("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MARCH 27, 1995
On March 27, 1995, I interviewed Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts [CCCC] by telephone. The following is my transcription of that interview. Note that in this interview I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or some of the statements of Mr. Skolnick.
-- Brian Francis Redman, Editor-in-chief, Conspiracy Nation
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CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. All I'm sayin' is that the claim had been made at the time
that this [Waco] was the first time that U.S. military had been
used against civilians. And I thought, well in the '68
Democratic riots, the U.S. military...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. Right. They used military, right. They used national guard
and others.
Well no, they've used military, in -- what was it? 1961? During the commotions at a university in Mississippi regarding integration? They brought in, I think they brought in uh, federalized the national guard or something?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah and also the "Bonus Army", if you remember back in, say...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
1931, right?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah. They used federal troops. Somebody -- I think John DiNardo,
somebody on the Internet -- pointed that out to me also.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. Yeah. So, it's been done in the past.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, okay. That's basically what I was gettin' at.
O.K. In December 4th of 1969, also in Chicago, the police and FBI raided the Black Panther Party headquarters, on the west side...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... That's not... You haven't got it correctly.
It was a unit, supposedly, of the state's attorney of Cook county that did the raid. It wasn't exactly the police, and it was not the FBI.
And, almost all of those that were in the team, that came in with machine guns and killed Fred Hampton in his bed, were connected to CIA. I know a lot about it.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, then that's kind of what I wanted to get into a little bit
here, is that.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Because the same one that led the raid, Sergeant Daniel Groth,
was involved in an earlier incident, two-and-a-half weeks prior
to Dallas [i.e., circa November 1963], where they stopped a team
of assassinations that planned to kill JFK in Chicago at a
football game if he came here. Same Daniel Groth.
Daniel Groth is a... I had a discussion with him one time. And he told me that, for the sake of his son, if I would stop talking about what I know about him. And I told him, "The news is the news." I can't help if family members of his are troubled or threatened because I uncover things about his connection to CIA.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Well you know, it's also debatable if, say, his son or any of his
family are responsible for his actions. I mean, what he did
is what he did.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Oh I didn't say that they were responsible. But he told me to lay
off of it one time I happened to run into him in a restaurant in
Chicago. And, he sat at my table and talked to me and tried to
persuade me to stop talkin' about these things. Because it was
causing him, his family, a great deal of trouble.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, and they had a grand jury investigation of that raid. And
I, for some reason, actually went to Chicago at the time (I think
I was about 16 at the time) and got, bought a copy of it. And I
still have that report. And it seems that they...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh they didn't indict anyone. And they... It was sort of a
watered-down criticism of what happened.
The media here falsely reported the thing. Such as channel 2 in Chicago (WBBM-TV, a CBS affiliate) went on the air thereafter and, supposedly, re-created what happened there with a, you know, with a model, on the air? A model of the apartment. And they falsely stated that Fred Hampton's people, who were all asleep actually, were shooting at the police and therefore the police were justified. It was entirely a fraud by channel 2.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah. But as far as the final report of that grand jury, you're
sayin' it was kind of like a "limited hangout" {1} kind of a
thing. That they...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. Their report wasn't too good.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay -- although I was impressed that they at least, in that
report, came out with the basic truth: that...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
But what the, much better evidence was a trial that went on. It
was one of the longest civil trials, I think, in American
history. It was Bill Hampton and his mother, that is, the
brother and the mother of Fred Hampton, versus the various people
involved in the situation -- Daniel Groth and others. They were
on trial for I don't know how many months.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
It was a civil suit though, right?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. And it's, it's published in the law books. Hampton
versus... whatever. It's... And the, I believe the jury verdict
was upheld on appeal, too.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Well the way I understand it, they were awarded millions of
dollars on that.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
So they won their case.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. In other words, better evidence came out there than by
way of any so-called "grand jury report".
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, okay.
As far as the Black Panthers go, is it your opinion that they're really a grass-root organization? Or did, were they gettin', say, hidden funds from anyone?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... not in Chicago. But some of the original people later got
into things that appear to be CIA -- including Eldridge Cleaver.
In fact, Cleaver's wife once made a speech, in Denver, in so many
words admitting that her husband had become friendly to CIA
because of Cleaver's wife's father, who was a very important
person in an agency connected to CIA, the AID [Agency for
International Development], I believe it is. Which is a similar
group.
In other words, in third-world countries, the CIA operated as the Agency for International Development, or whatever they call it. And Cleaver's wife's father was big with that. In fact, that came out when his father-in-law died, in his obituary.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
And what about claims of, say, the Communist Party funding some
of... say, not the Panthers, but there's been some claims that
Dr. Martin Luther King was receivin' money from the Communist
Party?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Naw... That was an ultra-right wing thing. He once, as a
spectator or observer, went to a seminar of the, uh... a
communist group. But he was not a communist.
I mean, it's just like some of us free-lance journalists occasionally go to a convention of the "CP-USA" [i.e., Communist Party - USA]. No other journalists are there. I mean, so somebody could point at me and call me a communist (which I'm not) simply because I went as a journalist to observe what's goin' on!?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, but I'm thinking more in terms of, say, that Dr. King,
originally, was grass-roots, began to have some effect on waking
people up, and at that point, the Communist Party...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well... No, he wasn't grass-roots. He was heavily arranged and
funded by groups connected to the Kennedy family, who, after his
death, helped set up one or more foundations that finance his
widow and children.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, and are you familiar with the recent dispute they're havin'
down there, about the museum?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. Yeah, I read about it. But those are all issues that I
don't claim any special knowledge about.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, okay.
You, in a prior interview, you mentioned that you had taught a class on, kind of, "tricks of the trade" for unearthing information.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, I taught a class at Columbia College, which is a broadcast
school, in Chicago. It's sort of a technical school; they teach
photography, video... stuff like that. And I used to teach a
course called "Civic Investigation". And I would teach... Part of
that course was how to research and investigate foundation tax
returns, which are a little-known public record. They're the only
income tax that you have a right to look at. And that's, IRS form
990-AR -- foundation tax returns.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, so that would be one of the "tricks of the trade": that you
go to the IRS and you...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh, no, you have to... No. Well you can write the district
director of the IRS. Or, in most big cities, they have a group
called "Donor's Forum". And they have the foundation tax returns
for foundations operating in that district.
And what we did, is compared various levels of the tax returns and then traced them back to other foundations that had already been identified as being part of CIA.
And through that means, we caused a controversy with what people used to call the "American Civil Liberties Union" [ACLU]. But the ACLU does not, as an entity, exist anymore. They were taken over completely, in 1967, by another group called the Roger Baldwin Foundation, which is connected to CIA and continues to operate what people used to call the ACLU. That's operated that way, right up to this date! And every time I've brought it up... I've brought it up at meetings of the Roger Baldwin Foundation and uh, one meeting in particular, they suspended the meeting and never resumed it! Because they wouldn't answer my questions.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, I'm kind of wantin' to pin down some of the "tricks of the
trade" for unearthing information. You know, you talk about the
Donor's Forum, and uh...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well, what came out during the CIA foundation scandal of 1967,
published in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was
that the CIA funded certain groups through three levels of
financing. The three levels are, conduits, fronts [phone rings],
and uh...
Hold on [answers other phone].
[...to be continued...]
-------------------------<< Notes >>----------------------------- {1} "Limited hangout". I can't find a precise definition for this term at the moment, so here is how I explain it. "Limited hangout" means telling some of the truth so that seekers will be deflected from the whole truth. For example, when Clinton was asked if he had ever smoked marijuana he replied that he had puffed but had never inhaled. Clinton was offering a limited hangout, in which he told only some of the truth. In relation to the Report of the January 1970 Grand Jury, they apparently just offered a limited account of the whole truth of what happened at about 4:45 a.m. on December 4, 1969.
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"