1
1
1
Here we are back at the alleged -- but imaginary, see above -- "traffic violation" committed by Abu-Jamal's brother Billy Cook, which is now presented as the first part of a sinister scheme to lure a police officer -- and perhaps this particular one -- into a situation where his back is unprotected to give a long-term cop-hating beast such as the ex-Panther Abu-Jamal an opportunity to finish him off.
Except that it never happened, as Joseph McGill, who jovially and joyfully indulges in these unfounded and false speculations fed to him by the equally unscrupulous Smerconish, knows perfectly well. To this day, nobody knows why Officer Faulkner stopped Billy Cook that fateful night, but what we do know squarely tells us that it was NOT for committing a traffic violation by driving down 13th the wrong way.
What Cook himself now says in the other, now no longer brand-new but still extremely informative, exciting, and much more balanced and objective documentary than the present one on the Abu-Jamal case, In Prison My Whole Life, is that what he got was the all-too usual (not only) nightly treatment of a black driver in an American city controlled by a disproportionally white police force. Asked what had happened after the stop, he says he was subjected to "slurs," and pressed further as to what these where, he respond: "Well the usual. The nigger."
Given the behavior of the police in America's cities to this day and the frame-up trials both Billy Cook and his brother Mumia Abu-Jamal were subjected to (and which I analyze thoroughly elsewhere), this statement has much plausibility, whereas McGill's and Smerconish's conspiracy thesis is a combination of a flat lie (Cook committing a traffic violation by driving on 13th in the wrong direction, contradicted by the prosecution's own witness Albert Magilton) and malicious speculation (he did what in fact he did not do to lure Faulkner to his death).
But at least we now know why the core of the fanatics who want to see Abu-Jamal executed rather today than tomorrow in their publications keeps insisting on such seemingly irrelevant view on why Billy Cook was stopped.
McGill's Tale V: Abu-Jamal, the Disrespectful and Cruel Hater of Any Civilized Order
Above, I have sketched some of the core lies and fantasies in the McGill/Smerconish interview. The list can't be complete without mentioning McGill's attribution to Abu-Jamal himself of a quote the latter made from the works of Mao Zedong in order to characterize the brutality of the American political system, a quote the young Abu-Jamal had used to characterize the United States' police forces following the assassination of Black leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Before I come to the full maliciousness of that attribution, I want to add another new fantasy presented by Joe McGill in his Smerconish interview which, given his solid knowledge of the facts, must count as another probably conscious lie.
Towards the final third of the interview, McGill rants and raves for more than a minute about how Abu-Jamal, after he had read, before the sentencing phase, a statement to the jury concerning the jury's finding him guilty, allegedly fought with Judge Sabo to not go to the witness stand for the cross-examination prosecutor McGill claimed he was now entitled to on account of Abu-Jamal's address to the jury. It was this cross-examination that provided the context that enabled McGill to bring in the Mao quote about political power growing out of "the barrel of a gun":
"Jamal then says, he doesn't even move, he sits down, he had stood for his five pages [of the statement he had read], and then Judge Sabo says, Mr. Jamal, you're being cross-examined, so please will you go up here to the witness stand. And then, nothing! He didn't even hear it, he was looking right through Judge Sabo. He does not recognize anyone. Judge Sabo did this for five times ! (my emphasis)"
In the Smerconish interview, McGill claims he then made the suggestion to let Abu-Jamal where he was, at the table of the defense rather than having him enter the witness stand, because he wanted to have the opportunity to cross-examine him.
Of course, Abu-Jamal had indeed had run-ins with the presiding judge over Abu-Jamal's right to represent himself and many other issues and was thrown out of the courtroom for more than half of his trial for these reasons. Everybody who has looked at that trial even superficially is bound to know that, but what most people can't know or realize when listening to the Smerconish/McGill diatribes is that everything McGill says in the quote above is to 100 percent invented. The actual full quote from the trial transcripts for the period between the end of Abu-Jamal's personal statement and the beginning of McGill's cross examination reads like this:
"Defense lawyer: I have no further questions, Your Honor. -- Mr. McGill: May I proceed, Your Honor? -- The Court: Go ahead. -- Mr. McGill: Perhaps it would be better, Your Honor, if I would stand over here and direct my comments to him. -- The Court: I don't care. -- Mr. McGill: It seems kind of silly if I turn to the right (whereupon the District Attorney stands at the witness box, directing his cross-examination to the defendant). -- [A sidebar conference follows in which only the lawyers and the judge are involved, and it is followed by the cross examination of Abu-Jamal.]"
So McGill's whole anger directed against Abu-Jamal even a quarter of a century after the facts is caused by an event that is only of a figment of his own imagination, or as we should rather, his wishful fantasies, as of all people concerned with this case, McGill must be one of those who actually knows the facts best, which also means that he must have known the story he told Michael Smerconish in December 2007 to be patently untrue.
McGill's Tale VI: "The Barrel of a Gun"
One of the worst and most mendacious parts of McGill's tale as told to Smerconish is the part that immediately follows the one just sketched, the one where McGill proceeds to subject Abu-Jamal to cross-examination.
