It been nearly 18 months since North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the three falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players “innocent” of raping and assaulting Crystal Gail Mangum. The prosecutor who brought the charges, Michael Nifong, was duly disbarred and the North Carolina State Bar declared emphatically that the charges were a lie.

Since no criminal charges were brought against, Mangum, the police (who falsified evidence and lied to grand juries), the “sexual assault” nurse at Duke University Medical Center who fabricated much of the story, and, of course, Nifong himself, all that has been left has been the many lawsuits against Durham, Duke, and Nifong. In other words, much of the case has been off the radar screen.

However, all of that has changed. Mangum has gone onto the speaking circuit, and now is claiming she was assaulted “with a broomstick” and that the original charges were true. She also is coming out with a book that will “tell all” and continue to repeat the lie.This is not a singular effort on her part. It seems that the “man behind the curtain” is an attorney for the North Carolina NAACP, Al McSurely. It was McSurely who was hyping the charges very early and made it known to Nifong that he would not win the Democratic primary in May 2006 unless he brought charges before the election.

It also was McSurely who demanded — and won — a gag order against the defendants in the lacrosse case. (Nifong already had stopped making public statements.) And it was McSurely who posted an awful list of accusations on the North Carolina NAACP website. (Scroll down to see McSurely’s handiwork on the lacrosse case.) In fact, the NAACP left up the accusations for several months after Cooper’s announcement that the accused player were “innocent.”

McSurely is an old-time Marxist, having been at this game for many years. It is not a coincidence that the Marxist websites like Counterpunch and others supported Nifong and tried to intimate that the charges were true, even after Cooper’s announcement. The standard line from the Marxists is that people were “bought off” by the “capitalists.”

By the way, McSurely also is behind Crystal’s upcoming book, serving as the agent of the organization that is publishing this upcoming pack of lies. My sense is that he wants to turn the tide not only against the lacrosse players and their various lawsuits, but most likely hopes to be able to get Crystal to file suit against the players in the future.

In the 1930s, the Communist Workers Party provided funds for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused of rape by Alabama authorities. Today, the people of the same ideology are working to frame innocent young men for rape.