24-08-2012, 07:20 AM
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with our two guests today: Seth Rosenfeld, the reporter whose new book is out this week, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power; we're also joined by Professor Diane Fujino, who has written a book about Richard Aoki, who Seth Rosenfeld says he has found through getting information through the Freedom of Information Act, that is anwas an agent for the FBI. Diane Fujino, can you talk about who Richard Aoki was? Give us a brief thumbnail sketch of his life story.
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah. Richard Aoki was born in 1938. As a young child, only three-and-a-half years old, he and his family, along with 110,000 other West Coast Japanese Americans, were placed into concentration camps. And for Richard, that was very formative, becauseand createdthis kind of hurts of history created a major personal injury, because his parents separated inside the camps. And in a very unusual situation, he and his younger brother went to live with their father, both inside the camp barracks as well as upon their return to the Aoki family's home in West Oakland.
Richard grew up homeschooled, which is quite unusual, and was very well read. He claims to have been going to the library back and forth and read 600 books in a single year. And while I have no proof of that, I do have many people talking about him, as an adult, as one of the most well-read people that they know. This includes a university professor friend of Richard who was saying this, that Richard is the most well-read person he knows. And Richard was very advanced theoretically, politically and theoretically.
Richard wasadopted the Cold War standards for masculinity and the military in the '50s, was eager to becometo join the Army and become the first Japanese-American general in the U.S. Armythat was his dreamand a fighter pilot. But, according to what Richard Aoki has told me, is that hewhile he was in the Army Reserves in the late '50s, he began to connect, through a series of working-class jobs, to labor organizers and socialist organizers. And they started to change, slowly and in an uneven way, his ideas about politics. And he joined the Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, and then, in the mid-'60s, '63, returned to Merritt college full time where he beganand he and others began a socialist discussion club.
And it was at Merritt College, which we know today as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, that he met the co-founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. And they began to have political discussions and exchanges before the start of the Panthers. And when the Panthers formed, he was one of the earliest members. He says, and Bobby Seale confirms, that they would talk to Richard in very political discussions and that when they wrote their 10-point platform, they ran it by Richard to see what he thought about it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip from the documentary film Aoki, which chronicles the life of Richard Aoki. In this excerpt, his friends and comrades explain how he helped bring weapons into the Black Panthers movement.
KATHLEEN CLEAVER: He had made guns available to Huey, very early on.
BOBBY SEALE: Huey says, "Look, Richard, you have to let us have some of those guns. You have a lot of guns here."
ELBERT "BIG MAN" HOWARD: Richard would come around and donate weapons to the organization, you know.
BOBBY SEALE: So he gave a M1 carbine and a .45. And this was all about uswe was going to patrol the police. Richard helped us teach the other brothersthe new, young seven, eight, 10 brothers in therehow to break these weapons down, how to clean the weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: From the documentary Aoki. Shaka At-Thinnin of the Black August Organizing Committee speaks about Richard Aoki's commitment to the cause.
SHAKA AT-THINNIN: If you have not won and you are still breathing, then that means you still have to fight. When I get to be 60 years old and like 70 years old and if I'm still breathing, I'm going to be still doing this. And I'm sure that's the way Richard feels. I know he does, you know. I talk to him. It's something that generates or emanates from him.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Those were some of the tapes of various people who worked with Richard and members of theformer members of the Black Panther Party talking about him. Seth Rosenfeld, one of the things you raise in your book, that you question whether he was actuallywhether Richard Aoki was actually donating weapons to the Panthers or helping to set them up.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes. I'd like to first say, it's important to be clear about what we know and what we don't know. What we know is, according to former FBI agent Burney Threadgill and this FBI document, the opinion of Wesley Swearingen, as well, that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant during the same period that he was arming the Black Panthers and giving them weapons training. What we don't know is whether the FBI was involved in any way with providing weapons or that it even knew that Richard Aoki was giving weapons to the Black Panthers. That's the first thing I'd like to make clear.
The other thing I want to point out is that, in doing my reporting, I took extra efforts to be totally transparent about what my evidence was. Professor Fujino says there's only one footnote in the book that addresses this. In fact, it's a very lengthy footnote, and it lists each piece of evidence that I use. In the story that I did with of the Center for Investigative Reporting for the Chronicle, we were also very specific about what the evidence was. Not only did I say that I had interviewed FBI agent Burney Threadgill, but we played the tape, and we also played Richard's comments, including his denial and also other statements which seem to be potentially suggestive explanations for his having been an informant.
DIANE FUJINO: I agree that Seth Rosenfeld's book is well researched. If you look in the footnotes and the bibliography, there's extensive research done, which is why I was so surprised that, after hearing the San Francisco [Chronicle] article, I expected to get more information in this thick book about evidence, and there wasn't any. It was very slim. It's the same things that are being said repeatedly.
