, but Horowitz’s protestations hardly helped solve the case. Rather, he only succeeded in politicizing the matter unnecessarily.

Then again, almost single-handedly for decades, Horowitz kept Betty’s case from fading completely from the limelight. He mentioned it in his speeches and articles. And significantly, in 1995, he published a long article by Kate Coleman in Heterodoxy, a journal of his non-profit Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

In that article, Coleman named who she believed ordered the murder and who did it. She also described attending a bookstore reading in Berkeley, when Elaine Brown was promoting her autobiography, “A Taste of Power.” During the question period, Coleman asked Brown whether she was in touch with Newton while he was in exile in Cuba, including the period when Betty was killed.

“Quite a bit, in fact,” Brown answered after an initial hesitation. “And I have the phone bills to prove it because he would call collect. It was costing me three and four thousand dollars a month!” Coleman surmised this was a highly relevant admission when it came to who within the Panther hierarchy might have ordered Betty to be killed.

Given her statement, Coleman knew that it had to be entertained that perhaps it was not Elaine Brown but Huey Newton who had ordered Betty’s murder. But Newton himself couldn’t be questioned because he too had since been murdered.

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