The story of the black American, Ernest James Thompson, who was apprehended in Belize City sometime on Sunday night and returned to the United States by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on Monday, is one which intrigues me.
The sensational reports of links to Al Queda and some plot to poison the water supply in the United States, do not faze me, and I will tell you why. This brother was a free man, out on parole, and the evidence indicates what he was running away from, was having to testify against people he believed to be his friends.
We have a sense of the climate of fear in the United States since the various 9/11 attacks five years ago on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the subsequent American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States has the right to defend its territory and its citizens.
As is the case with most Belizeans, a lot of my personal culture is an American culture – music, sports, dance, movies, clothes, etc. I am grateful to the United States for giving me a scholarship to study in one of their best universities. If I had to live in the United States or any other foreign country, for sure I would choose the United States. I am not an anti-American.
But we have to consider each case on its merits. In 1970, a black American poet by the name of Marvin X Jackman fled the United States because, like most Muslim members of the Nation of Islam, including Muhammad Ali, he was refusing to be drafted into the armed forces by the United States. This is a federal offence, and unless you have a lot of expensive lawyers, as Ali did, you will go to jail.
Marvin X arrived in British Honduras with basically the clothes on his back and nowhere to stay. I was living alone on Waight Street in the Yarborough area of Belize City at the time, and made my small rented house available for Marvin to use. I was on trial in the Supreme Court during this period, along with Ismail Omar Shabazz, a brother Muslim to Marvin X.
Marvin was a quiet, spiritual brother who began to spend a lot of time in Gales Point Manatee. I never went to Manatee to see where he was staying, what he was doing there or with whom he was hanging out. Like I said, to be ungrammatical, I had my own problems at the time. (There was no “coastal road” to Manatee in 1970.)
Incidentally, Marvin was not a lightweight poet. His work had been published in the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, among others. In 1970, I was also a poet, so we had a frame of reference. Marvin was not a criminal. His objection to the draft was “conscientious,” or religious. I suppose the American government, technically speaking, would have considered me a “hostile” for harboring a fugitive. That was not a consideration for me at the time.
One day in Manatee the Belize police just picked up Marvin X, bussed him to the international airport, and American federal officials took him back to the States. I heard somewhere they had my brother in handcuffs and chains when he was going out, but this is not eyesee, just hearsay.
Today Muhammad Ali is a great hero in the United States, but when I left there in 1968 he was one of the people most hated by the American government and business/industrial establishment. I don’t know anything whatsoever right now about Marvin X, but I hope he made out okay after the penitentiary.
Coming back to the present, I have to tell you that a conscious or militant brother can get himself into big trouble today in America in the twinkling of an eye. All the conscious or militant organizations are infiltrated, and highly paid informers are everywhere. Plus, everybody’s “wired up.” If you get into any group and say something angry or threatening because you’re angry about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, say, you can find yourself arrested, locked down and threatened with jail time unless you “cooperate.” It’s worse than that. There are macho provocateurs working for the federal government who can set you up and get you in big trouble. The technical term for this is “entrapment.” The United States, as a society, is tense.
Let me give you a front page example from THE NEW YORK TIMES, America’s leading newspaper, published just this Monday, December 18, 2006. This is the case of a white American by the name of Donald Vance, a 29-year-old U.S. Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. Vance became an FBI informer at the Iraqi security firm where he worked. The “system” made him detainee no. 200343 in Baghdad. And he was one of their informers!
Let me quote now from the New York newspaper: “But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.
One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.
American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.
The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.”
Until they prove to me otherwise, I consider Ernest James Thompson just a brother on the run, trying to find somewhere to start life all over again. I have a sense of how it feels to be on the run, and it ain’t nice. Not everybody who is on the run, is a child molester or a dirty sicko or a murderous terrorist. I know you’ve seen “The Shawshank Redemption.” Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Real.