By William M. Kunstler and Ronald L. Kuby
In its April and May issues, Penthouse ran a two-part feature article provocatively entitled “The Sikh Terror Plot,” by one Frank Camper, identified in trial testimony as a paid FBI informant, who runs a training school for mercenaries in Huey town Alabama, In his piece, Camper who is currently under federal investigation for two car fire bombings, offered as his chief villain Gurpartap Singh Birk, a 35year old British-educated Sikh who holds a doctorate degree in computer science, and who was a highly paid employee of a New ‘York computer-systems company. ‘As two of Dr. Birk’s attorneys, we take this opportunity to demonstrate how Camper misled our client in particular and the worldwide Sikh community in general, as well as Penthouse and its many millions of readers.
On June 5, 1984, the Indian Army, in what it labeled “Operation Bluestar,” attacked the centuries-old Golden Temple the Sikh equivalent of the Vatican, located in the Punjab city of Amritsar killing thousands of visiting pilgrims and destroying the library, which contained the sacred and irreplaceable writings of the religion’s prophets. Five months later, in apparent retaliation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot to death by two of her Sikh bodyguards, As a result, enraged Hindus wantonly murdered thousands of Sikhs in cities such as Calcutta and New Delhi, and burned or otherwise mutilated their bodies.
Like so many of his coreligionists, Dr. Birk was shocked to the core by Operation Bluestar and the unspeakable butchery that followed Mrs, Gandhi’s assassination. Much of this rage was directed at her son Rajiv, who as India’s new prime minister, did nothing to stop the savage Hindu attacks on Sikhs that followed his mother’s murder. As of this writing, there are violent confrontations daily between adherents of the two faiths in the Punjab, the only Indian state where Sikhs are in the majority and where the nationalist movement for an independent state, to be known as Khalistan, is rapidly gaining significant momentum.
In his article, Camper attempts to show that Dr. Birk brought to a white-hot fury by the attacks on the Golden Temple and their after math, plotted the murder of Mrs, Gandhi’s successor son, Fortunately for Birk, the FBI secretly recorded most of his contacts with undercover agent Thomas R. Norris (Camper’s “Donnie Morris”) and Camper, the tapes of which surveillance.
Decisively prove that many crucial portions of his article are false. On March 20, 1986, a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, after listening to these conversations, acquitted Birk of charges that he conspired to kill Rajiv Gandhi during the prime minister’s Visit to the United States in June 1985, and had tried to hire some-one to do the job. Apparently, the prosecutors thought as little of Camper’s value as a witness that says did not dare to call him to the stand.
A few choice examples of his duplicity should awaken most readers to the fact that while expose’s about international and domestic terrorism enjoy a current vogue, they (as well as their authors) must be given the closest of scrutiny before their “revelations” are accepted at face value, Or, as the judge who presided over Birk’s trial told his jury’ “we proceed with deliberate speed but with a lot of care and caution to make sure that in an important affair of this sort you have the best sort of information and consider it in the ‘most careful way.”
On January 26, 1985, a meeting set up by Camper took place among Dr. Birk, another Sikh, Norris and himself in a New York City hotel room. In writing about this meeting, which he misdates, Camper quotes Birk, whom he misnames, as saying that “the bi gest bastard of them all, Rajiv,” vas coming to the United Statesin June and “we just may have something planned for him in the future.” This alleged threat appears nowhere on the FBI tapes of the conversation, and all Birk ever is that he is interested only in mounting “a protest” against it. Although Camper contends in the pages of Penthouse that “I had wondered when the talk would come around to Gandhi,” the recordings reveal that it was he, not the Sikhs, who first raised the subject,
Moreover, it was Camper who, despite his demurrer that the FBI, in order “to avoid entrapping (Birk) wanted all of the motion to come from the that the prime minister’s plane might be shot out of the sky. with “Chinese shelter-fired ground-air missiles,” that there could be “a body snatch with a highly trained prisoner-taking crew,” and that Birk consider “going after Rajiv right there in India, going after him personally,” To Birk’s credit, he turned down all of these outlandish and highly dangerous proposals insisting that, since Gandhi had been “elected by 85 percent of the votes, the minority cannot dictate democracy aver there or anywhere.”
At a time which he characte rized as “mid-March 1985,” Camper recounts that his “FBI control agent, Fox,” had telephoned him to inform him that “Birk just told (Norris) that he now had permission to hit Gandhi.” Not only does this statement not appear in the tapes or in Norris’s trial testimony, but the allegation that the undercover agent had then offered Birka choice of four assassination methods from which the Sikh bad selected one, a “lone gunman, ‘crazy killer,” to commit the crime, is absolutely untrue, It was not ‘until more than a month later that Norris proposed his four alternatives, none being accepted by his quarry. Camper’s statement that “the deal was made” is not only fabricated but, at Birk’s trial, the judge ruled, in dismissing a portion of the murder conspiracy charge, that “it seems to me no reasonable juror could find beyond a reasonable doubt that during the period described by Camper an agreement existed among the defendant and the other individuals named in the indictment to kill the prime minister.”
Suffice it to say that a great deal of the dialogue reported by Camper finds no support in the actual tapes, their transcripts, and Norris’s trial testimony, all of which are matters of public record and can be consulted’ by interested parties at the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, or at that of the federal court clerk. A perusal of the transcripts will unequivocally reveals a wholly indecent scheme by government agents to provoke a grief-stricken young Sikh into agreeing to the murder of Prime Minister Gandhi, so that he could be prosecuted.
Nor can this indecency be limited to its prime operatives. The President of the United States, shortly before Birk’s trial, publicly referred to his case as a shining example of his administration’s successful antiterrorist operations, and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on two ‘occasions, echoed this theme. While Birk’s acquittal is the final proof Of the falsity of the charges against him, he was forced to live under the threat of possible life imprisonment for over a year.
On the other hand, Camper, who has boasted, a5 reported by the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News on July 3, 1981, that “I’ll never fight a war again for patriotism, l ’ll have to be paid first,” has profited handsomely from what is nothing more or less than the attempted barter of the life of a talented and tormented young man, That any civilized society, much less one that professes to give the very highest priority to human rights, should utilize the services of a man life Frank Camper to strike a sham and meaningless blow against “terrorism” perhaps the most accurate measure of our unfortunate times.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 20, 1986