I do want to say something that Juan González had mentioned about Richard not seeming to fit the profile because he was a more visible activist. And in another way, Richard Aoki does not fit the profile because many times, especially if they're agent provocateurs or even infiltrators, they're either low-key or they are people who try to get people to constantly engage in provocative and disruptive and risky behaviors. And Richard was a scholar. He's known for givingthe things that he's best known forwell, until this weekwas giving the first guns to the Black Panther Party to support their police patrols to stop police brutality in the black neighborhoods. And Richard was a scholar also. He was advanced theoretically and could spar theoretically with anyone around him. And that is not a typical profile of an infiltrator.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Fujino, this term that you use, "snitch-jacketing," can you explain it?
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah, it's a tactic used by the FBI tothrough rumors, through manufacturing evidence and misinformation, to cast suspicions around legitimate activists so that people think that they might be informants. And so I question: is the evidence there, or might this be a snitch-jacket on Richard Aoki? I feel the evidence is not there and that more needs to be provided in order to have it meet the burden of proof.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth Rosenfeld, your response?
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, snitch-jacketing was a technique that was used by the FBI against leftists and also sometimes in criminal cases. The purpose of it was to suggest that somebody was an informant and then leak that or make that known, and thereby cast suspicion on that person and discredit them. I don't believe that that's the case here. And there's absolutely no evidence that that's what was done here. There's nothing in any FBI file that addresses that. That's something that I thought about while I was doing the research. So I think that that supposition and allegation on the part of Professor Fujino is entirely unfounded.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to move on to talk about the rest of your book, Seth Rosenfeld, but I wanted to give Professor Diane Fujino one last final comment on this story that is coming out with the publication of Seth Rosenfeld's book. Diane Fujino, again, wrote the book Samurai Among Panthers about Richard Aoki.
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah. People are saying, you know, if Richard that's a big "if" if he was an informant, what did he inform on? When was he an informant? Seth Rosenfeld is claiming that he was in the late '60s based on this one 1967 document, which I argue is very unclear. It can be read in multiple ways. And, you know, so we want to know more information about this. But what people are saying is that Richard contributed so much to the movement. It's unclear if there wasif he was an informant, what kind of damage he did to undermine the movement is completely unclear. But what he did as a contribution to the movement is clear.
He was a leader of the Black Panther Party. He was one of the foremost architects of Afro-Asian unity. He was the second chair of the Asian American Political Alliance, which was one of the most influential youth groups of the Asian American movement and the group that's credited with coining the very term "Asian Americans." He helped to start Asian American Studies at Berkeley, both as an activist and then, in late '69, became one of the first instructors and an early coordinator of Asian American studies at Berkeley. And he went on to be a counselor and instructor at East Bay community colleges, where he supported ethnic studies and supported working-class students in their pursuits of higher education. And he made multiple contributions throughout his life, up through past his retirement, where he served as inspiration and a political mentor to many young people.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Diane Fujino, we want to thank you very much for being with us, professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her most recent book is called Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. We'll come back to talk with Seth Rosenfeld about other angles of his book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power.
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah. Richard Aoki was born in 1938. As a young child, only three-and-a-half years old, he and his family, along with 110,000 other West Coast Japanese Americans, were placed into concentration camps. And for Richard, that was very formative, becauseand createdthis kind of hurts of history created a major personal injury, because his parents separated inside the camps. And in a very unusual situation, he and his younger brother went to live with their father, both inside the camp barracks as well as upon their return to the Aoki family's home in West Oakland.
Richard grew up homeschooled, which is quite unusual, and was very well read. He claims to have been going to the library back and forth and read 600 books in a single year. And while I have no proof of that, I do have many people talking about him, as an adult, as one of the most well-read people that they know. This includes a university professor friend of Richard who was saying this, that Richard is the most well-read person he knows. And Richard was very advanced theoretically, politically and theoretically.
Richard wasadopted the Cold War standards for masculinity and the military in the '50s, was eager to becometo join the Army and become the first Japanese-American general in the U.S. Armythat was his dreamand a fighter pilot. But, according to what Richard Aoki has told me, is that hewhile he was in the Army Reserves in the late '50s, he began to connect, through a series of working-class jobs, to labor organizers and socialist organizers. And they started to change, slowly and in an uneven way, his ideas about politics. And he joined the Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, and then, in the mid-'60s, '63, returned to Merritt college full time where he beganand he and others began a socialist discussion club.
And it was at Merritt College, which we know today as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, that he met the co-founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. And they began to have political discussions and exchanges before the start of the Panthers. And when the Panthers formed, he was one of the earliest members. He says, and Bobby Seale confirms, that they would talk to Richard in very political discussions and that when they wrote their 10-point platform, they ran it by Richard to see what he thought about it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip from the documentary film Aoki, which chronicles the life of Richard Aoki. In this excerpt, his friends and comrades explain how he helped bring weapons into the Black Panthers movement.
KATHLEEN CLEAVER: He had made guns available to Huey, very early on.
BOBBY SEALE: Huey says, "Look, Richard, you have to let us have some of those guns. You have a lot of guns here."
ELBERT "BIG MAN" HOWARD: Richard would come around and donate weapons to the organization, you know.
BOBBY SEALE: So he gave a M1 carbine and a .45. And this was all about uswe was going to patrol the police. Richard helped us teach the other brothersthe new, young seven, eight, 10 brothers in therehow to break these weapons down, how to clean the weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: From the documentary Aoki. Shaka At-Thinnin of the Black August Organizing Committee speaks about Richard Aoki's commitment to the cause.
