And it never was. Today, San Francisco police arrested eight men for the murder of a police officer in 1971. I make no judgment about the case itself, about which I know nothing (although I will note that the U.S. government had a long history of persecuting and framing up Black Panthers, including the murder of Fred Hampton). I only note this:
Three men, including Taylor, were charged in the attack in 1975. But the charges were thrown out by a San Francisco judge because of a ruling that evidence was obtained by torture after the suspects were arrested in New Orleans.
Not just some illegal search and seizure, or some other "technicality" by which cases are often thrown out. Not just coerced testimony. Torture.
In my role as media critic, I will make note of one more paragraph from the article:
The slain officer was killed when Bell and Torres, armed with guns and dynamite, raided a neighborhood police station, firing a shotgun through a hole in the lobby's bulletproof window, as accomplices were posted outside as lookouts, according to police officials in New York.
Note that "according to police officials" appears at the end of the sentence, after you have read multiple details of a narrative designed to convince you that this is a factual recounting of events. It isn't, of course, it's simply an allegation, but by the time you are told that, it's already too late, because your mental picture of events has already been formed.
Meanwhile, while the San Francisco police pursue the suspected perpetrators of a 1971 murder of a single policeman, the United States government still refuses to brand as a terrorist (nor extradite to Venezuela for trial, nor try themselves as required by international law) Luis Posada Carriles, the chief suspect in a 1976 airline bombing which left 73 people dead, as well as the admitted perpetrator of a series of Havana hotel bombings in 1997 which left one more dead. And his co-conspirator in those crimes, Orlando Bosch, having been pardoned long ago by Bush I, writes op-ed articles for Miami newspapers, while the five men (the "Cuban Five") who went undercover, unarmed and at great peril to their own lives, to stop plots by Posada, Bosch, and others, have just started their ninth year in U.S. prisons, in two cases having not seen their wives in years thanks to the denial of U.S. visas.
Reprinted from Left I on the News