The following is an excerpt from Safiya Bukhari’s The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting For Those Left Behind. This section is titled “Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions and it was written some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, during a time where those who had been targeted by COINTELPRO were trying to recover their relationships and figure out how they would be able to continue to do political work together. We have written extensively about the environment of mistrust created around the imprisonment of Geronimo ji Jaga. That environment contributed significantly to the solutions that Safiya offers in this work. . . .