SHAKA AT-THINNIN: If you have not won and you are still breathing, then that means you still have to fight. When I get to be 60 years old and like 70 years old and if I'm still breathing, I'm going to be still doing this. And I'm sure that's the way Richard feels. I know he does, you know. I talk to him. It's something that generates or emanates from him.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Those were some of the tapes of various people who worked with Richard and members of theformer members of the Black Panther Party talking about him. Seth Rosenfeld, one of the things you raise in your book, that you question whether he was actuallywhether Richard Aoki was actually donating weapons to the Panthers or helping to set them up.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes. I'd like to first say, it's important to be clear about what we know and what we don't know. What we know is, according to former FBI agent Burney Threadgill and this FBI document, the opinion of Wesley Swearingen, as well, that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant during the same period that he was arming the Black Panthers and giving them weapons training. What we don't know is whether the FBI was involved in any way with providing weapons or that it even knew that Richard Aoki was giving weapons to the Black Panthers. That's the first thing I'd like to make clear.
The other thing I want to point out is that, in doing my reporting, I took extra efforts to be totally transparent about what my evidence was. Professor Fujino says there's only one footnote in the book that addresses this. In fact, it's a very lengthy footnote, and it lists each piece of evidence that I use. In the story that I did with of the Center for Investigative Reporting for the Chronicle, we were also very specific about what the evidence was. Not only did I say that I had interviewed FBI agent Burney Threadgill, but we played the tape, and we also played Richard's comments, including his denial and also other statements which seem to be potentially suggestive explanations for his having been an informant.
DIANE FUJINO: I agree that Seth Rosenfeld's book is well researched. If you look in the footnotes and the bibliography, there's extensive research done, which is why I was so surprised that, after hearing the San Francisco [Chronicle] article, I expected to get more information in this thick book about evidence, and there wasn't any. It was very slim. It's the same things that are being said repeatedly.
I do want to say something that Juan González had mentioned about Richard not seeming to fit the profile because he was a more visible activist. And in another way, Richard Aoki does not fit the profile because many times, especially if they're agent provocateurs or even infiltrators, they're either low-key or they are people who try to get people to constantly engage in provocative and disruptive and risky behaviors. And Richard was a scholar. He's known for givingthe things that he's best known forwell, until this weekwas giving the first guns to the Black Panther Party to support their police patrols to stop police brutality in the black neighborhoods. And Richard was a scholar also. He was advanced theoretically and could spar theoretically with anyone around him. And that is not a typical profile of an infiltrator.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Fujino, this term that you use, "snitch-jacketing," can you explain it?
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah, it's a tactic used by the FBI tothrough rumors, through manufacturing evidence and misinformation, to cast suspicions around legitimate activists so that people think that they might be informants. And so I question: is the evidence there, or might this be a snitch-jacket on Richard Aoki? I feel the evidence is not there and that more needs to be provided in order to have it meet the burden of proof.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth Rosenfeld, your response?
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, snitch-jacketing was a technique that was used by the FBI against leftists and also sometimes in criminal cases. The purpose of it was to suggest that somebody was an informant and then leak that or make that known, and thereby cast suspicion on that person and discredit them. I don't believe that that's the case here. And there's absolutely no evidence that that's what was done here. There's nothing in any FBI file that addresses that. That's something that I thought about while I was doing the research. So I think that that supposition and allegation on the part of Professor Fujino is entirely unfounded.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to move on to talk about the rest of your book, Seth Rosenfeld, but I wanted to give Professor Diane Fujino one last final comment on this story that is coming out with the publication of Seth Rosenfeld's book. Diane Fujino, again, wrote the book Samurai Among Panthers about Richard Aoki.
DIANE FUJINO: Yeah. People are saying, you know, if Richard that's a big "if" if he was an informant, what did he inform on? When was he an informant? Seth Rosenfeld is claiming that he was in the late '60s based on this one 1967 document, which I argue is very unclear. It can be read in multiple ways. And, you know, so we want to know more information about this. But what people are saying is that Richard contributed so much to the movement. It's unclear if there wasif he was an informant, what kind of damage he did to undermine the movement is completely unclear. But what he did as a contribution to the movement is clear.
He was a leader of the Black Panther Party. He was one of the foremost architects of Afro-Asian unity. He was the second chair of the Asian American Political Alliance, which was one of the most influential youth groups of the Asian American movement and the group that's credited with coining the very term "Asian Americans." He helped to start Asian American Studies at Berkeley, both as an activist and then, in late '69, became one of the first instructors and an early coordinator of Asian American studies at Berkeley. And he went on to be a counselor and instructor at East Bay community colleges, where he supported ethnic studies and supported working-class students in their pursuits of higher education. And he made multiple contributions throughout his life, up through past his retirement, where he served as inspiration and a political mentor to many young people.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Diane Fujino, we want to thank you very much for being with us, professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her most recent book is called Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. We'll come back to talk with Seth Rosenfeld about other angles of his book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass