Drop Charges in 38-year-old Murder Case -- Cindy Sheehan

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On Monday, San Francisco will see the opening of legal proceedings in the case of the seven former members and associates of the Black Panther Party charged in connection with the 1971 death of Sgt. John Young and conspiracy to commit murder. This surely will be one of the city's historic trials - if indeed it goes to trial.

At the heart of this 38-year-old case are confessions obtained under torture. Much like detainees in Abu Ghraib and Bagram air base, defendants in this case were blindfolded, covered with wool blankets drenched in boiling water, subjected to suffocation with plastic bags, beatings and electric shocks to the genitals.

In this case, the torture was carried out in 1973 in New Orleans. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had deemed the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to internal security of the country," and there were no holds barred when law enforcement retaliated against the Panthers for their challenge to police brutality in the black community.

The torture of some of the defendants in New Orleans included the participation of San Francisco police officers, who extracted forced signatures from them on "confessions" written by the police. All of the men who were tortured repudiated these documents when allowed to see defense attorneys and a magistrate.

In subsequent years, courts in Louisiana and California rejected the admissibility of this tortured testimony.

There is another eerie parallel with the war in Iraq. There, after the United States could not capture al Qaeda members with provable ties to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many innocent Iraqis have borne the brunt of the government's determination to make someone (who at least looked like the culprits) pay dearly.

And here in San Francisco, the new attempt to prosecute this old case seems to have been generated less by any new evidence than by the atmosphere of fear fostered by the war on terror, led by a government willing to condone torture in the name of security.

The world is waiting to see if the Obama administration will hold accountable those high level officials who normalized terror. As a mother and citizen who has felt the terrible cost of a war justified by officials who claimed to have intelligence that later proved to be distorted by torture, I cannot stand silent when the same evil is practiced at home.

I join with the Nobel Peace laureates the Rev. Desmond Tutu and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the San Francisco Labor Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and many others in their call to drop the charges against these men. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has gone on record as opposing torture. I call on all officials to do so as well, to reject prosecution based on the results of torture and to defend the human rights of these men who have been subjected to such injustice.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Casey Sheehan, an American soldier killed in Iraq, co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, and author of "Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism."