Prisoner’s death sparks protest

Sunday April 1 2007
http://www.newindpress.com

CUDDALORE, India: More than 1,000 inmates of the Central Prison here went on a flash protest fast following the death of a 32-year-old remand prisoner in the jail on Saturday.

K Chandrabalan allegedly died after a brief illness in the prison. According to police, Chandrabalan of Radhapuram was arrested on charges of selling illicit arrack. He was detained at the Central Prison since March 19.

Chandrabalan, who was not very strong, became indisposed this week. His condition deteriorated over the past two days and on Friday evening he developed fits, following which he was admitted to the clinic in the prison. As his condition became worse on Saturday morning, he was rushed to the GH where he died nearly an hour later.

According to sources, following his death, more than 1,000 prisoners, including life convicts and remand prisoners, observed protest fast in the prison. They claimed that Chandrabalan died due to severe torture in the prison.

They refused to take breakfast and lunch and demanded that action be taken against those involved in the death. Following the intervention of the top level officials, the agitation was withdrawn in the evening.

However, refuting this, prison sources said ‘‘the death was caused due to illness’’

SABOTAGE OR TERRORISM?

www.eugeneweekly.com

On May 15 federal Judge Ann Aiken will decide whether the Oregon eco-saboteurs are arsonists or terrorists.

Oral arguments on the application of sentencing guidelines for the "terrorism enhancement" will take place starting at 10 am. This enhancement could add up to 20 years to the sentences for all District of Oregon "Operation Backfire" defendants.

Sentencing of the eco-sabotage defendants will begin on May 22, one week after the decision is made on the enhancement. All hearings will take place in Judge Aiken's courtroom in the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse in Eugene.

According to attorney Lauren Regan, whose Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) is involved in the cases, "The enhancement's application will be affected by whether the property damaged or destroyed was government owned or private."

If the judge decides the terrorism enhancement applies to the cases, then each defendant will argue individually against the enhancement. U.S. sentencing guidelines state that for the terrorism enhancement to apply, the defendant or his or conduct must be "calculated to influence or affect the conduct of the government by intimidation or coercion."

The CLDC contends that the government is seeking to label these defendants as terrorists in order to justify the amount of money it has spent pursuing so-called terrorists. And if activists become labeled terrorists, the CLDC expects a chilling effect upon progressive movements.

Sentencing dates for the defendants begin with Stanislaus Meyerhoff on May 22, and continue each day except May 28 until the last defendant, Jonathan Paul, is sentenced June 5. Identification will be required to enter the courtroom, and if the courtroom fills, the hearings will be relayed to another room via closed-circuit TV.

Three Operation Backfire cases will be dealt with in Washington: Briana Waters, Jen Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum. The terrorism enhancement is not being sought in those cases. Waters, the only defendant to continue to plead not guilty, will go to trial on Sept. 17. Kolar and Phillabaum both pled guilty and await sentencing. Phillabaum self-reported to federal prison on Jan. 29.

— Camilla Mortensen

Millions Threatened by Climate Change

By Jeff “Free” Luers

3-20-07

Earlier this year the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their strongest language yet, attributed the earth’s current climate change to human activity. The report, the first of four, has lead to near daily news stories on global warming.

While a few skeptics, including conservative media, continue to deny global warming as cooked-up liberal science, most educated and rational people are increasingly concerned about the steps being taken to halt climate change.

With the US government refusing to take any action, people have cause for concern.

In their second report, soon to be released, the IPCC will warn that hundreds of millions of people will face water shortages in less than 20 years. Half of Europe’s plant species will be vulnerable or extinct by 2050. And by 2080, 100 million people could be flooded by rising seas each year, and a further 200-600 million could be hungry because of the effects of global warming.

The news is not good. An already vast amount of Arctic ice is melting leading to warmer oceans around the world. The high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the highest in 650,000 years, has made oceans more acidic. These changes are altering weather patterns and making oceans an inhospitable environment for many fish species we rely on as a food source.

Despite the hard science and the harmful effects of global warming already showing up, the US is on track to increase its greenhouse has emissions 19% by 2020. An internal draft coordinated by the White House Council on Environmental Quality projected that the current administrations climate policy would result in the emission of 9.2 billion tons of green house gases in 2020, an increase of nearly one-fifth of 2000 levels.

Many scientists have warned that the shape of human history will be defined by the actions we take in the next 10 years to limit green house gases. Most recently the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a statement calling for “rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” warning that any delay “will increase environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs.”

As the American public mobilizes to end the Iraq war, we must also focus our attention on combating climate change. The Iraq war is part of a foreign policy strategy to insure ready access to oil and other resources. The US currently uses more resources and contributes more greenhouse emissions than any other nation.

Our country needs a mass mobilization, not only to end the war, but also to turn government priorities on their head. It is traditional for a society’s principles to evolve quicker than those of its government. That fact is the historical foundation for all social movements.

Our country needs radical change and it needs it now. We do not have the luxury of time. Acting to limit climate change now could prevent future wars because in a few decades time war will not be fought for oil, it will be fought for water.

The science is very clear. We must act now. Which means everyone needs to think 10-20 years ahead to what will happen if we don’t start reducing greenhouse gases. The issue is far too important to leave it to corporations and governments to solve. We must respond like the lives of hundreds of millions of people depend on our actions, because they very likely do.

- Jeff “Free” Luers

Write to: Jeff Luers, #13797671, Oregon State Prison, 2605 State Street, Salem, Oregon 97310

www.freefreenow.org

Whitewash

Victims' attorneys blast city report on officer sex scandal
BY ALAN PITTMAN

When Roger Magaña worked at the Eugene Police Department (EPD), women complained over and over that he was using his badge to force sex, but Eugene police did nothing. After Magaña was finally caught after six years and sent to prison for abusing a dozen women, substantial evidence emerged that other police officers had failed in the investigation, supervision and hiring of the criminal. But the police again did nothing.

What the police and city did do is select a former cop who wrote a report that agreed with their inaction. That consultant, former McMinnville Police Chief Rod Brown, released a report last week that city officials claimed should restore lost citizen confidence in the EPD.

City Manager Dennis Taylor praised the "incredibly objective" report, which largely concurred with the city position that no other officers should be investigated, disciplined or reprimanded for their handling of the Magaña complaints. The city paid $5 million to settle lawsuits by the victims of Magaña and Juan Lara, another officer convicted of a lesser sex crime spree. "I just hope this will close the chapter," Taylor said of the Brown report.

But Michelle Burrows, the Portland attorney for one of Magaña's most frequent victims, called the Brown report a "whitewash." Burrows emailed that the retired police chief's report "itself manifests why society should not let the police review their own conduct." She continued:

The analysis by the report writer just repeats all the justifications and excuses proffered by the Eugene Police Department as to how the abuse was allowed to spread to 35 women over six years. It isn't just the benefit of hindsight that allows us to see this. The law enforcement community who worked with Magaña and Lara are trained to detect criminal activity, especially sexual misconduct. The officers who knew parts of the entire puzzle are as important a part of how the extensive abuse continued as Magaña or Lara, and in some respects their willful disregard of what was obvious is just as bad as what Lara and Magaña did. We trusted them to do the right thing and even now with this inane report, they still refuse to take responsibility for their own actions.

Elden Rosenthal, a prominent Portland civil rights attorney, represented two of Magaña's other victims. "I disagree strongly with the conclusions of the report," he said.

"This is the reason that you don't have the police investigate the police," Rosenthal said. "This is the reason you need to have independent review."

"The people of the city of Eugene should not countenance police not reporting the misconduct of their fellow officers," Rosenthal said. "Unless the culture of the Eugene Police Department changes, there will be other incidents of misconduct in the future."

In his $25,000 report, Brown argued that "the dynamics of working in law enforcement ... are only comprehended when you have lived that professional life."

But Rosenthal said the judge and jury system doesn't leave it only to cops to judge cops. "That's what the civil rights laws are all about."

Rosenthal noted that federal Judge Thomas Coffin dismissed many of the city's and Brown's arguments in ruling against the city on summary judgement.

Brown argued that the "crux" of the issue was that the seriousness of the complaints against Magaña made it more "reasonable" to ignore them.

"When a complaint is regarding an offense or action by an officer that is so egregious as to be outrageous and inconceivable, the receiving officer looks upon the allegation with incredulity and skepticism."

"It's absurd," said Rosenthal of the argument by Brown and the city.

Greg Veralrud, a Eugene attorney for several victims of Magaña and Lara, said he hadn't had a chance to read the report. He said in some cases, he could understand why officers didn't believe the women when they complained, although "the pattern should have been recognized by someone."

But Veralrud said officers clearly failed in other complaints. He cited an early incident where Magaña sexually abused an underage police cadet who complained to two other officers who believed her but did not report the incident to superiors. "I thought that was egregious," he said. "That should have sent some shivers up the ranks."

Brown laid out his arguments absolving the police in a 33-page report after reviewing depositions, personnel files and documents provided by the city and interviewing a few police officials but not talking to victims.

Burrows, who conducted many of the 40 depositions and read 12,000 pages of discovery documents in the case, said Brown's report is refuted by a heavily footnoted, 133-page motion for summary judgement she filed last year before the city paid to settle the case.

In the document, Burrows alleges Magaña had "nearly 45 victims in over 100 documented acts of sexual abuse." She alleges that officers and police repeatedly failed to respond to complaints. "During the entire five years of Magaña's activities, 23 different officers, one chief of police and the director of human resources had actual knowledge of no less than 15 different complaints involving 15 different women who were being either harassed, raped or sexually abused by Magaña."

Here's a list of some of the key allegations that Burrows makes, citing sworn depositions from Eugene police officers, city officials and city documents:

• City police and human resource officials "knowingly covered up officer Magaña's pre-employment criminal history in order to fulfill minority quotas," Burrows alleged. Det. Scott McKee said that when Magaña was 17 or 18, Magaña was "accused and ... convicted of an offense that involved forcible or compelled sexual acts with a young girl." The next year he was arrested for burglary but not convicted. Documents relating to the criminal history were "lost" but later "mysteriously resurfaced" during the criminal investigation.

The police background investigator recommended against hiring Magaña, but he was "hired anyway at the insistence of Chief [Leonard] Cooke, Captain Roy Brown, [officer] Frank Bone and Helen Towle." Burrows cited police Human Resources Director Towle's deposition in writing that Towle "does not believe that criminal arrests disqualify an applicant for an officer position."

By hiring Magaña, the city was "giving that violent sex offender the means to rape and sexually abuse as many as 45 known victims," Burrows wrote.

• "Officer [Gerald] Webber testified in trial and deposition that a woman told him Magaña was asking for 'blow jobs,' but he thought that she was making it up despite the fact that he knew the woman never lied to him." Webber repeatedly testified under oath that he told acting Lt. Jim Fields about the accusation and Fields told him to drop it. But Fields called that claim a "damn lie."

• After a woman's sexual complaint, "Magaña apparently sent [officer Mel] Thompson and another officer back to the woman to tell her to stop 'making up' information about Magaña. ... The woman apparently believed she had been threatened."

• A woman told officer [William] Reimers that Magaña was fondling another woman. Reimers had sworn under oath in court documents that the woman was an honest or reliable source for criminal investigations, but decided that she "was not credible in a complaint about another officer," Burrows wrote.

• Lax discipline was prevalent in the department, Burrows alleged. Drunk driving "officers were stopped by patrol, taken in to the department for booking, but a lieutenant intervened, turned off the videotaping equipment and arranged for the officer to be taken home with no charges."

• There were unconfirmed "accusations by the wives of some of the RDU [Rapid Deployment Unit] officers that some officers were frequenting prostitutes on duty and as part of the job."

• RDU officers showed their genitalia to prostitutes during sting operations, Burrows alleged. "The RDU officers, seeing nothing wrong in removing their clothing, were complying with the women's request to undress to 'prove' they were not cops."

• Within EPD Magaña "had the reputation as a 'ladies man' and openly bragged to other RDU officers of having sex with over 100 women."

• The complaint by Magaña's final victim was initially dismissed. "Officer [Kathy] Flynn's 'investigation' of the [woman's] complaint that Magaña was fondling her lasted 90 minutes, was never referred to Internal Affairs and was not sent on to a superior officer." The persistent woman pressed her complaint with other officers but initially, "Neither Officer [Randall] Smith nor [Scott] McKee believed the woman, refused to meet with her personally and asked her questions designed to intimidate or discourage her."

• Supervisors failed to supervise, Burrows alleged. Magaña's supervisor "Sgt. [Joseph] Harris was viewed as a 'lax supervisor' who "sometimes misses the point." Supervisors were consumed with bureaucratic duties to the extent that they had less than 15 percent of their time available for direct supervision, another city consultant reported. "The RDU was a secret entity all unto themselves with almost no oversight by management."

• "Sgt. Harris reviewed a complaint made by [a woman] and seemed to conclude that Magaña was not telling the truth, engaged in activity which was not verifiable." A review consultant also told Towle and Chief Thad Buchanan that Magaña lied in the case. But everyone who knew about the case, Harris, Buchanan, Towle, Lt. Fields and Capt. Becky Hanson, did nothing.

• A police recruit complained that Magaña made sexual advances to her in 2003 when she was being trained by him, but there was no evidence the complaint was investigated.

• Officers Rich Bremer, Sgt. Jennifer Bills and Lt. Rick Siel knew that an underage police volunteer complained that Magaña had made inappropriate sexual contact with her that led her to leave the police. Magaña was not investigated and no record was made of the incident.

• The mother of one of Magaña's victims called to complain to an unidentified captain who took no action.

• A victim told officer Ryan Wolgamott that Magaña had raped her. The complaint was in front of officers Kara Bankhardt, Mel Thompson and Sgt. Scott Fellman. They ignored the complaint.

• A woman "made a statement to a municipal court judge, 'How would you like it if a Eugene cop forced you to suck his dick?'" The judge did not investigate or report the incident.

Burrows alleged that Magaña thrived in an EPD atmosphere where sexual impropriety was tolerated. One female sergeant allegedly had sexual relations with an 18-year-old male cadet she was supervising and with four different officers, two of whom were married. Her simultaneous relationships with two officers caused tension and "safety issues at work."

Sgt. Derel Schulz, while married, engaged in a sexual relationship with a female Coburg officer, Burrows alleged. "Apparently, the female cadet broke it off, but Schulz started 'stalking her' and she obtained a stalking complaint. The department 'covered it up and made the complaint go away.'"

A woman who was a secretary on the narcotics team filed sexual harassment complaints against three to four officers including Sgt. Ron Swanson and Thad Buchanan, who later became chief. Chief Hill admitted he received two sexually based complaints which he said were not substantiated.

Officer Jeff Glemser said under oath that the unpunished impropriety by other officers contributed to the scandal, Burrows reported, quoting him. "Other people were getting away with it. Supervisors, people you are supposed to look up to. ... Now if these people were dealt with appropriately, Magaña may still be working here and he may have not done as much as what he was doing."

"Things are covered up because they are afraid of what the public will find out," Burrows quoted Glemser.

Burrows called it "damning" that a "stunning number of officers" supposedly trained to recognize criminal activity received complaints about Magaña and did nothing.

"It is not enough for them to pretend to some level of naivete, or innocence. 'We'll never be the same again.' They had a duty to know and to be mindful of their oath to the very citizens they failed," Burrows wrote.

Brown and the city claim that the police department won't ignore complaints in the future.

But Burrows notes, "The street level officers who were questioned said without hesitation that it was the standard policy and procedure" to not act on the complaints against a fellow officer. "Even to this day they see nothing wrong with discounting the complaints as they did."

a prisoner in mexico named carlos arroyo

from People's Global Action NA
Fri, 30 Mar 2007

the following message concerns a prisoner in mexico named carlos arroyo.
it is just a reminder that funds are greatly needed for his case if anyone
can help out. there was recently a death in his family, which makes it all
the more important that support be directed his way. please be in touch if
you are able to make a donation and please circulate this information.
thank you!
___________

2/07 Update: Carlos Arroyo was arrested in May 2001 in
Mexico City, framed by police for an alleged robbery.
He was beaten and tortured by police at the time of
his arrest and faced an unfair trial that involved an
extensive fabrication of false evidence against him.
His original sentence was 15 years, though it was
subsequently reduced to 12. Prior to his arrest Carlos
was involved in the anarchist community in Mexico
City; he also participated in the university student
strikes. It is likely that he was set-up by the state
as retaliation for his political activities. He was 22
at the time of his arrest. Carlos’ family is extremely
poor and has been unable to shoulder the burden of
legal expenses. They were scammed by two lawyers,
which not only resulted in a loss of money, but also
squandered many of Carlos’ chances for appeals. The
family has depended on the support of friends and are
still greatly in need of financial assistance. Several
benefit compilation tapes/cds have been made on
Carlos’ behalf.  For a while, there was a slim
possibility that a new law in Mexico City could result
in a further reduction of his sentence; though the
details remain unclear, we have recently learned that
Carlos may now have a shot at obtaining his freedom
much sooner than expected.  However, his chances will
depend on the availability of financial resources. His
family is currently raising funds to this end. In the
meantime, outside resources also enable his family to
continue visiting him, as well as buy food for him in
prison and bribe prison guards to prevent physical
abuse. If you can contribute financially in any way or
would like to write Carlos (in Spanish, please),
contact caps@riseup.net .

Spring update about Daniel McGowan's case

We have been relatively quiet these days and wanted to update you on things going on with Daniel's case.

At a March 2nd court date, sentencing dates were set for all defendants. The sentencing dates for the non-cooperating defendants in the case are as follows:

June 1 - Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block's sentencing. 9 AM
June 4 - Daniel McGowan's sentencing. 9 AM
June 5 - Jonathan Paul's sentencing. 9 AM

We are encouraging people to attend these dates and support the defendants. Be sure to arrive early (only 42 seats!), dress well for court and please behave during the proceedings. Oregon Federal Court is located at 405 East 8th Avenue. (Be careful crossing Franklin Boulevard). View map.

There is also a very important court date coming up in May. At a May 15th hearing, Judge Aiken will hear arguments on the "terrorism enhancement" the government wants to have applied on all defendants in the case. You can read an update on this aspect of the case in today's Eugene Weekly here.
Letters to the Eugene Weekly regarding this important issue can be sent to editor@eugeneweekly.com (Letters to the Editor (to be published in the paper) should be clearly labeled as such, be no more than 250 words and must include your full name, address and phone number.

We are happy to announce that we are starting a matching grant campaign for Daniel's tuition. We have a donor that will match your donation dollar for dollar up to $12,000. This means we will be able to double your donation i.e. Your $25 donation means we get $50. Thanks to this generosity we are in a position to cover Daniel's masters degree tuition in full. Please consider contributing and help Daniel earn his masters degree while he serves his sentence. You can donate online through the paypal button on www.supportdaniel.org or send a check/money order made out to "Lisa McGowan", POB 106, NY, NY 10156.

Finally, we are organizing a massive book sale in New York City on May 5th at the Book Thug Nation book table on Astor Place between 3rd and 4th Avenues at 12 noon. Please save the date and start looking through your shelves now to see what you can donate. When the sale is closer, we will announce a book drop off location. If you don't live in NYC and want to help, you can peruse our book stock and buy books from our amazon.com shop here.

Thanks for all your support!
Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan

Rod Coronado released!

Rod was released on March 23, 2007 after finishing an 8 -month sentence in federal prison for disrupting a 2004 mountain lion hunt in Sabino Canyon, Arizona.

As great as it is that Rod is home again, he still needs your support. His trial for "demonstrating the use of a destructive device," relating to a speech he gave in San Diego in 2003, is scheduled to begin in June.

Visit www.SupportRod.org for updates.

ELP Information Bulletin (28th March 2007)

ELP has just received this fantastic bit of new from the British
based Vegan Prisoners Support Group.

Dave would like this circulated as widely as possible.

28th March

Dave Blenkinsop heard today that he has been successful with his
parole and will be moving to a hostel in the new few days.

He has asked us to thank everyone that wrote and or gave him
support during his sentence.  He has also requested that his
privacy is respected on his release.

Vegan Prisoners Support Group
Tel/Fax 0208 292 8325

Free Free Now!

Monday, March 26, 2007 my hartford advocate

In 2001, Jeff “Free” Luers received a 22-year prison sentence for setting fire to three SUV’s at a Eugene, Oregon dealership, in order to make a statement about global warming. He was only five years ahead of Al Gore. No one was harmed by Luers' monkey-wrenching, and the SUVs were later resold. Nonetheless, Jeff Luers is still not “Free.” He languishes in an Oregon prison while murderers, child molesters and armed robbers serve shorter sentences than he has already served. His case finally received a ruling from the Oregon Court of Appeals on Valentine’s Day of this year. The judge ruled that Luers had been improperly sentenced, and that his case be remanded back to the Circuit Court for resentencing. Though this is good news, “Free” still needs help, for legal fees and for expenses once he is released, until he can get himself properly situated back in the world. If you want to help or to learn more about the shameful case of this political prisoner, visit www.freefreenow.org

Or, if you can spare it, send a donation to Free's Legal Defense Fund, POB 3, Eugene, OR 97440

Meanwhile, back in the perfectly sane reality of Bush's America, SUV owners are freaking out over rising gasoline prices (but not global warming!). Unable to make theircar payments, they have begun to do a little monkey wrenching of their own. That is, arson-for-hire rings are being paid to torch their SUVs, in order for the owners to collect their insurance payments.

Good old American ingenuity! Something tells me that the perps of this 'eco terror' scam will not be getting 22-year prison sentences for insurance fraud.

Free Jeff Luers pamphlet in English and Espanol
http://olymedia.mahost.org/free2345.pdf

Description:     
English and en Espanol
Environmental Activist and Political Prisoner Sentenced to 22 years and 8 months!
File Size:     356 kb
File Type:     PDF

ALF makes its debut in Chile

15th March 2007
http://www.arkangelweb.org

The Animal Liberation Front made its debut this week in Temuco, capital of the 9th adminstrative region (north to south) of Chile.

A communiqué posted on a Spanish animal rights website on 14th March stated that 4 meat shops and a shop selling birds were targeted. According to the communiqué, the fronts of all of the shops were damaged and one of the meat shops had its windows damaged. Window and door locks were also glued shut.

The activists called the attacks "completely successful" and their communiqué stated, "We want every fighter to know that the struggle is also taking place at the ends of the earth."

There were no reports of the attacks in the Chilean media and it is unknown how police are treating these new actions.

Chile has several small grassroots and large national animal rights organisations, including Animanaturalis (http://www.animanaturalis.org/index.php), which campaigns in many Spanish-speaking countries including Spain, and Derechos Animales (http://www.derechos-animales.com/), a group based in Santiago.

While the national groups carry on some of the well-known international campaigns such as vegan outreach, protesting the Canadian seal slaughter, and the Chinese dog and cat fur trade, smaller groups tend to focus on animal abuse at the community level, such as the rampant abuse of dogs that activists say is "common in Latin America." Underground animal rights activism has thus far been rare in Latin American countries.

Repression as State Strategy

from the brand new A Murder of Crows #2

Repression is a topic that is often discussed in the revolutionary milieu, but unfortunately it is a subject that is not well understood. Because of democratic baggage, repression is often understood as simply an anomalous and outrageous violation of rights. What people fail to comprehend is that repression is part of the standard operating procedure of any class society. There are those that rule and those who are ruled, and to maintain this divide, a combination of coercion and accommodation is necessary. To preserve the social structure of our society then, it is necessary to recuperate parts of social movements, and to repress the other parts. Essentially, repression is a strategy for maintaining power by capitalist ruling classes within nation-states. Thus, since it is a long-term strategy, it is always in motion and not some occasional occurrence.

When repression strikes and comrades are arrested, such as in the “green scare,” the reaction of many is to disassociate themselves from those who are being attacked by the state. Liberals, progressives, and most activists draw up official statements denouncing violence, sabotage, and illegality, all in hopes of proving to the government that they are just good citizens who like to follow the rules and who are interested in “positive” social change. This spineless response is standard for the left, and serves to flank the state’s actions. Disassociation is not only a cowardly act, but is also based on faulty logic.

The underlying premise of disassociation is that the state has reacted to a specific occurrence and that those being persecuted are responsible for bringing repression upon themselves and everyone else. Certainly there are specific acts that the state responds to, such as actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), but this is not where repression stems from. In actuality, repression is a long-term strategy employed by the state regardless of specific illegal acts and is an attempt to maintain the status quo by any means necessary. Repression, then, is always present in many forms. It is the police, the courts, the prison system, the proliferation of security cameras, the immigrant detention centers and the like. If anyone needs further proof that the state doesn’t merely punish people for breaking its laws, and instead represses in order to destroy its opposition, one need only take a look at recent events.

Some Recent Attacks

A well-known example of state repression within the anarchist milieu is the infiltration of various conferences, protests and even affinity groups by one particular state agent: Anna Davies. Following the arrests of Lauren Weiner, Zachary Jenson and Eric McDavid in January 2006 for conspiracy to commit several acts of sabotage, the government revealed that one of the three’s comrades was in fact in the employ of the state. What’s more is that the government funneled money to Anna to rent a house where planning allegedly took place and to pay for supplies to commit these alleged acts. When this information was revealed, comrades across the country quickly posted photographs of Anna to popular anarchist and activist sites, and within days a picture of Anna’s activity was pieced together.

Rather than simply being involved with the three people arrested in California, Davies had been actively working for the FBI as far back as 2003. She has taken part in major protests such as the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the 2004 anti-G8 Protest in Georgia, the June 2005 Organization of American States protest in Florida, and the Bio-Democracy protest in Philadelphia, also in June of 2005. Along with major convergences, Davies attended anarchist conferences and gatherings in 2005 such as Feral Visions in the Appalachian Mountains and the CrimethInc Convergence in Indiana. On various Indymedia sites she also solicited photographs and video of protests under the guise of publicity, but it should be presumed that any information sent to her was added to the FBI’s intelligence base.

So the intention behind her infiltration was not to help solve a particular case, or to investigate one specific crime. Instead, she was employed as an infiltrator to gather information about the anarchist scene in general. It should also not be surprising that the case that she is currently involved in focuses on alleged acts that were planned to occur in the future, not ones that had already occurred. Based solely on the evidence made available to the public, it is not hard to see that the FBI was facilitating these alleged crimes by renting a house for Davies and the three arrested people and funneling money via Davies for supplies. In effect, the state was justifying their existence through aiding and abetting. In the US government’s latest terror war, arrests and examples need to be made; Weiner, Jenson, and McDavid have served this purpose quite well.

In addition to the case of Anna Davies is the 2003 infiltration of direct action anti-war groups in California. In July 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California released a detailed report in which they documented a variety of instances in which local police departments, along with the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, placed officers into anti-war groups. First and foremost they infiltrated the groups in order to gather information, but more insidiously, the police hoped to steer the organizations in a direction more useful to the state. When asked why officers had been placed in the San Francisco group Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW), Captain Howard Jordan of the Oakland Police Department stated: “if you put people in there from the beginning, I think we’d be able to gather the information and maybe even direct them to do something that we want them to do.” Clearly the state’s perspective is one of infiltrating in order to undermine.

This strategy manifested itself on multiple occasions. In April of 2003, DASW organized a picket at the Port of Oakland in opposition to the war in Iraq. At least one shipping company at the Port was handling war supplies, and the group organized to shut the port down for the day. Nearly 500 demonstrators took part, splitting into smaller groups to picket the various entrances to the port. The Oakland Police Department, however, was prepared. Through surveillance, police had already gathered information about the protest, and in this instance, they also brutally attacked demonstrators with rubber bullets, tear gas, and wooden dowel shots causing scores of injuries. In response to the police crackdown, DASW organized an anti-police brutality march in May of 2003. What members of the group did not know was that they had elected police infiltrators to plan out the route for their march. No one, not even the police, could fail to see the irony of that situation. While in their report the ACLU decries the actions of the police as evidence of misconduct, these acts should more importantly be viewed as evidence of the state’s attempts to undermine and destroy opposition to it.

As shown by FBI infiltration of anarchist demonstrations and events and local police infiltration of protest groups, it is easy to see that they were not investigating crimes that had taken place, but rather they were investigating possibilities of concrete resistance, which by necessity, generally break the law. This shows that there are plenty of examples, and certainly many that we may never know about, which demonstrate that repression already exists and is underway. It is not intermittent, and does not always respond to particular violations of the law; it is a long-term strategy of the state to destroy opposition. This strategy, however, has wider implications beyond the bounds of the radical milieu and affects the exploited as a whole.

The New Repressive Strategy

Author Kristian Williams, in his book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, examines fundamental changes in the repressive strategy of the United States government. His main observation, which he thoroughly documents with official papers and statements, is that following the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the state switched to a strategy of permanent repression, or as he calls it, counter-insurgency. Learning from their past failures, the police developed a preemptive model of repression which sought to prevent insurgency before it happened. Williams outlines two major components functioning hand in hand: militarization and community policing.

Militarization is one of the most obvious changes within police departments in the United States. In city centers across the US, police departments are well armed and equipped for urban warfare. Not only has their weaponry been upgraded in a variety of ways, but also newer and more powerful firearms are available. Armored personnel carriers (APCs), helicopters and even tanks are at their disposal, as are a multitude of so-called non-lethal weapons such as tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray, which are known to kill and permanently injure people. But it is not only the tools, but also the manner of organization and the scope of the mission that define militarization.

Organizationally, many police departments were restructured along military lines into squads and platoons, and paramilitary units were created as well. Special Weapons and Tactics units, better known as SWAT teams, are a manifestation of militarization in terms of organization, armament, and dress. Created in the late 1960s, their first missions involved raids on Black Panther Party headquarters and on the hideout of the Symbionese Liberation Army. SWAT teams were also mobilized dozens of times in relation to the activities of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee. Now however, SWAT teams aren’t simply used for “extreme” situations or in the case of potential shootouts; they are also used for routine patrolling in the ghettoes of many major cities. In this way, paramilitary units –equipped with machine guns— targeting people for ID checks, loitering, and even traffic violations, has become a normal part of life for the most exploited members of this society. This is but one part of the state’s counter-insurgency campaign.

Community policing is the friendly face, and perhaps the more insidious side, of the new repressive strategy. Community policing developed in response to the state’s inability to predict and control urban uprisings in the 60s and 70s and was designed, “to build a bond between the police and the public in hopes that this would increase police legitimacy, give them better access to information, intensify penetration of community life and expand the police mission.” This is not the same as infiltration because it is an overt attempt to work with civic organizations, churches, homeowners, and the general public in order to transform people into the eyes and ears of the state. Some of the tactics employed include: neighborhood watch groups, public forums, meetings with religious and civic leaders, foot and bike patrols, a focus on minor offenses, citizen volunteer opportunities, and police sponsored community activities such as Night Out Against Crime. This is how the police and the state worm their way into the social networks of various neighborhoods in order to gain legitimacy. Therefore when force is used, it is presented as being validated by “community support.”

Community policing has also expanded the role of the police from simply dealing with violations of the law to an overall focus on “public order” and “quality of life.” This is based on the Broken Windows theory which argues that small issues such as rundown property and juvenile loitering eventually contribute to an ever-growing sense of disorder in the neighborhood and consequently, to greater violations of the law. This means that rather than simply focusing on serious offences, the police also focus on many smaller crimes that supposedly lower the quality of life and eventually snowball into great social disturbances. Quality of life issues include ridding neighborhoods of graffiti, breaking up homeless encampments, and dealing with noise complaints; this focus essentially promotes a zero-tolerance approach to crime. The underlying premise is that any amount of lawbreaking, whether it is jaywalking or kids hanging out on corners, contributes to ever-greater lawlessness.

The confluence of community policing and militarization amounts to nothing less than a consistent campaign of counter-insurgency. Penetrating communities and including common people in the state apparatus, in combination with paramilitary units and a war-based conception of crime, are part of a strategic shift to preempt any major disorder or uprisings. Poor neighborhoods and districts, especially black and Latino ghettoes, which were the source of much insurgency during the 1960s and 1970s, are hit particularly hard by this preemptive strategy. Undoubtedly, since the exploited pose a permanent threat to the social order, there is a direct connection between this daily repression and the repressive activity focused specifically on radicals.

How to Deal

If we begin to understand repression as a strategy of the state that is continually in operation, then we must transform our way of dealing with it. In the US, radicals deal with it in a reactive way: first the state strikes, then we come out with posters, leaflets, statements, and attempts to raise money for our imprisoned comrades. This is of course assuming that repression is even responded to; most choose to look the other way as long as it poses no threat to themselves or their acquaintances. Unfortunately, the mentality of some is that those being targeted by the state are responsible for bringing repression upon themselves. Without simply repeating the usual principles of revolutionary solidarity, we feel the need to reaffirm that it’s important to start using our heads and thinking about what can be done outside of the usual support campaigns. Comrades in Spain, once again, have given us some examples to learn from.

On February 9, 2006, two anarchist comrades, Ruben and Ignasi, were arrested in Barcelona for an arson attack on a prison labor company and for vandalism at a bank. The anarchist response to the arrests was immense. Graffiti and propaganda covered walls in many neighborhoods in Barcelona, and dozens of acts of sabotage were carried out in solidarity with them. Individuals attacked banks and ATMs across Spain, a satellite signal antenna was destroyed in Barcelona, and the offices of real estate companies were targeted. Public demonstrations were held in support of the imprisoned comrades, and on a few occasions in Barcelona, major intersections were shut down during rush hour, as banners flew and flyers were handed out to passersby. The acts of sabotage were not random; they were an extension of pre-existing fights against gentrification and the media’s repeated efforts to label anarchists and autonomists as domestic terrorists. Thus they served to intertwine and deepen the implications of their resistance. And in their resistance, comrades in Spain employed a variety of tools: posters, graffiti, sabotage, protests, and blockades. Perhaps more importantly they demonstrated a refusal to allow the state to kidnap their comrades without repercussions.

Outside of the scope of friends and comrades being taken by the state, there is the daily repression that is ever growing. We need to get in the habit of resisting the daily indignities that are imposed upon us by this regime of repression. They will push us to see how far we will bend, to make us bow and show respect to authority. They hope to police our every move, to make simple things illegal, for the sake of constantly having a reason to interfere with our lives. This is manifesting itself in a variety of ways: the proliferation of video surveillance devices monitoring public spaces, constant harassment for identification, more aggressive policing of demonstrations, random searches, and more importantly, the racist policy of mass incarceration. All of these changes are the result of the convergence of interests between states and businesses with mutually reinforcing agendas. One of the most nefarious aspects of this growing network of control is the way in which it is normalized over time. We get used to being watched, inspected, harassed, beaten and treated like prisoners. The media is complicit in this process by continually promoting a climate of fear –fear of pedophiles, gangs, immigrants, and eco-terrorists—that serves to build democratic support for repression.

There are some precedents for struggle against the slow creep of repressive technologies. In Britain there has been widespread sabotage over the past several years of speed cameras, which seek to catch drivers violating the speed limit. Hundreds of cameras have been destroyed across the country by chainsaws, burning tires, and rifles. The recent implementation of speed cameras in Australia has produced the same reaction. Surveillance cameras, however, are more prolific and more useful to police. In many cities across the world, surveillance cameras are routinely targeted with rocks, paint, and hammers. People generally use brightly colored paints to disable the cameras and draw attention to them. Cameras are only one part of the repressive web that threatens to envelop us, but are certainly a worthy target.

Also, anarchists and other radicals in many countries have initiated projects that focus on immigrant detention. In Australia in 2002, there was a direct attack on the Woomera detention facility by hundreds of people who tore down several layers of security fences. This allowed several detainees to escape. In Greece in December of 2004, anarchists held a solidarity rally with Afghan immigrants who had been tortured by the police. There, the demonstrators attacked the police station where the torture had occurred. In Lecce, Italy, a very determined struggle against the Regina Pacis detention center has been developing over the last three years. Riots have broken out in the facility, and sabotage and arson attacks were undertaken against those who manage and profit from it. As long as capitalism exists, it will ravage large parts of the world, sending people on forced marches across deserts, oceans, and national borders; thus these revolutionary projects of immigrant solidarity are worthy of close study.

If we hope to have any impact upon repression, we need to begin refusing their commands and disobeying their orders, and start thinking about ways we can meet face-to-face with others who are facing state repression. When the state hits us, let’s hit back. After all, like the police argue, a few broken windows eventually lead to full-scale disorder.

by Kellen Kass

Notes

1. We are still unsure about whether or not Anna Davies is the informant’s real name, but for the article we will use that name for the sake of simplicity.
2. At this time, both Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson have taken plea deals and agreed to cooperate against Eric McDavid. For more information see: www.supporteric.org
3. State of Surveillance ACLU report, p. 13. Available online: http://www.aclunc.org/issues/government_surveillance/the_state_of_surveillance.shtml
4. Kristian Williams. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. p 239
5. Williams p 237
6. Calling this strategy counter-insurgency is not in any way a hyperbole, because occupying armies in situations such as Algeria and Ireland primarily developed these strategies. While there is too much to go into here, William’s Our Enemies in Blue is an excellent resource for gaining a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.
7. For more information about the UK speed camera attacks, see http://www.speedcam.co.uk/, and for the Australian case, see “Speed Cameras: The War Begins,” available at: http://sydney.indymedia.org/node/38981
8. Also for information on anarchist activity against immigrant detention centers see “An Example of Struggle Against Deportation and Detention Centers for Immigrants” in the first issue A Murder of Crows

A Murder of Crows
PO Box 20442
Seattle, WA 98102

Abu-Jamal Hearing Date Set by Third Circuit Court of Appeals

March 24, 2007

Dave Lindorff, Atlantic Free Press

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelpia journalist and former Black Panther
activist who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982, will finally have his appeal of his conviction heard by a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which set a date of May 17.

At that session, Abu-Jamal will argue that his original trial for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was fatally flawed because of racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection. He will argue that his conviction by that jury was improper because the prosecutor improperly was permitted to lessen jurors' sense of responsibility by assuring them that whatever they decided, the defendant would get "appeal after appeal" and so their decision "would not be final." He will also argue that his effort to appeal his conviction was damaged because his post-conviction relief act hearing was presided over by a judge who was clearly biased in favor of the district attorney.

The hearing will also hear a claim by the district attorney that Abu-Jamal's
death sentence - lifted by a Federal Judge in 2001--should be reinstated.
The federal district court had ruled that Abu-Jamal's sentence had been
arrived at by a jury that was given improper and confusing instructions by
Judge Albert Sabo, and that their sentencing form itself was misleading.

Meanwhile, it has been learned that the Philadelphia District Attorneys
Office earlier this month attempted unsuccessfully to have the entire Third
Circuit Court--one of the more liberal appeals courts in the nation--recused
from hearing Abu-Jamal's appeal on the grounds that Abu-Jamal's claim of
jury selection bias was charging then DA Ed Rendell (now Pennsylvania's
governor), with having deliberately violated the law. Rendel's wife,
Marjorie, is one of the appeals court judges in the Third Circuit.

Abu-Jamal's attorney Robert R. Bryan, objecting to the DA's effort, noted
that there was no claim of illegality on the governor's part, but rather on
the part of the prosecutor in the case, Joseph McGill. It is alleged that a
succession of Philadelphia DA's encouraged their prosecutors to remove as
many blacks as possible from capital juries, and documentary evidence has
been submitted to show that this was done, both by the DA's office over all,
and by assistant DA McGill in his own capital cases. During jury selection
for Abu-Jamal's trial, 11 black potential jurors who had all agreed they
could vote for a death penalty, were removed by McGill using his available
peremptory challenges (meaning he did not have to give a reason for his
action).

In a letter to the DA's office stating that the request to have all the
circuit's judges recused from hearing the case had been rejected, the clerk
of the court said that such a request would have to be made not as a letter,
but in the form of a formal motion. In a scolding tone, the letter notes
that such a motion "must be in proper form, i.e. an original and three
copies and certificate of service."

"It must have been humiliating for the opposition" to receive such a note,
comments attorney Bryan. He notes that to date, the DA has "not had the
guts" to make such a formal motion, adding, "We'll see."

---

Source : Atlantic Free Press

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1236/81/

ELP Information Bulletin (24th of March 2007)

Today the following article appeared in the American mainstream media.....

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5440051,00.html

Suspect, 24, arrested in rash of area SUV fires

By Felix Doligosa Jr., Rocky Mountain News
March 24, 2007
Police arrested a man Thursday night who may be connected to multiple
fires involving sport utility vehicles in two Denver neighborhoods.

Grant Barnes, 24, was arrested near Garfield Street and Bayaud Avenue at
11:30 p.m., said Heather Green, spokeswoman for the Denver Fire
Department. An officer stopped Barnes' vehicle after he was acting
suspiciously.

Police found evidence in Barnes' car that could link him to the fires,
Green said. The suspect had not been charged.

In the past week, six fires have been reported in parked SUVs in the
Cherry Creek and Lowry areas, Green said. Several of the fires were
started by "incendiary devices," such as a bomb, according to fire
investigators.

Investigators said they do not believe that Barnes is an ecoterrorist.

After one vehicle was burned, the letters ELF were found drawn in the
soot, Green said. Investigators said they believe that the writing was put
there after the fire. ELF is believed to stand for the ecoterrorist group
Earth Liberation Front.

"There does not appear to be connection to ELF," Green said.

Investigators "are not yet 100 percent sure," she said, but it appears
that if Barnes has any connection to ELF it's as "a wannabe."


=======

By using the American Governments own prisoner locator website we
have identified Grant Barnes as being held at:

Grant Barnes #1533241
PO Box 1108
Denver, CO 80201
USA

All ELP knows about this guy is what we have read in the mainstream
media reports.  If anyone knows any thing more about him please let
ELP know.

Jailed Professor's Hunger Strike Over

Saturday March 24, 2007

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A federal appeals court on Friday affirmed a civil contempt ruling against a former university professor hours after he ended a two-month hunger strike to protest a judge's decision to extend his prison term. A judge decided to hold Sami al-Arian an additional 18 months because he refused to testify before a Virginia grand jury investigating Palestinian charities. Al-Arian had been scheduled to be released from prison in April.

Al-Arian, a Palestinian who taught computer science at the University of South Florida, claimed that a plea agreement in Florida exempted him from cooperating with the Alexandria, Va. grand jury.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected al-Arian's argument. The plea agreement "contains no language which would bar the government from compelling appellant's testimony before a grand jury," the appeals court said.

Al-Arian's lawyer, Peter Erlinder, did not immediately return phone messages seeking comment.

Nahla al-Arian said she was able to convince her husband early Friday to end his water-only fast that began Jan. 22. He is being held at a medical prison in Butner, N.C. She said he lost about 53 pounds - one-quarter of his body weight - and was too weak to walk.

"We're very happy and relieved that he's decided to suspend his hunger strike," she said, adding that family members and supporters had feared permanent damage. "Hopefully he will not need to resume it."

Prosecutors labeled al-Arian a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the U.S. calls a terrorist organization, but his six-month trial in 2005 ended in an acquittal on some counts and a hung jury on others.

In a plea bargain last April, al-Arian admitted conspiring to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison, minus credit for the time he had served.

U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. in Florida found al-Arian in civil contempt for refusing to testify and extended al-Arian's prison sentence by 18 months. A judge will also review al-Arian's status every six months and could continue to extend al-Arian's sentence until he cooperates.

---

Associated Press writer Samuel Spies in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

Upcoming green scare hearings

From GreenScare.org

Upcoming Dates (2007):

· May 15 - Oral arguments for Terrorism Enhancement
· May 22 - Cooperating Defendant Stanislas Meyerhoff's sentencing. 9 am
· May 24 - Cooperating Defendant Kevin Tubbs's sentencing. 9 am
· May 25 - Cooperating Defendant Chelsea Gerlach's sentencing. 9 am
· May 29 - Cooperating Defendant Darren Thurston's sentencing. 9 am
· May 31 - Cooperating Defendant Suzanne Savoie's sentencing. 9 am
· May 31 - Cooperating Defendant Kendall Tankersley's sentencing. 1 pm

· June 1 - Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block's sentencing. 9 am
· June 4 - Daniel McGowan's sentencing. 9 am
· June 5 - Jonathan Paul's sentencing. 9 am

Daniel McGowan's support team can be reached at friendsofdanielmcg@yahoo.com

Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block's support team can be reached at supportersofnathanandjoyanna@gmail.com

Jonathan Paul's support team can be reached at friendsofjonathanpaul@yahoo.com

Support for Panther veterans, Mumia Abu-Jamal to receive Sacco & Vanzetti award

Supporters pack courtoom for Panther veterans

By Valerie Edwards Workers World
San Francisco

Published Mar 22, 2007 10:08 PM

Ray Boudreaus, Richard Brown, Hank Jones, Richard O’Neal, Harold Taylor and Francisco Torres entered the courtroom on March 13 shackled—despite objections made by their defense attorneys at the Feb. 14 arraignment here before Judge Little. The ages of these prisoners range from 57 to 70.

The courtroom was filled with supporters on March 13 at 9 a.m., the same as it had been on Feb. 14. A determined early morning demonstration of more than 100 people in support of these prisoners began an hour earlier in front of the Hall of Justice building. Numerous drivers passing by honked their car horns and raised their fists in solidarity.

The six men were arrested on Jan. 23 and, along with Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim—who have been in New York prisons for more than 30 years—on charges that supporters maintain were a frame-up, charged with the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer and a sweeping conspiracy involving numerous acts between 1968 and 1973.

These Panther veterans are now known as the San Francisco 8.

The first charges in this case were thrown out in 1975 when a federal court ruled that torture “has been illegally used to extract confessions.”

Now, with funds made available by Homeland Security’s post-911 war against terrorism, the San Francisco Police Department has reopened the investigation of the 1971 murder of Sgt. Young and put Detectives Erdelatz and McCoy—members of the original torture team—in charge.

The reopening of this case extends the efforts of the U.S. government to make torture acceptable, not only in its so-called war against terrorism, but also on the domestic front.

The shackled defendants sat silently for the ten minutes it took the federal prosecutors and defense attorneys to decide on the date and time for the next hearing. The judge laughed several times while this was going on. Whatever caused her laughter, it was hugely offensive.

The issue of the shackling of these men, who have been serving their communities for 30 years, has been postponed again.

The next hearing will be April 27.

The Committee in Defense of Human Rights was formed by Brown, Boudreaus, Taylor and Jones in 2005 after they were jailed for refusing to cooperate with the 2003 grand jury witch hunt.

The Web site www.cdhrsupport.org states that the SF8 case is a continuation of the Cointelpro attack on the Black movement and community, and that “this case could set an intolerable moral standard and disastrous legal precedent.”

Please go to the Web site for information, updates and downloadable flyers and to make donations.

Mumia Abu-Jamal to receive Sacco & Vanzetti award

Published Mar 22, 2007 10:05 PM

The Community Church of Boston will present the 30th annual Sacco and Vanzetti Social Justice Award to death-row political prisoner and renowned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal on March 25.

The award will honor Abu-Jamal for the work he has accomplished, despite government repression.

The event, co-sponsored by South End Press and Jericho-Boston, will take place from noon to 3 p.m. in the Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston Street in Copley Square. It will celebrate Abu-Jamal, the struggle to free all political prisoners, and the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Tickets for this event, the Community Church of Boston’s major annual fundraiser, are $20.00—$5.00 for seniors, youth and students. But all are welcome, regardless of ability to pay.

The program features Pam Africa—activist, community organizer and president of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Pam Africa will accept the award on behalf of Abu-Jamal.

Other speakers will include Lynne Stewart, human rights attorney and recipient of the 2005 Sacco and Vanzetti Award; Boston’s popular political hip-hop group “The Foundation Movement”; Kazi Toure, former political prisoner and co-chair of Jericho-National; and youth performers from Voices of Liberation.

— Peter Cook

Chico Grandmother Goes to Jail Today for Protest at Army's School of Assassins

by Dan Bacher
Wednesday Mar 21st, 2007 Indybay

Cathy Webster, a Chico grandmother, was one of six activists who reported to prisons throughout the country on March 21 for trespassing onto the grounds of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas.

640_websterjpg.jpg
original image ( 1176x1748)

Chico Grandmother Goes to Prison For Trespassing at U.S. Army’s School of the Americas

After having lunch with family and supporters, Cathy Webster of Chico turned herself in at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Facility in Elk Grove today to spend 60 days behind bars and high security fences for a simple trespassing charge at last November’s protest at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Webster hugged her daughter, Stephanie Tarrago, and her grandchildren, Alicia and Alejandro, before two Sacramento County Sheriffs Deputies escorted her into the jail. Meanwhile, Chico and Sacramento area supporters, including Grandmothers for Peace and other peace advocates, sang “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Down by the Riverside.”

Webster trespassed on the U.S. Army base to protest the teaching of counter-insurgency techniques and torture to Latin American soldiers that return to their home countries and commit atrocities, including massacres of women and children. In the same spirit as the civil rights movement, she used non-violent civil disobedience to shine a spotlight on the teachings of the school, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2000.

“The soldiers that are trained at the SOA are not defending their country, but are killing civilians for corporate greed and domination,” said Webster. “They go back to their countries to kill and torture their own people. The graduates of this school are among the worst human rights violators in Latin America.”

She participated in the annual protest and vigil along with 22,000 others, including 1000 Grandmothers ? in the annual protest and vigil.

The short-term goal of Cathy Webster's action and of organizations around the country is to educate Americans about the Army school, known as the “School of the Assassins” throughout Latin America. The long-term goal is the pressure Congress to pass legislation to de-fund the school and close it permanently. A vote in Congress is expected in May.

“I stepped onto military property with other protestors and was arrested for unauthorized trespassing,” explained Webster just minutes before turning herself in. “I was fully aware that I what was involved when I walked onto military property."

Webster was going to jail on the day before a Congressional vote on supplemental funding to continue the Iraq war and occupation was expected. "We need to cut the funds so we can stop a war that has been waged without any just cause," she stated. "So many innocent Iraqis and our soldiers have been killed and wounded since Bush began the war 4 years ago. I hope that our Congress Members get brave and speak up against the funding."

The 62-year-old grandmother was one of six activists who reported to prisons throughout the country on March 21. Webster, Melissa Helman, Alice Gerard, Philip Gates, Joshua Harris and Graymon Ward are part of the sixteen who brought the protest against the SOA/WHINSEC and U.S. foreign policy onto Fort Benning this past November at the Vigil to Close Down the SOA. Eight other defendants have received their notices to report to prison on April.

Katherine Whitney Ray, 17 years old, was sentenced to one year of probation and 50 hours of community service and Margaret Bryant-Gainer was released after serving 71 days in Muscogee County Jail after refusing to post bail on November 19, 2006, according to SOA Watch.

Webster said that this is the first time she has ever been to jail, but she was resolute and in good spirits as she checked herself in.

“I feel no anxiety (other than leaving my family behind), nor shame,” said Webster. “I do feel resolute in calling to peoples’ attention what our taxes are paying for, and thus what we as a nation are participating in. As a prisoner of conscience, I am in good company, stretching back centuries.”
Webster said she would also also be participating in and promoting the Close The SOA Fast, April 25-27. This is a juice/water only fast for three days in anticipation of a May vote in Congress to defund the SOA/WHINSEC. Lobbying Congress has been a year round effort for sixteen years.

“The Fast is to create more energy in our cosmos to encourage Congress to do the right thing. I hope and encourage you to participate as well,” she added.

After she was taken way by the deputies, Lorraine Krofchok, director of Grandmothers for Peace, commented, “I find it amazing that Cathy is going to jail for standing up for human rights while our Congressman, Dan Lungren, votes for torture.”

“I feel proud of my mother,” said Stephanie Tarrago, “and I feel no anxiety that she is going to jail for a cause that she believes so strongly in. We will be supporting her at home throughout her jail term.”
Webster said she will be sending letters to be posted on the 1000grandmothers website, http://www.1000grandmothers.net, and hopefullycalling into local radio stations during her stay.

The SOA/WHINSEC made headlines in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocate torture, extortion and execution. Despite this admission and hundreds of documented human rights abuses connected to soldiers trained at the school, no independent investigation into the facility has ever taken place.

New research confirms that the school continues to support known war criminals and human rights abusers. Despite having been investigated by the United Nations for ordering the shooting of 16 indigenous peasants in El Salvador, Col. Francisco Del Cid Diaz returned to SOA/WHINSEC in 2003.

Notorious graduates of the school include the “born again butcher” General Rios Montt, who conducted a war of genocide against the Mayan population of Guatemala that resulted in wiping 626 Mayan communities off the map, and Hugo Banzer, the brutal dictator of Bolivia.

“Prison witness has been a core element of the SOA Watch movement since its beginning,” according to a press release from SOA Watch. “In the tradition of Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi and countless others, SOA Watch activists have used peaceful, nonviolent resistance to expose the horrors of the SOA/ WHINSEC and to express solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Latin America.”

As a result, 211 SOA Watch human rights defenders have collectively spent over 92 years in prison. Over 50 people have served probation sentences.

“Their sacrifice and steadfastness in the struggle for peace and justice provide an extraordinary example of love in action and have given tremendous momentum to the effort to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy and to close the SOA/ WHINSEC,” according to SOA Watch.

For information about the efforts to close SOA/WHINSEC, go to the School of the Americas Watch website at http://www.soaw.org or the 1000 Grandmothers website
at http://www.1000grandmothers.net.

To send Webster letters in prison, mail to:
Catherine M. Webster X-4310736
Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center
12450 Bruceville Road
Elk Grove, CA 95757

Cuban 5 on WBAI

The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign
http://www.ProLibertadWeb.com
ProLibertad@hotmail.com and ProLibertad.Campaign@gmail.com
ProLibertad Hotline: 718-601-4751
_______________________________________________________________________________

Download the MARCH 2007 Edition of the ProLibertad Newsletter El Coqui
Libre: http://www.prolibertadweb.com/eclMarch2007.pdf
_______________________________________________________________________________

Despierta Boricua Segment for Friday March 23rd, 2007 at 6:45am on
WBAI radio 99.5fm or live webstreaming/archived on http://www.wbai.org

This Week's segment features an interview with Cuban 5 activist,
Alicia Jrapko, of the International Committee for the Freedom of the
Cuban 5.  We will be discussing the Committee's lastest intiaitive to
support the movement to grant visas for Olga Salanueva and Adriana
Perez, wives of 2 of the Cuban 5.  For mroe info. go to
http://www.freethecuban5.com
_______________________________________________________________________________

MARCHA: PROLIBERTAD!!
Saturday March 31st, 2007 at 1pm
Gather at 1 Fordham Plaza
(Look for the Puerto Rican Flags)

Directions: Subway D or #4 to Fordham Road, then bus BX12 to Fordham Plaza;
or buses BX9, BX12, BX15, BX17, BX22 to Fordham Plaza; or Metro-North
commuter rail to Fordham; or #60, #61 Westchester Bee Line buses.

FREE THE PUERTO RICAN POLITICAL PRISONERS!! The Puerto Rican Political
Prisoners: Oscar Lopez Rivera, Carlos Alberto Torres, Haydee Beltran Torres,
and Jose Perez Gonzalez!!

Join the ProLibertad Freedom Campaign as we KICK OFF “FREEDOM MONTH” (April
2007) with a community march for the  Puerto Rican Political Prisoners in
the Bronx!!

On April 4th, 1980, several Puerto Rican Independentistas were arrested by
the U.S. government for fighting for Puerto Rican independence!!  For 108
years,  Puerto Rico has been a colony of the U.S. government!!
International law states, that a colony has the right to use whatever means
necessary to end colonialism!!

The Puerto Rican Political Prisoners are freedom fighters, not terrorists!!
They were incarcerated for their political beliefs and actions  for Puerto
Rico’s independence!!

The April Freedom Month is dedicated to educating, organizing and mobilizing
to free the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners!!

Political Prisoners are freed by the masses!!  It is time to bring this
issue back to the community; it is time to hit the streets!!

FOR MORE INFO. AND OUR BEAUTIFULL FLYER GO TO: http://www.ProLibertadWeb.com
_______________________________________________________________________________

APRIL 2007 FREEDOM MONTH!!

The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign has designated April, "Freedom Month!!"
Every April ProLibertad organizing a series of events to commemorate the
arrests of our political prisoners.  We use this month as a time to raise
awareness concerning the prisoners and of Puerto Rico's colonial reality.

TENTATIVE FREEDOM MONTH APRIL 2007 Schedule
(An email with updated times and venues will be published shortly)

Saturday March 31st-ProLibertad Community March in the Bronx (See the above
announcement)

Sunday April 1st- Special mass dedicated to the Puerto Rican Political
Prisoners by La Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas/UCC at 11:30am

Friday April 6th-Militant Labor Forum event for the Puerto Rican Political
Prisoners at 6:30pm

Saturday April 7th- "Hands off Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia" (With the added
demands of "Free Puerto Rico" and "Free the Puerto Rican Political
Prisoners") at 1pm http://www.april7coalition.org

Tuesday April 10th-ProLIbertad Event at the International Action Center at
7pm

Friday April 13th-Puerto Rico/Political Prisoner Event with Fuerza de la
Revolucion Domincana at Centro Orlando Martinez in Inwood

Tuesday April 17th-Special ProLibertad Freedom Campaign Information Session
at Hunter College at 7pm Hunter college east building center for Puerto
Rican studies 14th floor room 1441 or the solarium

Thursday April 26th-ProLibertad Student Event with Hunter College's Hostos
Puerto Rican Club at 1pm

Saturday April 28th-ProLibertad Special fund-raiser (BOMBAZO) at 7pm

Sunday April 29th-Unity Brunch on the PRican PPs with Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement at 1pm
_______________________________________________________________________________

ADOPT-A-PRISONER 2007

The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign wishes everyone a wonderful, just and
powerful New Year!! In these times of war, repression and RESISITANCE, we in
the ProLibertad Freedom Campaign are calling on all our allies, supporters
and friends to remember our brothers and sisters behind the walls!! Those
amazing and inspiration compañer@s that were incarcerated by the US
government for their brave actions and commitment to the liberation of
Puerto Rico; a colony of the United States for 108 years!

As the year 2007 begins, we are urging all of you to join ProLibertad's
newest campaign:
ADOPT-A-PRISONER 2007

This is an easy project. There are only 5 easy steps to support this
endeavor:

Step 1: Go to http://www.prolibertadweb.com/page4.html and read about one of
our prisoners.

Step 2: Choose one of them or all of them and make the commitment to write
to him/her/them once or twice a month.

Step 3: If you can, send them a commissary donation (small financial
donation $5-whatever; every little bit counts)!! These small donations allow
them to pay for phone calls to family/LEGAL COUNSEL/friends and also for
over priced materials behind the walls. To learn more about how to donate go
to: http://www.prolibertadweb.com/page5.html

Step 4: Email us Prolibertad@hotmail.com and let us know who you've adopted.
We want to keep track of this campaign and see how many of you are able to
commit to supporting our prisoners.

Step 5: Motivate all of your friends to ADOPT-TO-A-PRISONER!! Be creative!!
Invite ProLibertad to speak to your friends or organize a card/letter
writing party. Let us know how we can support!

TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE FREEDOM HAPPEN!! TOGETHER WE CAN SUPPORT OUR HEROES

Jocks 4 Justice Speak out for Gary Tyler

by DAVE ZIRIN
the Nation March 21, 2007

The history of the American legal system is scarred with instances of injustice: the Haymarket martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Add to this list the case of Gary Tyler, convicted of murder at the age of 16. Tyler's case was remarkable because at the time of his 1975 conviction, he was the nation's youngest death-row inmate. The spotlight dimmed when his sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole in 1977, a year after the US Supreme Court declared Louisiana's death penalty unconstitutional.

Tyler, now 48, is living out his days in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison. A former slave plantation, Angola is home to 5,000 prisoners,
75 percent of whom are black. He has now spent years of his life
behind bars because he was the wrong color in the wrong place at the
wrong time.

National interest in Tyler's case was revived by a recent series of
articles by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. In 1974 Tyler was on
a school bus filled with African-American students who attended the
formerly all-white Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish,
Louisiana. A white mob attacked the school bus. As Gary's brother
Terry recalled years later to journalist Adam Nossiter in a piece
published in The Nation, "They were on the attack, man. It was panic."
Witnesses at the time said someone on the bus pointed out the window
and yelled, "Look at that white boy with that gun." After several
pops, a 13-year-old white student, Timothy Weber, lay wounded on the
ground. Weber's cousin, Deputy Sheriff V.J. St. Pierre, rushed the boy
to the hospital, where he later died from a gunshot wound. Later,
white supremacist David Duke came to Destrehan to fan the flames of
racial hatred.

Herbert wrote, "That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up
the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of
appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day." The police
came onto the bus and Tyler was dragged off. Then came the beatings.
As Juanita Tyler, Gary's mother, told Herbert, "One of the deputies
had a strap and they whipped him with that. It was terrible. Finally,
when they let me go in there, Gary was just trembling. He was
frightened to death. He was trembling and rocking back and forth. They
had kicked him all in his privates. He said, 'Mama, they kicked me.
One kicked me in the front and one kicked in the back.' He said that
over and over. I couldn't believe what they had done to my baby." An
all-white jury found Tyler guilty of first-degree murder. Since his
conviction, the four witnesses against him have recanted their
testimony.

The murder weapon, as Herbert reported, had been "stolen from a firing
range used by the sheriff's deputies." It appeared out of nowhere as
the murder weapon. The gun has since magically disappeared from the
evidence room.
A federal appeals court ultimately ruled that Tyler did not receive a
fair trial, but justice was again denied. In an interview with Amy
Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!, Herbert explained that
the court ruled that "the charge to the jury was flawed, and they said
that it was flawed so badly that it clearly could have had an impact
on how the jurors ruled. But they were so insistent on not having this
case overturned and not having Gary Tyler freed or have a new trial
that they ruled on a technicality that he did not deserve a new trial.
So it's on the record that a federal appeals court has said that his
trial was fundamentally unfair."

In 1989, Louisiana Board of Pardons (LBP) voted 3 to 2 to commute
Tyler's sentence from life to sixty years, making Tyler eligible for a
speedy release from prison. But Louisiana Governor Charles "Buddy"
Roemer, a Democrat facing an electoral challenge from David Duke,
refused to issue a pardon. A crucial element in Roemer's decision was
the racially charged political climate: Eighteen years later, that
climate has changed. And now the fight to free Gary Tyler has been
reignited by a new advocacy effort, led by Tyler's family, lawyers and
activists.

Joe Allen, a member of the Free Gary Tyler steering committee,
credited Bob Herbert's columns for reviving the effort to free him.
"Gary's case is one of the great miscarriages of justice in the modern
history of the US but had largely been forgotten until the recent work
by Bob Herbert," he told me. "I think there is momentum now that makes
it possible for the first time in decades to build a national campaign
for his freedom."

In addition to the Free Gary Tyler campaign, Amnesty International's
relaunched advocacy has given the Tyler case new visibility. Building
on this momentum, I contacted people I know from the world of sports
to ask if they would to stand with Tyler at this critical time. And
they have responded.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos were part of the most dynamic moment in
the history of sports and struggle when they raised their black-gloved
fists at the 1968 Olympics. Lee Evans was also a gold medal winner at
those Olympics and a leader of the Olympic Project for Human Rights.
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was a top-ranked boxer who spent almost
twenty years in prison for a triple homicide before being exonerated
after an international campaign to win his freedom. Jim "Bulldog"
Bouton and Bill "Spaceman" Lee were all-star pitchers for the Yankees
and Red Sox who told uncomfortable truths about both society and the
game that they love. Etan Thomas plays for the NBA's Washington
Wizards and stands in the tradition of the previous generation of
political athletes. Together, they and other sports figures are asking
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for the release of Gary Tyler. Read
the statement to see how Tyler's quest for justice has brought these
and other extraordinary figures from the world of sports together.

JOCKS 4 JUSTICE
To: Gov. Kathleen Blanco

We, the undersigned members of the sports community, call upon you, in
the name of justice and racial reconciliation, to pardon Gary Tyler
and free him from Angola prison. Gary is an innocent man who has spent
32 of his 48 years on earth behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
Gary's life has been destroyed because of racial hysteria and that
peculiar brand of police work known internationally as "Southern
Justice."

As you are undoubtedly aware, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has
spent the last month exposing the terrifying truth behind Gary's
conviction. In 1975, Gary Tyler, an African-American teenager, was
convicted by an all-white jury for the murder of Timothy Weber, a
thirteen-year-old white youth. Weber was shot and killed during a
busing riot where 200 whites attacked Gary's school bus. Weber's death
quite understandably sent shock waves across the state. The police
needed a killer. They chose Gary and his nightmare officially began.
Gary's mother detailed to Herbert the sounds of listening to deputies
at the police station savagely whipping her son, while they blocked
her from entering the room. "They beat Gary so bad," she said. "My
poor child. I couldn't do nothing." Every witness who identified Gary
as the shooter has since recanted and alleged police intimidation. The
gun supposedly used on that day has disappeared.

In the mid-1970s, Gary's case mobilized thousands across the country
for his freedom and led Amnesty International to declare him a
"political prisoner." Denied a fair trial 32 years ago, imprisoned for
life for a crime he did not commit--we call upon you to free Gary
Tyler now.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, boxer and author of The 16th Round

Tommie Smith, 1968 Olympic gold medalist

John Carlos 1968 Olympic bronze medalist

Lee Evans, Olympic gold medalist

Etan Thomas, Washington Wizards center and author of More Than an Athlete

Jim Bouton, former New York Yankee pitcher and author of Ball Four

Bill "Spaceman" Lee, former Boston Red Sox pitcher and author of The Wrong Stuff

Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, former Light Heavyweight Boxing Champion and head of
Joint Action for Boxers (J.A.B.)

David Meggyesy, former NFL linebacker and retired Western Regional
Director, NFL Players Association (NFLPA)

Jeff "Snowman" Monson, Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter

Toni Smith, former member of Manhattanville College Women's Basketball team

Dr. Phil Shinnick, member of the 1964 US Olympic team

Bobbito Garcia co-editor of Bounce Magazine and NYC DJ

Dennis Brutus, former director of the South African Non Racialist
Olympic Committee and professor emeritus of Africana Studies at the
University of Pittsburgh

Doug Harris, executive director, Athletes United for Peace

Lester Rodney, sports editor, the Daily Worker, 1936-58

Rus Bradburd, former assistant basketball coach at the University of
Texas El Paso and author of Paddy on the Hardwood: Journey Through
Irish Hoops

Julio Pabón president and CEO of Latino Sports Ventures

William Gerena-Rochet, editor of LatinoSports.com

Dave Zirin, columnist for The Nation online and author of What's My
Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States

For more information, visit freegarytyler.com

To contact Governor Blanco,

Call: (225) 342-0991

Or write:

Office of the Governor
Attn: Constituent Services
P.O. Box 94004
Baton Rouge, LA 70804-9004

Italian fugitive-turned-writer arrested

By TALES AZZONI Sun Mar 18, 4:48 PM ET

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Accused of killings in his native Italy, militant 1970s leftist Cesare Battisti reinvented himself in France as a celebrated writer of police thrillers. But Paris got tougher on suspected terrorists and Battisti went on the run again in 2004, disappearing, apparently with the help of a French "support committee."

Disappearing, that is, until Sunday, when police tracking a woman bringing Battisti money found the fugitive novelist near Brazil's famed Copacabana Beach.

An extradition request was immediately sent to Brazil's Supreme Court, which could send him back to Italy, said a spokesman for Brazilian federal police, Bruno Ramos.

Battisti "will try to ensure his rights," said his Paris lawyer, Eric Turcon.

Like many leftists wanted for their roles in a tumultuous period of bombings and assassinations in Italy in the 1970s, Battisti, who escaped from an Italian prison in 1981, took refuge in France in the 1990s. He took advantage of a tacit policy, developed under Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, allowing Italian militants who took refuge in France the right to remain if they renounced their violent ways.

France was proud of its tradition as a haven for political refugees and disapproved of Italy's use of mass arrests and informants to combat extremists. Some in France believed that Italian militants could not get fair trials at home.

Battisti was a member of Armed Proletarians for Communism, a group founded in 1977 that targeted mostly prisons and people who were believed to cooperate with law enforcement. He was accused of the slaying of a prison guard and of butcher Lino Sabbadin, who was slain in Milan on Feb. 16, 1979. Sabbadin had shot and killed a robber who had broken into his store months earlier.

Fleeing Italy and proclaiming his innocence, Battisti lived in France for more than a decade, gaining prominence by writing about two dozen books, including many dark thrillers.

He was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison in Italy in 1990 for the slayings of the prison guard and Sabbadin.

He reiterated his claim of innocence of the killings in a book published in France a year ago.

"I am guilty, as I have often said, of having participated in an armed group with a subversive aim and of having carried weapons. But I never shot anyone," he wrote in "Ma Cavale" ("My Escape").

Mitterrand's legacy left France vulnerable to criticism that it wasn't doing enough to combat terrorism. As times changed, France adjusted its policy of sheltering Italians, as well as Basque militants accused of attacks in Spain.

In January 2003, Italian authorities formally asked France to extradite Battisti. Two months before then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was able to sign an extradition decree in October 2004, Battisti disappeared again, failing to show up for a weekly check-in with judicial officials.

Law enforcement officials went on the hunt for him, while a support committee was formed to back his bid to remain in France. Artists and intellectuals rallied around him, including novelist Fred Vargas and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy.

It was a young woman from the support committee, assigned to bring the fugitive money, who proved to be his undoing. Acting on a tip from Italian police, the French watched the woman for a month, tracking her to the Rio de Janeiro hotel where Battisti was found, French police officials said.

"Brazilian police had been following him for several months after receiving information from Interpol (the international police agency) in Paris and Rome," Ramos said of Battisti.

It was not immediately clear whether the woman was also arrested Sunday. She was not identified by name or nationality.

In Rome, Italian Premier Romano Prodi telephoned to congratulate Interior Minister Giuliano Amato for the "brilliant operation." Justice Minister Clemente Mastella said he hoped that Battisti would quickly be extradited to Italy, the ANSA and Apcom agencies reported.

Battisti is also accused of being an accomplice to the slayings of a police officer and jeweler Luigi Torregiani. Torregiani was killed in a gun battle in Milan on the same day Sabbadin, the butcher, was killed.

Torregiani had also shot and killed a robber who had broken into his store months earlier.

Alberto Torregiani, the jeweler's son, said Battisti needed to pay "until the end and stay in prison," according to the ANSA agency.

"This would show that justice can be achieved even after 30 years, when it is pursued with determination," said Torregiani, who was wounded and paralyzed by one of his father's bullets in the attack.

Letter of Rage

By Ali Khalid Abdullah, Prisonersolidarity.org
March 16, 2007
http://www.prisonersolidarity.org/AliKhalidAbdullah5.htm

This is a letter of rage. It is well past the time that we opened our eyes, that we stopped being bullshitted, brainwashed, and placed in a socio-political cage, and learned to take back our power. I refer to the power we relinquished to the political structure in order to become a so-called "developed nation," while other brothers and sisters in these so-called "third world" live and die off of the crumbs that kapitalist/imperialist nations throw off of their tables.

The time is over for Black and White hate. We must stand together and realize that we are being played - played by monopolizers who want us to hate one another, and to fight and kill one another, while they exploit us and our labor and potential.

The time is done for allowing the enemy to dictate to us who our brothers and sisters are. All this propaganda pushed upon us about the immigrant taking our jobs and bringing down the Amerikan dream is a lie. A big fat racist lie. Our immigrant brothers and sisters aren't bringing down nothing. They were long ago brought down by the white power superstructure that has used and exploited them and their land to make profit and gain power over the rest of us. The truth is that our immigrant brothers and sisters have never been the problem. How can a starving and economically deprived people be the root of any problem?

The problem is with those who exploit, those who spread racist propaganda. The problem are the kapitalists who think of no one but themselves. We have to stand outside the lying hype vomited to us by their news media and the sell-out politicians -- Democrats and Republicans, alike.

Start looking outside of Amerikkka. Start learning about Afrika, Asia, Latin Amerika, the former Soviet Republic and throughout the Middle East, and see who is suffering. See who is being deprived. See who is being seriously exploited, dying of thirst, hunger and disease. Learn about what is really going on before making biased comments about other people.

Look, this letter isn't written to sugarcoat or play, in some politically correct language. I'm trying to blast you with some real shit. I'm trying to inspire you to check out some things, and if I have to use profanity in order for you to stop in your tracks and look at what's happening, so be it. We need to build a controlled and organized rage for resistance, to the status quo.

is everything that we have made at the cost of someone else's suffering to provide it? Do you think that your cell phone was made without others' suffering? All cell phones, computers and anything that has a chip comes from a substance found in a particular mud in Afrika. It’s called Coltan (the colloquial Afrikan name for columbite-tantalite). Coltan is the driving force for us to have cheap access to these products.

Look at the bling-bling (ala jewellery) so many people have, or seek. The people who slave their lives away to get these diamonds and gold can't even feed themselves. Why not?: Because of greed, political manipulation and media savvy. I call upon all of you who say that you're tired of exploitation, racism, homophobia, sexism, and ageism. You're tired of being treated as worker-slaves. You're ready to feel the rage! To feel the hot-blood rush through you and raise your emotions, to jump up and FIGHT THE POWER STRUCTURE!

Ali Khalid Abdullah
#148130
Muskegon Corr. Fac.
2400 S. Sheridan Rd.
Muskegon, MI

Ali Khalid Abdullah has been incarcerated since 1990 for taking action against a known drug dealer for the sexual molestation of an 11-year-old girl, because her mother owed a crack debt. Abdullah was ambushed, shot in the chest, and left for dead as a result of street information circulating that he was going to deal with the perpetrators. After recovering from the hospital, he sought to attack several businesses the drug dealer owned as fronts for selling drugs. Abdullah and friends confronted the employees, and discovered that they did not know what was going on. They left without taking any money, or causing any harm. But Abdullah was arrested and sentenced to 6 ½-20 years for "Assault with Intent to Rob While Armed." He has been denied parole since 1996, and discharges in July 2008.

Eric McDavid in Need of Donations for Legal Fees!

First of all, let us say thank you to everyone who has supported Eric in
the past - financially, with your letters, your pictures, your poetry, and
your love. Eric's journey would have been much more difficult and painful
without all of you offering your time and energy.

Unfortunately, Eric has now been in jail for over 14 months without having
been convicted of any crime. He has constantly stood by his principles
during his incarceration - enduring a grueling two week hunger strike to
get vegan meals, and maintaining his innocence in the face of his
codefendant's cooperation with the government. The accusations against
him are chilling in their absurdity - the "conspiracy" charges against
Eric call to mind the "thought crime" of George Orwell's 1984.

After paying for all of Eric's legal fees for over a year, his family is
in need of assistance. His trial date is approaching (possibly as early as
May 9), and the legal fees are mounting. We need to raise $15,000 to
ensure that Eric's legal fees - lawyer, investigators, etc - are covered
through trial. We must make sure that Eric continues to have the best
legal representation possible to fight these outrageous charges and keep
the government from draining his family financially.

To that end, we're trying to ask EVERYONE to do whatever they can to help
raise money for Eric's legal fees. Please consider holding a fundraiser
for Eric - a show, a bakesale, an art auction - whatever you have the
know-how and the resources to do. We simply cannot do this alone.

Also, please consider donating directly to "Sacramento Defense Fund" to
help cover Eric's legal fees. You can donate directly with paypal at
www.supporteric.org

Please remember that this is not over. While other folks across the
country have taken deals or otherwise settled their cases, Eric's legal
struggle continues. We need everyone's love and support right now, but
unfortunately, we also need financial assistance. Check the webpage
regularly for updates about how much we've raised and how much more we
need.

Thank you all,
Sacramento Prisoner Support
----------------------------------------------------------

Don't forget! Eric's next hearing is scheduled for April 16 at 9 am at
the Federal Building in Sacramento (501 I Street, 15th floor, room no. 3).
He would love to have the courtroom packed with friends, family, and
supporters. Please consider attending and come dressed for court.
----------------------------------------------------------

Schedule & Menu for Art Auction
Saturday, March 24 5:00-8:00pm
at the Brickhouse in Sacramento (2837 36th St )


5:00pm doors open
5:30pm Chickpea & Herb Mini-pies and Burgundy Olive, Spinach & almond
Tapenade
6:00pm Crackers with White Bean & Kale Pate and Little Barbecue Tempeh
Turnovers
6:30pm Sweet & Salty Nut Pastries and Fruit & Ginger Tarts with Sesame Crust
7:00pm Deadline for bidding on art
7:00-8:00pm Bids and Raffle winners announced

In addition to fabulous finger foods by Joshua Ploeg the event will
feature cider, live music and a talk by Eric McDavid’s lawyer Mark
Reichel. Come prepared to buy art and take it home with you.

AN EVANGELICAL DECLARATION AGAINST TORTURE

PROTECTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN AGE OF TERROR

Executive Summary

1. Introduction: From a Christian perspective, every human life is sacred. As evangelical Christians, recognition of this transcendent moral dignity is non-negotiable in every area of life, including our assessment of public policies. This commitment has been tested in the war on terror, as a public debate has occurred over the moral legitimacy of torture and of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees held by our nation in the current conflict. We write this declaration to affirm our support for detainee human rights and our opposition to any resort to torture.

2. Sanctity of Life: We ground our commitment to human rights in the core Christian theological conviction that each and every human life is sacred. This theme wends its way throughout the Scriptures: in Creation, Law, the Incarnation, Jesus’ teaching and ministry, the Cross, and his Resurrection. Concern for the sanctity of life leads us to vigilant sensitivity to how human beings are treated and whether their God-given rights are being respected.

3. Human Rights: Human rights, which function to protect human dignity and the sanctity of life, cannot be cancelled and should not be overridden. Recognition of human rights creates obligations to act on behalf of others whose rights are being violated. Human rights place a shield around people who otherwise would find themselves at the mercy of those who are angry, aggrieved, or frightened. While human rights language can be misused, this demands its clarification rather than abandonment. Among the most significant human rights is the right to security of person, which includes the right not to be tortured.

4. Christian History and Human Rights: The concept of human rights is not a “secular” notion but instead finds _expression in Christian sources long before the Enlightenment. More secularized versions of the human rights ethic which came to occupy such a large place in Western thought should be seen as derivative of earlier religious arguments. Twentieth century assaults on human rights by totalitarian states led to a renewal of “rights talk” after World War II. Most branches of the Christian tradition, including evangelicalism, now embrace a human rights ethic.

5. Ethical Implications: Everyone bears an obligation to act in ways that recognize human rights. This responsibility takes different forms at different levels. Churches must teach their members to think biblically about morally difficult and emotionally intense public issues such as this one. Our own government must honor its constitutional and moral responsibilities to respect and protect human rights. The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9/11. We need to regain our moral clarity.

6. Legal Structures: International law contains numerous clear and unequivocal bans on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. These bans are wise and right and must be embraced without reservation once again by our own government. Likewise, United States law and military doctrine has banned the resort to torture and cruel and degrading treatment. Tragically, documented acts of torture and of inhumane and cruel behavior have occurred at various sites in the U.S. war on terror, and current law opens procedural loopholes for more to continue. We commend the Pentagon’s revised Army Field Manual for clearly banning such acts, and urge that this ban extend to every sector of the United States government without exception, including our intelligence agencies.

7. Concluding Recommendations: The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.

Eco-What-ists? Rantings of a Long-Term Activist

Eugene PeaceWork's The Peace Pages. (Spring 2007).

By Peg Morton

About a year ago – I can’t remember exactly when – I read in the newspaper that a group of “eco-terrorists” had been rounded up and was to be tried here in Eugene. I found myself propelled to those hearings – my heart reaching out – but (because I did not know them and did not know their stories) with many questions. I found very few of my peace activist friends in the courtroom, and so I have to ask why I was there and they were not. My answer is embedded in my own story: I have learned that I am related to all those who care deeply about the future of our planet and about true justice, an end to poverty, an end to war. I have disagreed, sometimes vigorously, with tactics that some use. But we are family.

I’m in my mid-70s now. My life-long “career,” despite various jobs, professions, and degrees, has really been activism. It began in the 1950s when, as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I joined an exchange program with a Black college in Alabama, where I experienced the “colored” water fountains, rest rooms, and waiting rooms, and riding illegally in the back of buses. In graduate school, I helped organize an intercollegiate peace conference.

As a young adult with babies, I served in the League of Woman Voters, building organizing skills and learning the importance of careful study before action. In the Civil Rights Movement, I worked with a local NAACP chapter on housing integration, and then, in another community, on school integration. I served as a Democratic precinct committeeman (elected), wheeling my baby around the neighborhood, driving people to the polls, and, as a school parent, working to end corporal punishment and provide equal opportunities for girls (shop and sports). Later, I plunged into the Central America solidarity movement, joining the Pledge of Resistance to the contra war in Nicaragua, going on many delegations, studying Spanish, making presentations… Well, you get the drift.

My Philosophy of Nonviolence
I am a Quaker and believe deeply in the philosophy of nonviolence – or to put it more actively, satyagraha (Soul, or Truth Force – not only in its spiritual ethical role but also in its effectiveness. From time to time over the years, there have been groups in the Peace Movement with whom I emphatically disagreed over tactics and attitudes. During the Vietnam War, when students and others in our Southern Illinois University town began to throw rocks and break windows, our Quaker group began regular silent vigils, inviting others to join us. I was never in contact with the Weathermen, but they believed that the destruction of property would help end the war. We were, in a sense, parallel movements, all working toward the same goal. Later, here in Eugene, as we stood at the Federal Building opposing the Iraq embargo, I found myself annoyed at those who covered their faces and yelled curses at the traffic and at the police as they drove by.

A fundamental question defined our differences: “Do the ends justify the means?” The groups in which I participated believed (and believe) that the means and the ends are all one strand that cannot be separated. The means will fundamentally affect the end result. We believe that nonviolent strategies have been and can be extremely effective, as in the Gandhian movement and the Civil Rights Movement. Other groups believe that one must compromise to reach the sought-after results. Importantly, however, if I understand correctly, these groups were and are committed to not causing death, to not taking lives.

With the 90s came a surge. Young adults, some very young, were everywhere – in the trees and on the streets – and especially in and around Eugene. I was heartened by this upsurge of environmental and social justice activism: Food Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns, and informal schools that sprouted in my Whittaker neighborhood… I found myself slandered (not personally but categorically) – well, scoffed at – in zines and on the alley walls of Grower’s Market: I, a pacifist, was “passive.” Standing on street corners with signs will get us nowhere, they said. We were being challenged to take risks, to have courage.

This was good for thoughtful reflection. Although I will always believe that the actions in which I have been involved over the years (including standing on street corners with signs) have been effective to one degree or another, I also believed – and I still believe – that our nonviolent peace movement could be challenged to take more risks, as individuals to make more sacrifices. I think that this is happening. It needs to happen much more.

When Social Activism Turns Violent
I visited the tree-sitters at Fall Creek and have listened to stories from tree-sits in other locations. These people love the ancient forest and are grief-stricken and angry about the ecological consequences of its destruction. They are putting their lives on the line to save old-growth trees. I deeply admire their committed, long-term effort, their hard and sometimes dangerous work. I watched a video of a small group in California chained together and to a tree. Instead of cutting the chains, the police pepper-sprayed each one, including their eyes, as they sat there silently. I have been happy to redirect some of my federal military taxes to support tree-sitters. I wish that more of us were more informed about what they’ve been doing.

I disagree with many of the attitudes and strategies that have been used by some groups in the very diverse movement that rose up in the ‘90s. I want to participate in actions that express firmness and commitment to a goal but that are also friendly, respectful, and open. I want to listen to all points of view and to understand my adversaries as human beings. I believe that we in the nonviolent movement for peace and justice must be willing to make sacrifices as great as those of our men and women in the military. I have engaged in fasts. I hope I won’t run away from arrest and that I will risk arrest when I feel led in the Spirit to do so, and I will deal with the legal consequences as they arise. Am I willing to risk my life? I don’t know. But our soldiers do every day.

I have disagreed with the underground movement that has engaged in property destruction – from SUVs to logging trucks to various buildings. However, the actions of these people – as far as I know – have not killed or injured a single person. The label eco-terrorists links them to true terrorists who engage widely in political murder. I was and am horrified by the length of Jeffrey Luers’ sentence, and I wonder who is paying for the far worse crimes that are being wrought on our precious environment. When I was serving my brief three months as a prisoner of conscience in a federal minimum-security prison, another inmate was a young woman who had participated in the burning of a logging truck serving her sentence of several years with dignity. She also received a huge fine that will follow her most of her life. Her punishment is excessive, but far less so than that of Jeffrey Luers, who is serving 22+ years in a maximum-security prison. Excessive sentencing is one reason that we have more prisoners per person than any other industrialized country.

In Chiapas in the late 90s, I had the privilege of meeting Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who had lived and worked there for more than 40 years supporting indigenous people. I asked him how people who believe in nonviolence should respond to guerrilla and other movements that use violence. He told me that we must look at guerilla movements in context: We must first understand the violence of a system that causes abject poverty (and, I would add, a system that the U.S. government has actively supported over the years). Those who are crushed into starvation (and then some) sometimes choose to rise up, using arms to fight for a better life. They have nothing to lose. As privileged, white North Americans, how can we judge these people? Instead – especially because we are complicit in their poverty – we need to find ways to deepen our understanding and to educate ourselves about the economic basis for their poverty, as well as the richness and beauty of their cultures.

What Can We Do?
We can work and keep working to change the system. In fact, we especially need to bear witness to U.S. support of the use by the military of these countries of torture, massacre, assassination, and the disappearances of teachers, journalists, labor leaders, human rights lawyers, and entire villages of women, children, and men – as well as of the guerrilla fighters. We live in societies where violence is taught from early childhood on and exonerated, excused, and used as primary instruments of government.

Some people in the peace movement are quick to distance themselves from those with different attitudes about the use of property destruction. I think we need to recognize that we are part of the same movement. Of course, we need to – in fact, we must – challenge each other. But we need also to focus our attention, each in the group of our choice, on our broader goals. All of us need to always remain aware of the violence of the system that surrounds and engulfs us.
This group of “eco-saboteurs” has been rounded up and is on trial with huge publicity. That perhaps is one way the government is placing a smokescreen on the violence and destruction in the Middle East. It is my heartfelt hope that their sentences will not be excessive. It is my hope that we will support them as they serve their sentence, and, most importantly, that their actions and the consequences will help raise our consciousness to the seriousness of environmental destruction. These young people took action knowing that they were taking huge risks. I disagree with their actions, but I honor their courage and their commitment to saving an Earth that is being destroyed, especially by stupidity and greed in the United States. I ask: “How will we, can we, call attention to and act effectively in response to this destruction, this death that is happening before our eyes”?

Peg Morton is a 76-year-old retired rural mental health counselor, Quaker activist, and long-term war-tax resister. She served three months in federal prison for an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. In November 2003, she and 27 others peacefully crossed into Fort Benning (GA), site of the notorious School of the Americas, to commemorate the victims of SOA violence in Latin America and to call for SOA’s closure.


Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist. He was charged in federal court on many counts of arson, property destruction and conspiracy, all relating to two incidents in Oregon in 2001. Until recently, Daniel was offered two choices by the government: cooperate by informing on other people, or go to trial and face life in prison. His only real option was to plead not guilty until he could reach a resolution of the case that permitted him to honor his principles. As a result of months of litigation and negotiation, Daniel was able to admit to his role in these two incidents, while not implicating or identifying any other people who might have been involved. The government will seek a sentence of eight years, while Daniel's lawyers will seek a sentence of no more than 63 months at his June 4th sentencing hearing.

Abu-Jamal: Victim or Perpetrator?

March 15, 2007

By Regina Rivers, The New Paltz Oracle

The Fahari-Libertad hosted an open forum which focused on the death penalty,
racism and Mumia Abu-Jamal on Wednesday, March 7 in the Lecture Center. The
event was also co-sponsored by Mu Sigma Upsilon, Black Student Union, Rap
Poetry Music, Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, Democracy Matters, and
Poetry Association.

The audience was very emotional as they heard the story of Jamal, an
international journalist and Black Panther and his arrest for the murder of
Philadelphia cop Daniel Faulkner.

The guest speakers were Pam Africa and Suzanne Ross, who are activists
against racism, injustice, police brutality and are some of the many
supporters of Jamal.

According to the guest speakers, there is much evidence leading to Jamal's
innocence, but he hasn't been released yet.

Additionally, Jamal still has not received the trial that he wants. He was
denied the right to represent himself in court and he was convicted guilty
even though he has tried proving his innocence over and over again, and he
continues to try and prove his innocence to this day, according to Africa
and Ross.

Africa and Ross elaborated on the case as well as the Civil Rights Movement,
the Black Panther Party of Philadelphia and how the power of young people
can really make a difference.

Africa and Ross claim that the FBI has been keeping a track of Jamal since
he was 15-years-old, when he first joined the Black Panthers.

Jamal was well known for exposing police brutality and the injustice among
minorities by authority figures.

"I think that it's very sobering and beautiful to be presented with reality
in such an honest, raw way," said sophomore photography major Alyssa Levy
after learning about Jamal's case, .

Levy also stated that more unnoticed situations similar to Jamal's would
come to light in order to educate others. She said that what happened to
Mumia Abu-Jamal could have happened to any random person.

"A lot of people feel that 'if it doesn't happen to me, then it's not my
problem.' It's pushed out of their minds until it happens and some pretend
that it doesn't happen," said secondary education graduate student Elani
Huie. "America is more racist and manipulative than I thought. Just because
it's 2007 doesn't mean that it's over, it's more prevalent."

Gale McGovern, a New Paltz-native who has been an activist for the Free
Mumia movement for 13 years, was impressed by the fact that many people who
came to learn of Mumia also ended up supporting him as well.

"We don't have enough people active against the 'powers that be.'
Intergenerational events such as this help to spread awareness," McGovern
said.

Despite what people may say, think or assume, situations like that of Mumia
Abu-Jamal demonstrate that the issues of racism and injustice are still
prevalent today. For more information on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, visit
www.freemumia.com.
---
Source : The New Paltz Oracle (University of New York)

Statement of Jonny Ablewhite

 Jonny Ablewhite, along with John Smith and Kerry Whitburn, had their
appeal today against the draconian sentence of 12 years for activities
related to Newchurch guinea pig farm. They received no reduction in
sentence. The prosecution were even told they didn't need to present
their case. This is indicative of the corruption of the judicial system
and the state's repression of animal rights activists!

PRESS RELEASE

Once again my pleas for equanimity, objectivity and a reasoned approach
to the provable facts of this case have been ignored. My requests to the
Court of Appeal for an adjournment to give my newly appointed solicitor
the opportunity to comprehensively review the case were ignored. This, I
believe, was a purposeful and injudicious decision. The numerous
invalid, specious and unfounded accusations that Judge Pert QC made in
his sentence summation on May 11th 2006 and my challenges to them have
again been disregarded, without rhyme or reason. I can only surmise this
case has become a political chess game and false accusations are so
abound that all logic has been lost. The pretexts and purposes of the
police, the media and the courts are clearly insidious and
Machiavellian. How I am expected to calmly settle down and complete my
sentence, one can only guess? Until there is a fair and decent
exploration of the evidence in this legal drama - one which has been
played out for the media from the time of my arrest in 2004 until right
now - I will continue to question and challenge the decisions made about me.

The animal advocacy movement is fast joining the ranks of other minority
social movements who are prejudicially mistreated on arbitrary grounds.
We are viewed with institutional disdain for our ethics, while other
minority peoples are marginalised for their race, gender, or
nationality. And, with them, we shall not be trampled so efficaciously.
 From prison, I shall continue my fight for probity and justice. Thank you

Thomas Tripp article

This is a statement by Thomas Tripp (1978-2007) that he wrote for the Break The Chains Conference that happened in Eugene, Oregon, in the Summer of 2003. Tom wrote several articles that appeared in Break The Chains newsletter, Green Anarchy magazine, on infoshop.org and elsewhere.

Thomas Tripp - Statement of Solidarity with Break The Chains Conference:

Around the world, repression daily increases, not merely repression against anarchists, but against ideas, against the natural world, against freedom in all of its forms. Our comrades - both anarchists and those who don’t yet know themselves to be anarchistic, but only see themselves as lovers of freedom - are gunned down in the streets, beaten down in alleyways and of forest floors, run down by bulldozers while defending children. Evil goats in the state house, even while battling in the streets.

More and more often, however, the prison cell is becoming the most concrete _expression of state repression. The state believes that all forms of dissent can be silenced with a prison wall, that the simplest way to deal with the disillusionment and rage that is sweeping the globe is to criminalize everyone: the poor, blacks, whites, Natives, protestors, peacekeepers, militants: the state seems to believe that if you are not wielding the truncheon you should, at the very least, be receiving the blows.

Day by day the walls go up, the razor wire is strung, the towers are “manned.” Prisons spread like sores across the face of the land, popping up to the tune of deranged economist’s screaming “economic recovery!” One by one the lives of all of us - from comrades in the struggle to those just struggling to get by - are touched, and sometimes shattered, by the current reign of terror embarked upon by the state.

I don’t need to quote the numbers to you - I’m sure most of you know the statistics by heart. Many of you have done time yourselves and know first hand how prison attempts to leech away from you all that is good; how every function of the prison system is designed - not to curtail “crime,” nor to rehabilitate, whatever that means - but only to perpetuate the existence of the prison system itself.

Eugene Debs once said, in effect, that without solidarity, nothing can be accomplished, but that with solidarity, there is nothing that we cannot achieve. In the battle for freedom which we wage against the state, solidarity is our truest, most powerful weapon. Our individual and collective acts of guerrilla warfare (on every level from cultural guerrilla warfare to actual fighting in the streets) are essential and must continue and increase. However, it’s when we assert ourselves en masse, when we wield the weapon of solidarity, that we can really see the state tremble in its jackboots.

The prisoner support movement has been using the weapon of solidarity for many years to chip away at the foundations of the prison-industrial-complex, engaging in the twin joys of community and struggle. The prison authority of nearly every single state quake with fear and hatred at the mention of the anarchist prisoner support movement - and this only serves to show how strong we have become, and how much stronger we become every year! How much we grow.

All of you attending this conference understand the strength of solidarity. You all know that the struggle for freedom in which we are all engaged begins within the hearts of each of us and that the struggle cannot end until the walls of every prison have been reduced to mere dust and rubble; until sunlight falls full on the faces of unchained prisoners. Our struggle will not be finished until every soul in prison walks free. I wish I could be with you all today, working out new tactics and strategizing to achieve our common goal. But, unfortunately, the state still has its talons on me - for the moment. Instead, I thank you all for having the courage to take up the fight, and for having the strength, in solidarity, to see our struggle through to the end.

Thank you.

Thomas Tripp

#12032560, TRCI

82911 Beach Access Rd.

Umatilla, OR 97882

Anti-Terror Squad Raid and Arrest Protestors in Dramatic Swoop

Sydney Indymedia 2007/03/14

Media release concerning arrests in sydney of g20 protestors.

Anti-Terror Squad Raid and Arrest Protestors in Dramatic Swoop

The Victorian Terrorist Investigation Squad in conjunction with Federal, NSW and Victorian police raided at least 6 houses in Sydney this morning and arrested 5 protestors. The protestors have been charged with offences related to the G20 protests in Melbourne last November.

“The involvement of the anti-terror squad in persecuting people for their involvement in protest activity is extremely alarming,” said Anita Thomasson from the Ongoing G20 Arrestees Solidarity Network.

“Direct action is a legitimate protest tactic and expression of dissent that in no way constitutes terrorism. To imply as such is completely absurd. Direct action and civil disobedience both have a proud history of being part of movements for social change, from the suffragettes, to strikes for the 8 hour day, and more recently the gay rights movement in Tasmania.

“The use of anti-terrorist policing tactics and resources against protestors confirms the worst fears of civil liberties groups that anti-terror legislation would be used to threaten the basic civil liberties of ordinary people. Excessive policing has always been the norm in the state’s response to criticism or challenge, however now we are for the first time seeing anti-terror resources and powers designed to combat terrorism being used directly to target and survey protestors in Australia.

“The Ongoing G20 Arrestees Solidarity Network supports protestors directly confronting illegitimate institutions such as the G20, whose policies perpetrate violence in countless communities around the world every day. We are calling for all charges to be dropped.”

Individuals arrested during today’s raids will appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday.

For further comment contact: Anita Thomasson 0411680052

arushandapush.blogsome.com/

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2007/03/1

ETA hunger striker close to death after removing tube

The Independent
By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid
26 February 2007

An Eta prisoner on hunger strike in Madrid for more than three months
faces imminent death after removing the nasal tube through which he
was forcibly fed, and is now "taking no nutrients whatever", Spain's
prison service said.

Inaki de Juana Chaos, who has served 19 years for killing 25 people,
began his hunger strike last November in protest against a further
three years imposed for publishing threats in a newspaper. He was
transferred two weeks later to a secure hospital bed, and is reported
to be gravely ill.

Recent photographs of a skeletal De Juana strapped to his bed have
polarised public opinion and convulsed Spain's political class,
already shaken by the Basque separatists' bombing of Madrid airport
in December.

De Juana's extreme action, taken on Friday in an apparent fit of
anger, presents prison authorities - who are legally bound to keep
him alive - with a dilemma. Until now they have strapped him down for
only 12-hour sessions while administering the feeding tube.

They may now have to bind him round-the-clock to stop him ripping out
the tube, aggressive treatment of a weakened man that could threaten
his life. De Juana could soon qualify for parole but says he will
continue his hunger strike until he is freed. Tens of thousands
protested in Madrid on Saturday to demand he serve his full term.

Arrestee Solidarity actions are once again attacked by the police

Athens Indymedia

GREECE: Ongoing repression against students, but the struggle continues!

13 Μάρτη 2007

Monday 12th of March: The trial of the 49 arrestees facing minor charges has been postponed until next Wednesday, 21st of March in order for them to receive all legal documents and prepare their defence with their lawyers.

From the remaining nine arrestees, eight have been released on strict bail conditions (reporting to a police department three times a month and a 5,000 euros deposit!) while another one, V.S., a builder, has been detained.

Parents clashed with the police outside court building 7, were those with the minor charges are facing trial. The conflict broke out when some parents tried to enter the building and were pushed back by the cops. The conflict quickly spread and the cops began their assault. They pepper-sprayed some parents on the face; one parent fainted and another one was taken to hospital.

Photos posted on Indymedia show a cop hitting, by holding his baton the way round, which is strictly prohibited. [read more, see photos]. Most mainstream media outlets across the country reposted this photo without giving indymedia any credit.

Elsewhere on Monday 12.03:

• A huge concert took place in Syntagma, Athens' central square, with a lot of artists participating. Meantime, several highways were blocked across the city.
• Solidarity actions took place in other cities, including Xanthi, Nafplio and Thessaloniki.
• Solidarity announcement by Academics of Thessaloniki University
• petition run by parents

[ report from the court | Solidarity announcement by Academics of Thessaloniki University | petition run by parents ]

Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House

Herman Wallace’s dream house as drawn by Jackie Sumell.
NY Times
March 11, 2007
By CHRIS COLIN

MINOR improvements still occur to him, but Herman Wallace has more or less finished his dream house. It’s got a yellow kitchen, a hobby shop and custom-made pecan cabinets. It should be noted that no actual house exists, but this is understandable. Mr. Wallace has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola for the last 34 years.

Mr. Wallace’s virtual home is the subject of a new book, “The House That Herman Built,” and an art installation with three-dimensional models of the house is on tour in Europe. The project ? which walks a thin line between art and activism ? is a result of a question posed to Mr. Wallace five years ago: What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-by-9-foot cell for three decades dream of?

The woman who asked the question, and later produced the book and the installation, is Jackie Sumell, a 32-year-old white artist who at the time lived in San Francisco. Her work, often political, has been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. Mr. Wallace, a 65-year-old Black Panther originally imprisoned for robbery, was convicted in 1972 of murdering a prison guard. In November a state court commissioner recommended that his conviction be overturned, and a decision is pending on whether to adopt that recommendation.

In the four years it took to design the house, Ms. Sumell and Mr. Wallace developed a close rapport. Their intimacy can be glimpsed in the more than 300 letters they exchanged, many of which are included in the book. Their correspondence was initiated by Ms. Sumell after she attended a talk by an exonerated prisoner, a fellow Black Panther who had been put in solitary around the same time as Mr. Wallace. (They and a third inmate, also in solitary for decades, became known as the Angola Three.)

Nearly a year after her postal friendship with Prisoner No. 76759 began, Ms. Sumell entered the M.F.A. program at Stanford University and, in a class devoted to investigating spatial relationships and architecture, she was assigned to interview a faculty member about his home.

But she had a more interesting candidate.

Her next letter to Mr. Wallace described the assignment and asked him: What kind of house do you dream about after all these years in a cell?

Mr. Wallace’s cell is part of the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison in Angola, La. It was once a complex of plantations, named for the African country from which most of the slaves there were transported. The inmates still pick cotton and other crops in the fields.

“The house is going to need a swimming pool, with a light-green bottom and a large panther painted in the center,” Mr. Wallace wrote to Ms. Sumell.

Yet for the most part the house invented by a man in solitary confinement reflects the thoroughly ordinary existence that he lost in prison. Mr. Wallace, who grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, focused on amenities he longed for and old-fashioned building details he can remember.

The imagined house is the antithesis of Mr. Wallace’s current quarters: a suburban home of about 3,500 square feet surrounded by flowers; he specified roses, gloxinia and delphiniums. There is also a guest house, reserved for visiting activists. A second-floor master bedroom looks out over a marble patio, landscaped garden and massive oak tree.

Steel and concrete ? prison materials ? have no role here ere. Birch and pecan are everywhere, their special qualities carefully explained in Mr. Wallace’s letters.

Ms. Sumell said that Mr. Wallace, his view so abbreviated for so long, focused well on minute details ? the potatoes and Tabasco sauce in the pantry, the notebooks laid out on the conference table ? but had a harder time imagining open spaces.

Traces of a prison mindset crop up. When the placement of his computer meant his back would face the office door, Ms. Sumell said that he asked that a mirror be installed above, so he could see anyone entering the room. A sense of security is important to him, she explained. The master bedroom sits safely above the very center of the house. A wraparound porch adds a layer of perimeter, as does the surrounding garden. There is even a special door leading to an underground bunker, equipped with its own water supply. The goal, Ms. Sumell said, was never to feel trapped.

The time capsule of prison can be glimpsed in his preference for a 1970s aesthetic: shag carpeting flows through the three bedrooms, one decorated entirely in white. The master bedroom’s furniture is mahogany. The purple barstools were rejected: Ms. Sumell complained that she didn’t know how to draw them. In one concession to changing times, Mr. Wallace asked that the bearskin rug be made of fake fur.

As the details accumulated, Ms. Sumell added, the house became something Mr. Wallace could fully visualize and, consequently, served as a kind of escape. (Such powers of visualization are not uncommon for him after years of solitude: Ms. Sumell described a chess tournament he helped organize in which games were played by inmates calling out their moves, cell to cell.)

Though Ms. Sumell estimates that she made at least 20 trips to visit him at the prison over the four years they worked on designing the house, many of the descriptions and measurements were exchanged by mail and were subject to the prison’s censors. Once officials confiscated an elaborate floor plan Mr. Wallace had drawn; Ms. Sumell was told that it could have enabled another criminal to rob the (virtual) home.

The house would probably win no design awards. Except for the panther peering up from the pool bottom, Mr. Wallace’s ideal is resolutely plain by contemporary architectural standards. (In a telephone conversation from prison Mr. Wallace recalled photographs of some more experimental houses sent to him by Ms. Sumell: “They had houses in trees,” he said disapprovingly.)

What’s arresting about the design is the singular approach to architectural planning that brought it into being ? Ms. Sumell calls herself the “tube Herman’s ideas go through” ? and the emotional candor that infused the process. The letters in the book reveal excitement but also pain. In them Mr. Wallace refers to Ms. Sumell as a daughter, and at other times as a sister.

“We’re family,” she said matter of factly. “He’s my best friend.”

He gave advice on relationships and even fashion critiques. (After seeing her new mohawk, Ms. Sumell recalled, he said, “It’s not that bad.”) She discovered someone animated and thoughtful, a man who creates elaborate paper flowers in his cell.

There were surprises too. As the project neared completion, Ms. Sumell learned that her mother was dying. With the first exhibition of the house models coming up ? a chance to attract attention to Mr. Wallace’s legal case ? he insisted she cancel it.

“You just focus on your mom,” she said he instructed.

Is a project like this art? Or is it activism? And how significant are those questions in the context of a man spending three decades in a concrete box? Ms. Sumell says that she believes her only option is to push ahead, merging art with activism wherever possible. Her next goal is to build the actual house, right outside the prison if possible.

Mr. Wallace now has a copy of the book. (Merz and Solitude of Stuttgart, Germany, printed 800 copies, which are being sold for $20 each at the Angola3.org Web site.) Though he found it a little strange to have “people peeping inside my head,” he said, his voice sounded proud, if tentatively so.

“It expresses something different from the public perception of us prisoners,” he said. “We have dreams too.”

Mr. Wallace’s most pressing dream is another courtroom, and a chance at freedom. In the months to come the state will rule on the court commissioner’s recommendation that Wallace be released. Meanwhile, he said, he continues to think about his house.

THE CRIMINALIZATION OF SOCIAL PROTEST IS FILLING MEXICO'S VOLATILE

THE CRIMINALIZATION OF SOCIAL PROTEST IS FILLING MEXICO'S VOLATILE LOCK-UPS WITH POLITCAL PRISONERS

MEXICO CITY (March 5th) - This past Christmas, family members of 26
political prisoners taken during brutal repression of militant farmers
in San Salvador Atenco just outside Mexico City last spring, came up
with an ingenious strategy to visit their loved ones in the Santiaguito
prison where they have been held practically incommunicado for months.
Taken advantage of a Mexico state prison custom that allows outsiders in
to entertain the inmates during the holiday season by performing
"pastorelas" or Christmas passion plays, the relatives of the prisoners
presented themselves at the prison gates dressed as shepherds and wise
men, the Virgin Mary, and the Devil himself - a typical pastorela story
line involves the Devil trying to divert the Three Wise Men from
bringing gifts to the Baby Jesus.

But the authorities at Santiaguito were ready for the relatives of the
prisoners. The shepherds and the wise men and the devils were
strip-searched. Wooden machetes, a symbol of the farmers' struggle,
which were to be used as props in an updated version of the pastorela,
were confiscated. The Virgin Mary was forced to do "sentadillas",
squats so that jailhouse matrons could examine her body cavities for
smuggled subversive materials.

At length the troupe was passed in and allowed to perform their
pastorela for the inmates of Santiaguito, ending the show with a rousing
chant of "Presos Politicos Libertad!" (Liberty for Political
Prisoners!), a cry that is being heard all over Mexico these days.

The criminalization of social protest is filling the nation's jails and
prisons with political prisoners. 214 protestors were arrested in the
crackdown at Atenco last May 3rd and 4th - all but 26 have been allowed
to bail out but still face charges that could lock them up for years.
Two young men were killed during the police actions, which involved
thousands of state and federal police and appeared to be in retaliation
for the farmers' successful battle to fend off expropriation of their
lands for the construction of a new multi-billion dollar international
airport in 2002.

Another 140 citizens were beaten, gassed, and arrested in Oaxaca on
November 25th by the Federal Preventative Police to break up the seven
month-long occupation of the city's old colonial center by the Oaxaca
Popular Peoples' Assembly (APPO) and striking teachers who have been
demanding the removal of a tyrannical governor. 19 activists have been
executed by Governor Ulises Ruiz's death squads and 60 remain
disappeared - human rights workers suspect that some are being held in
secret state, federal, and military lock-ups.

Many of the prisoners taken November 25th just five days before the
chaotic inauguration of Felipe Calderon whose election last July 2nd is
questioned by many Mexicans, were hardly political. One mother was
trapped outside a downtown pharmacy after she had bought medicine for a
sick child, beaten, cuffed, and flown a thousand miles north to a
Nayarit state prison - then Secretary of Public Security and now
Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora decreed that prisoners deemed to
have "a dangerous profile" should be held out of state. A similar fate
awaited a Oaxaca architect who had gone downtown to Xerox blueprints. A
dozen juveniles were seized and jailed in adult prisons.

As at Atenco where police are accused of sexually abusing 23 women who
were being transported to Santiaguito (seven claim they were raped),
federal police sexually abused and taunted men and women captured
November 25th - in testimony to the International Civil Observation
Commission on Human Rights, a European NGO that spent a month
investigating abuses in Oaxaca and interviewed over 400 witnesses to the
repression, the mother of one young protestor testified that her son was
sodomized by the cops. The Calderon government has refused to accept
the findings of the Commission, which it insists has no bonafides.

Of the more than 200 prisoners taken in Oaxaca since May, 62 remain
imprisoned. Dozens of activists and teachers were already locked up in
Oaxaca jails prior to the mass arrests.

Among the most prominent political prisoners seized in the right-wing
Calderon government's rush to make social protest into a crime, is
Ignacio Del Valle, the leader of the Popular Front to Defend the Land
(FPDT) which spearheaded the "macheteros" movement of Atenco. Although
he was arrested on the first day of the May confrontations, "Nacho" Del
Valle is charged with an April "kidnapping" - during a meeting with
state school officials who had threatened to walk out, Del Valle locked
the door. The charge mandates imprisonment at a maximum-security prison
and the Machetero leader is now housed at El Altiplano (formerly La
Palma and Almaloya) where many of the nation's toughest narco lords and
organized crime figures are locked down.

Also jailed at El Altiplano is Flavio Sosa whom Calderon fingered for
being the ringleader of the APPO protests, and who is charged with
sedition, riot, and a variety of crimes allegedly committed during
demonstrations at which Sosa was not even present. Sosa, who is being
held with two brothers whose only apparent crime is to be named Sosa, is
a former Oaxaca leader of the right-wing president's leftist nemesis,
the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) whose candidate Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador probably beat Calderon in last July 2nd's
fraud-smeared elections. Sosa who was captured leaving a negotiating
session with the new government in early December is considered
Calderon's first political prisoner.

The number of political prisoners being held in federal penitentiaries,
CERESOS (social rehabilitation centers), state prisons, municipal jails,
and secret lock-ups is unknown but clearly numbers in the hundreds. At
least 90 of those taken at San Salvador Atenco and in Oaxaca remain
behind bars. Another 100 have either disappeared in Oaxaca or were
already imprisoned prior to the November 25th crackdown.

Dozens of other political prisoners have languished in jail for years.
At least 35 accused members of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR),
which rose in Guerrero and Oaxaca in 1996 including 16 Zapotec Indians
who have been penned up at Oaxaca's Santa Maria Ixcotel prison for ten
years, remain incarcerated. Gloria Arenas ("Colonel Aurora") and Jacobo
Silva, accused of being leaders of an EPR split-off, the ERPI, are in
the early years of 40-year sentences.

The Cerezo brothers, National University students accused of bombing
banks in 2001 and the first political prisoners to be sentenced for
terrorism following the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington remain
lodged in maximum security prisons - the brothers who are sons of two
fugitive EPR leaders were accused of organizing a hunger strike during
prolonged protests by narcos at El Altiplano two years ago.

Since 2000, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has won the
release of almost a hundred of their prisoners from Chiapas prisons
although two remain locked down in neighboring Tabasco. Nonetheless,
Zapatista bases inside the Chiapas prison system continue to grow. "The
Voice of Amate" groups together dozens of indigenous prisoners at the
state's largest prison who "adhere" to the Sixth Declaration of the
Lacandon Jungle and who the EZLN designates as political prisoners.
During his journeys around Mexico in 2006 under the rubric of "The Other
Campaign", Subcomandante Marcos visited with political prisoners at a
number of Mexican lock-ups.

Despite the incarceration of hundreds of political prisoners, Interior
Secretary Francisco Ramirez Acuna denies that this distant neighbor
nation holds any political prisoners at all. During his stint as
governor of Jalisco state, the Interior Secretary, who has
responsibility over both the nation's internal politics and its prison
system, jailed 42 protestors taken at an anti-globalization
demonstration in Guadalajara in May 2004, some for as long as two
years. Many were tortured so severely by Ramirez Acuna's police that
international human rights organizations, including Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch, sought to intervene. As Jalisco
governor, the Interior Secretary rejected hundreds of recommendations by
the National Human Rights Commission (over 700 complaints of human
rights violations were filed with the CNDH during Ramirez Acuna's reign
as governor (2000-2006.)

If his Interior Secretary's disingenuous claims that the regime holds no
political prisoners were to be believed, Felipe Calderon would be the
first Mexican president not to have locked up the opposition. Mexico
has a long and torturous history of jailing political dissidents. Back
in 1910, the dictator Porfirio Diaz clapped the liberal candidate for
his job in jail to keep him off the ballot (Calderon's PAN sought to
revive this ploy against the leftist Lopez Obrador in 2006.) But in
classic political prisoner style, Francisco Madero declared the Mexican
Revolution from behind bars in a San Luis Potosi prison.

Railroad union leaders Demetrio Vallejo and Valentin Campa served ten
years for calling a wildcat strike which tied up Mexican railroad lines
for several weeks in 1959 - their imprisonment became a cause celebre
throughout Latin America. The revolutionary painter David Alfaro
Siquieros was jailed for "social dissolution" - i.e. supporting the
railroad workers.

Hundreds of rebellious students were thrown into rat-infested cells at
the Lecumberri "Black Palace" during the 1968 strike at the National
Autonomous University (UNAM) and the National Polytechnic Institute
(IPN) - hundreds more were gunned down by the police and the military
under orders from a paranoiac, anti-communist president.

In Lecumberri, the students organized hunger strikes and work stoppages
and some even sewed up their lips to protest how the government had
silenced their movement. Among the jailed leaders of '68 was the late
Heberto Castillo who later became the moral leader of the Mexican Left.
Being a prisoner of '68 continues to be a much-coveted status symbol on
the left here.

During the "dirty war" of the 1970s, 600 farmers along the Costa Grande
of Guerrero state suspected of supporting the guerrillero Lucio
Cabanas's Party of the Poor were disappeared by federal and state
security agencies. Many were held in clandestine prisons and on military
bases, tortured, and executed. Air force planes dumped their bodies into
the Pacific Ocean in plain sight of the luxury port of Acapulco.

Today's political prisoners enter a seething social milieu. The Mexican
prison system is running at 30% over capacity, according to a 2006 CNDH
census and space is at such a premium that it is "rented" out to new
inmates. State and federal prisons are jammed with the young and the
poor, often indigenous and many convicted of low-level "crimes against
health" (drug dealing.) Poor prisoners are forced to serve the "capos"
that run drug, prostitution, and alcohol rackets with the collusion of
corrupt custodial staffs. Brutal turf fights between gangs result in a
death a day.

Mexican prisons, like prisons everywhere, are filled to bursting with
prisoners of color and class. They are instruments of class oppression
- a designation which greatly expands the definition of who exactly is a
political prisoner.

Latin American prisons have turned into horrific killing floors in
recent years and 2007 got off on a bad foot. During the first week in
January, 21 lives were lost in a Salvadoran prison riot and 22 more
prisoners were killed in Venezuela. Venezuela counted 314 prison
murders last year through July 2006. Triggered by the transfer of prison
gang leaders from a corruption-ridden Sao Paolo penitentiary last May,
riots inside and out of the jail resulted in 133 deaths, including 41
police officers. Another 130 were killed in a Dominican Republic prison
uprising in January 2006. Central America - particularly Honduras and El
Salvador where many members of "maras" or youth gangs are locked down,
have been the stage for riots that have cost hundreds of lives.

In 2006, Mexico resolved prison uprisings in Chetamal and Sinaloa with
minimal bloodshed but the bad gas of class oppression is redolent inside
the nation's lock-ups. Indeed, piling up political prisoners in such a
volatile dynamic is kind of like lighting a match in a fume-filled room.
"Mexico's prisons are overdue to explode" the 2006 CNDH report predicted.


*****************************

John Ross is on the road at Cape Fear North Carolina with his latest
opus "Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible - Chronicles of
Resistance 2000-2006" and will be touring the south (North Carolina,
Berea Kentucky, Atlanta Georgia, New Orleans) and the Midwest
(Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Cincinnati) in March before hitting the
east coast in April. These dispatches will continue at ten-day intervals
until Ross returns to Mexico.

The ABCF Update, Issue 47, Spring 2007 is now out!

The Update is a quarterly publication produced by the
Anarchist Black Cross Federation. It is one of the few
publications designed specifically about political
prisoners and prisoners of war in North America.

The present issue focuses on the recent arrests of the
San Francisco Eight and the continued harassment of
the accused- living and deceased.

Addition articles:

• Tsutomu Shirosaki Transfer
• Judge Reopens Omaha Two Case
• Food Not Bombs Targeted by Nazis
• Bashir Hameed Cell is Raided
• Update of Daniel McGowan Case
• Joe-Joe Bowen Needs Financial Assistance
• New Court Decision on Jeff Luers
• Jaan Laaman statement
• Report from LA ABCF
• Jalil Faces Harassment
• Letter from Hanif Bey
• Red Army Faction Released
• Eta Political Prisoner Ends Hunger Strike
• Chip Fitzgerald Update

You can download a copy from the ABCF site at:
www.abcf.net/abcf.asp?page=pdfs .
All hardcopy subscriptions can be order by contacting
LA-ABCF at: la@abcf.net

A great event...

I want to tell you about a great event we organized for the international women's day...

We organized a lecture about the situation of Palestinian political women prisoners (there are as 120 such prisoners, out of almost 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners and POW's...

We organized it together with a youth association called Baladna, the room was full of young people - there wasn't place for all the people that attended the event...

There were 5 speakers -

2 former political prisoners (both released at January this year) - Areej Shahbari from Nazareth that spent 5 years in prison and Tali Fahima from Kiriat Gat that spend 2 and half years in prison.

A lawyer Taghreed Jahshan that is working in the organization WOFPP

and parrents of 2 women still incarcarated - Taghreed Sa'adi from Sakhneen (sentenced to 6 years and allready in prison for 5 years) and Su'ad Abu Hamad (sentenced to 5 years and should be released in some months).

A mother of a young man that was arrested before 5 and half years, when he was 15 years old, for "trying to build an destructive device" and was sentenced to 10 years, asked to speak too, and she told some mooving detailes about the hardship they are facing, especially since the authorities outlawed the main prisoner-support association that was active inside the 1948 occupied territories of Palestine at September last year.

In the photos:

1) Some of the speakers in the event

2) Women in struggle: 3 former political prisoners, the lawyer and 2 mothers of prisoners (the women with the scarves)

---

---

Nigerian police routinely torture detainees: U.N

By Estelle Shirbon Fri Mar 9, 2007

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian police routinely torture suspects, shooting them in the legs, beating them and hanging them from the ceiling for long periods, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture said on Friday.

Manfred Nowak said he had also seen cases of medical neglect of injuries caused by torture that were worse than any he had come across in other countries.

"As far as the police is concerned, I have come to the conclusion that torture is systemic," Nowak told a news conference at the end of a one-week visit to Nigeria.

"It is a routine practice. Detainees are beaten up. They are suspended from the ceiling for prolonged periods and beaten in that position as a way for the police to extract confessions or other information," he said.

At a criminal investigation department center he visited in Lagos, Nowak found a room that police openly referred to as the "torture room."

The filthy room was packed with 125 suspects, many of whom had been tortured. The detainees were not being given enough food or water. The youngest person there was 12 years old.

Some detainees had been shot in the lower legs and their wounds were badly infected. They had seen no doctor.

"There were several detainees there who had very serious infections and were in imminent danger of dying because they were being denied medical assistance," Nowak said.

IMPUNITY

The main reason for this state of affairs is total impunity, he said. Not one police officer has been convicted of torture and it is impossible for victims to seek redress.

Poor policing and a dysfunctional judiciary are among the legacies of decades of corruption in Africa's most populous country, which was ruled by the army for most of its history since independence in 1960.

Nowak said the government had started some reforms in the administration of justice since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 but there were few tangible results.

He said the system discriminated against the poor because those who could afford it could pay lawyers and meet bail conditions, while those who couldn't were left at the mercy of police who would detain them for months in appalling conditions.

Nowak also visited prisons, where he found there was little evidence of torture but overcrowding as detainees await trial.

Nigeria says more than 25,000 inmates, or 65 percent of its total prison population, have never been convicted of a crime but remain jailed because of delays in the justice system, missing police files, absent witnesses and prison mismanagement.

It is common for prisoners to wait five to 10 years for their trials. Thousands have spent longer in jail than they would have served if convicted.

British Animal Rights Prisoners News

ELP Information Bulletin (8th of March 2007)

Dear friends

ELP has just learnt that Teresa Portwine and Suzanne Taylor (who have
both been given jail terms for their role in a series of noisy
demonstrations against companies with links to HLS) have been moved. 
There new addresses are:

Teresa Portwine TM7153
HMP Cookham Wood
Rochester
Kent
ME1 3LU
England

Suzanne Taylor TM7154
HMP Cookham Wood
Rochester
Kent
ME1 3LU
England

Also, staying with British AR prisoner news, ELP is delighted to
announce that our old friend Garfield Gabbard has been released from
prison.  He was released yesterday.

New Sentencing Dates for Oregon Eco-Sabotage Defendants

During a federal court hearing on March 2, 2007, the following sentencing dates were finalized for the eco-sabotage defendants from the District of Oregon “Operation Backfire” cases:

Tuesday, May 15, 10AM:

Oral arguments on application of the Sentencing Guidelines “terrorism” enhancement for all defendants (Could add up to 20 years to sentences).

[Dates for Cooperating Defendants:]

Tuesday, May 22, 9AM: Stanislas Meyerhoff

Thursday, May 24, 9AM: Kevin Tubbs

Friday, May 25, 9AM: Chelsea Gerlach

Tuesday, May 29, 9AM: Darren Thurston

Thursday, May 31: Suzanne Savoie (9AM) & Kendall Tankersley (1:30PM)

[Dates for Non-Informants]

Friday, June 1, 9AM: Nathan Block & Joyanna Zacher

Monday, June 4, 9AM: Daniel McGowan

Tuesday, June 5, 9AM: Jonathan Paul

All hearings will take place in the Wayne L. Morse Federal Courthouse in Eugene (211 E. 7th Avenue), Judge Ann Aiken’s courtroom. You’ll need ID to get in. If the courtroom fills up, the hearings will be shared via a video feed to another room.

Please support the non-informant defendants before, during and after these sentencing dates!

For background information on the cases, commentary and updates, see:

http://cldc.org (A more thorough update will soon be available here)

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/greenscare/ &

http://greenscare.org/

Invitation to Join Prisonersolidarity

Did you know that if you throw in parolees and probationers the
combined number of people under some form of correctional supervision
in the United States rises to nearly 6 million, or an estimated one
out of every 38 adults? Founded in Youngstown, Ohio (home to Ohio's
death row as well as one of the highest prison concentrations of any
urban center), this moderated listserv aims to establish a regional and
international network of people who are concerned with prisoners'
rights and prison alternatives. A related portal,
www.Prisonersolidarity.org, offers current news as well as original
essays written by prisoners, activists and concerned citizens.

To subscribe send a blank message to:
prisonersolidarity-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, or visit our yahoogroups
website: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/prisonersolidarity/

Civil Liberties Defense Center's Fusion Fundraiser

This Saturday will be the 2nd annual Fusion Fundraiser. Please
spread the word and bring your whole family, organization,
neighborhood, etc.!! Thank you for supporting the Civil Liberties
Defense Center, we wouldn't be here without you!

Saturday, March 10, 7 pm - 10:30 pm
The DIVA, 110 W. Broadway in Eugene

$10 at the door for hors d'oeuvres, drinks and music plus one $2
raffle ticket

Kids under 12 are free


Fusion Fundraiser Rules

A Fusion Fundraiser is a fun cross between a silent
auction and a raffle. Two rooms contain numerous
generously donated items, each item having its own
raffle jar. Participants place their raffle tickets in
the jars in front of the items they hope to win. There
is no limit to the number of raffle tickets a
participant can purchase or put in any individual jar.
Fusion Fundraiser raffle tickets are $2 each and may
be purchased from room attendants or at the door.

We will also have a grand prizes room. The tickets for
these items will be $5. Grand prizes include an evening at
Brietenbush, a raft trip on the McKenzie, a
suzie/sammi homemaker kit, and many other great prizes.

Update on March 2nd Oregon "Green Scare" court hearing

We just wanted to give you an update on the March 2nd court hearing held in Eugene last week.

The dates for the terrorism enhancment hearing as well as all sentencing dates were set by Judge Aiken. The hearing to determine whether the defendants in the case get the terrorism enhancement will take place on May 15, 2007 in Eugene Federal Court. Daniel's sentencing is June 4th at 9AM. Daniel's non-cooperating defendants' sentencing dates are as follows:
Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block: June 1st
Jonathan Paul: June 5th

There were some other matters discussed in court on March 2nd related to the restriction of people attending the court hearings for some defendants and
the sealing of sentencing briefs. We are in support of all sentencing hearings being completely open to the public as they should be. We are also in support of unsealed sentencing briefs filed with the court as well.

The past two months have been a whirlwind on our end. Daniel's property bond was reduced to $800,000 and the court removed the residency requirement that
had Daniel living with his sister's family since February 2006. Daniel and his partner moved to a separate residence and shortly after, found out that
he was accepted into a Master's program that will allow him to earn a graduate degree while he is imprisoned. Our fundraising efforts are shifting to making that happen and we will soon be announcing a matching donation campaign to pay for Daniel's tuition.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone who wrote a letter to the Judge for Daniel's sentencing. The response was overwhelming and an amazing display of solidarity. Last Friday was the deadline and we received nearly 250 letters in Daniel's defense. It is a testament to the level of support for Daniel and against these prosecutions.

Thanks for all you do.
Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan

Three new British Animal Rights Prisoners

Urgent ELP! Bulletin (6th March 2007)

Dear friends

Today three British animal rights activists were jailed for their
part in a non-violent campaign against Huntindon Life Sciences.
According to the BBC news, the three were accused of being key
figures in a campaign against companies with links to HLS.  They were
accused of entering the offices of companies with links to HLS and
demanding that those companies cut their links.  They were also
accused of organising loud demonstrations against the companies.
Plus they were accused of taking photos of the people who worked for
the companies.

Please send urgent letters of support to:

Mark Taylor (New Prisoner)
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
Thamesmead
London
SE28 0UB
England
(Sentenced to four years)

Suzanne Taylor (New Prisoner)
HMP Holloway
Parkhurst Road
Holloway
London N7 0NU
England
(Sentenced to two and a half years)

Trish Portwine (New Prisoner)
HMP Holloway
Parkhurst Road
Holloway
London N7 0NU
England
(Sentenced to 15 months)

==========

British Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network
BM Box 2407
London
WC1N 3XX
England
www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

Tsutomu Shirosaki Transferred to Terre Haute

We have just found out that Tsutomu has been
transferred to Terre Haute FCI

His new address is the following

TSUTOMU SHIROSAKI
20924-016
FCI TERRE HAUTE
FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
P.O. BOX 33
TERRE HAUTE, IN  47808

Bashir Hameed Needs Help

PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO http://www.docs.state.ny.us/ ORwww.ny.gov/governor/ protesting the cruel and unusual punishment of Bashir Hameed (James York) #82-A-6313 in 24 hour confinement in total darkness. Bashir is a diabetic and also has had open heart surgery and is not receiving proper medical treament in lockdown...peace Abdul Shanna

February 23, 2007

Herman Ferguson received a call today from one of Bashir's friends at

Great Meadow Correctional Facility. Bashir is still on lockdown since

January 19th, as the hearing regarding the "political contraband" found in

his cell has been postponed several times. Although he is permitted to

have visits, he cannot make any phone calls. Now the prison has turned out

the lights in his cell, so Bashir spends all his time in the dark.

This outrageous sensory deprivation can only worsen Bashir's health. He is

still being denied his medical checkups and monthly bloodwork needed

following his open heart surgery. He is also not receiving necessary

medical attention for his diabetes.

The "political contraband" found in his cell includes some pictures from

the 35th Anniversary Reunion of the BPP and some writings by the New Black

Panther Party. Of course, all of this had already gone through the prison

mail system before Bashir received it.

Please continue to call and/or write to demand that Bashir be released

from lockdown. Stress that Bashir needs his monthly checkups and bloodwork

following his open heart surgery.

While the prison apparently does not have the time to provide Bashir with

needed medical care, they obviously DO have the time to harass him.

Great Meadow Correctional Facility

11739 State Route 22, P.O. Box 51

Comstock, New York 12821-0051

(518) 639-5516 (Washington County)

Write to Bashir and let him know he has your support:

Bashir Hameed/York #82-A-6313,

Great Meadow Correctional Facility

Box 51

Comstock, New York 12821

For more information call NYC Jericho at 718-853-0893

Jaramillo opts for $75-per-night jail accommodations

The former assistant O.C. sheriff's yearlong stay at the pay-to-stay, more-amenities Fullerton city lockup for two felonies won't be a picnic -- well, actually, sometimes it can be.

By H.G. Reza
Times Staff Writer

March 2, 2007

It is not the Mayberry jail, where justice is tempered with Southern hospitality, but for George Jaramillo it is the next best thing.

The former Orange County assistant sheriff will rent a cramped cell at Fullerton City Jail to serve his one-year sentence for lying to a grand jury and unauthorized use of a county helicopter, police and district attorney officials said Thursday.

Jaramillo, 46, has until April to begin serving his term at a private or municipal jail of his choice after pleading no contest in January to two felonies. In return for his plea, the Orange County district attorney's office dropped nine other counts and agreed he would not have to serve his term in a county jail. He could have gotten 13 years in state prison if convicted of all charges.

Instead, Jaramillo will pay his debt to society in a spartan cell 3 feet from the drunk tank. The tank has no shortage of noisy occupants on weekends, mostly drunks picked up in the city's trendy downtown area. One of his jail chores will include cleaning the drunk tank.

Pay to stay can be summer camp compared with state prison. A criminal who can afford to pay for his jail stay enjoys privileges that make his punishment more bearable.

For starters, Jaramillo may be able to bring his cellphone and a laptop computer. A screenwriter who paid to do his brief sentence in Fullerton was able to finish his screenplay on his laptop, said jailer Efren Ragay.

Jail officials said Jaramillo will have trusty status, as do all pay-to-stay inmates, and he will be allowed to roam outside the building but not off the unfenced grounds. They are not concerned about him walking away, because that would earn him a transfer to the type of lockup he is trying to avoid. While in custody, he will have to wear an orange smock with the letters "FPD" at all times.

Jaramillo will also be allowed family visits in a patio in front of the police station, where he can enjoy restaurant meals that visitors can bring him. Otherwise it is frozen dinners from the microwave. The cost to be the city's guest is $75 per day. Usually, the entire sum is payable in advance, but because of Jaramillo's longer sentence he will probably be able to pay in installments, said Lt. John Petropulos.

"If you're going to be in jail, it's the best $75 per day you'll ever spend in your life. You don't have to worry about getting beat up by a guy with a shaved head and tattoos," he said.

Cities began opening up their jails for paying clients about a decade ago. About 15 cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties rent jail space to low-risk offenders, including Pasadena, Alhambra, Seal Beach and Huntington Beach. Rates differ from jail to jail. Fullerton's rate seems like a bargain compared with that of Torrance, where inmates pay $171 per day.

There are no reliable figures showing how many men and women have chosen to use pay-to-stay facilities. But generally, only low-risk inmates serving a year or less for nonviolent crimes are accepted.

The program is little known, but its popularity is growing so quickly that you had better make your reservations soon. Huntington Beach Jail administrator Dale Miller said his facility, which can handle eight male and four female paying clients, is booked until June. He said he turns down about half of those who apply.

Celebrities who have paid for their crimes include actor Christian Slater, who served 59 days in La Verne City Jail for battery and drug offenses. Rap music producer Dr. Dre, sentenced to five months for violating probation, served his time in the Pasadena jail.

Critics charge that pay to stay is a glaring example of the unequal distribution of justice in this country.

"It symbolizes the two-tiered system we have in this country for poor defendants and the well-to-do," said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News magazine, which is an advocate for inmates. "The poor are just as deserving but can't afford to participate. This makes a mockery of the notion of equal justice under the law."

Jaramillo's choice of jails still must be approved by the judge. Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, who also has a say-so in where Jaramillo will serve his sentence, has already raised an objection.

"I will not agree to any special privileges for Jaramillo, including the use of a cellphone or personal computer," he said.

Robert Corrado, Jaramillo's attorney, said he and his client considered several jails in Southern California, making Jaramillo's safety the priority.

"It needs to be a decent, clean place where his family can visit," Corrado said.

Bill Naber, a jail consultant and former Sonoma County sheriff's captain, said that even if Jaramillo were ordered to serve his term in a county jail, he would not spend his time in Orange County Jail because inmates might seek revenge against him.

Petropulos said Jaramillo would be required to work in the Fullerton jail. His duties will include heating the frozen meals for other inmates and mopping and cleaning the aging but spotless jail.

Jaramillo, expected to report around the middle of the month, will share with another inmate a cell the size of a walk-in closet.

They will share a corner toilet partly hidden behind a slim canvas wardrobe, affording only a modicum of privacy. Next to the toilet is a sink and two wall lockers like those found in a high school hallway. A card table with two chairs is wedged between two prison beds.

Jaramillo can relax inside his cell and watch television or movies on a VCR. A wall phone below the TV allows him to make collect calls if he is not allowed to bring his cellphone. There is also a small shelf with reading material. The only other recreation available is shooting hoops in the jail's driveway.

The Fullerton jail was built during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration, but the facility has all of the electronic gadgets and surveillance equipment found in modern jails.

"It's like the Mayberry jail with modern technology," said Ragay, who has worked there 20 years.

Eviction protesters fight Danish police

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) -- Dozens were arrested after angry
protesters threw cobblestones at police Thursday when an anti-terror
squad started a disputed eviction of squatters from a downtown
building, police said.

A German citizen was hospitalized after being hit in the head with an
object, according to a hospital spokeswoman. His condition was not
serious.

The highly publicized eviction has drawn ire from the squatters and
other youth, who have viewed the former theater as free public
housing for years.

Dozens of onlookers clashed with hundreds of police officers who took
part in the eviction, which began shortly after 7 a.m. when a
helicopter hoisted down members of Denmark's anti-terror police on
the building's roof.

Officers with anti-riot gear then sealed off the surrounding streets
as police began bringing out squatters.

Police said at least 35 people had been arrested inside the house
while dozens were detained outside for trying to cross police lines.
Police spokesman Per Larsen said foreign citizens were likely among
those arrested, but had no details on nationalities.

"The morning action happened with military precision," Larsen said.
"It went by the book."

It was unclear how many people were inside the house when the eviction began.

Dozens of protesters quickly gathered behind police lines shouting
"stop police brutality." Nearby shops, fearing riots, began boarding
their windows.

Copenhagen University Hospital spokeswoman Lisbeth Westergaard said
the injured German was in his 20s, but did not reveal his identity.

"He is doing fine and he will soon be discharged," she said.

The eviction has been planned since last year, when two courts
ordered the squatters to leave the house and hand it over to a
Christian congregation that bought it six years ago.

The squatters refused to leave, saying the city had no right to sell
the four-story building while it was still in use.

In December, a rally to protest the eviction turned violent. Some of
the around 1,000 protesters threw cobblestones, iron bars and
fireworks at police, who detained some 300 people.

A Terrible Thing to Waste

Convicted as an ecoterrorist, a brilliant young scholar nose-dives in prison

By JUDITH LEWIS

www.laweekly.com Wednesday, February 28, 2007

When Billy Cottrell was first sent up to Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, he thought he had landed the perfect job. A brilliant student of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Cottrell has a high-functioning form of autism that makes it difficult for him to pick up on people’s emotions, but also gives him a grave appreciation for detail. At Lompoc, he thought, he would do secretarial duty in the “boiler-room office,” spending many hours alone, filing, sorting, typing and proofreading. He could be useful.

Before his first day, however, prison officials got nervous. They knew Cottrell was smart; they’d seen his physics textbooks and writings. And wasn’t this the kid who’d been convicted of blowing up Hummers somewhere in Los Angeles? Thinking he might find a way to rig the water heaters to blow up the prison, Cottrell says, they denied him the job.

Next, Cottrell was offered a job mowing Lompoc’s copious lawn. This appealed to Cottrell’s jittery need for physical exertion. Before he was arrested, he could run a marathon in under three hours, even sleep-deprived and hopped up on Rockstar energy drink. Once again, however, the penitentiary’s guardians said no: Cottrell says prison guards worried that he might use the gasoline in the lawn mower to make a bomb.

Finally, Billy Cottrell — who got kicked out of high school a few times yet wrote an essay to the University of Chicago so impressive he was accepted into its competitive math-and-science program, who snagged an appointment at Caltech to study the arcane complexities of string theory, and who many prominent scientists consider a genius — found a job he could keep. He stood up to his knees in filth, sorting through his fellow inmates’ putrid detritus in the prison dumpsters.

It’s a job most prisoners get as a single day’s punishment. Cottrell did it for three and a half months.

Since the day he arrived at Lompoc, 18 months ago, say his lawyers, family and friends, Cottrell has been harassed, threatened and taunted by the prison population and, in some cases, also by the guards and the administration. Because in the rigid world of prison, Cottrell has been labeled a terrorist.

Lompoc guards whispered the word at him as he passed. Visitors heard guards refer to him as their “very own ecoterrorist.” Cottrell later learned he had been used as an example in a training video on how to deal with terrorists in prison, “so now every prison guard in the country recognizes me as a terrorist on sight,” he wrote in a January 10 letter to the L.A. Weekly. He has been denied common privileges such as exercise, visitors and phone calls. Ultimately, he was banished to solitary confinement — the Hole, in prison parlance — like a violent thug.

And all because of one night in the summer of 2003, when Cottrell helped two friends deface and destroy dozens of sport utility vehicles in the name of the environment. Those who know of Cottrell and his tough prison sentence stretching to 2010 — the judge piled on an additional three years, without benefit of a jury rendering — say Cottrell is being mishandled, persecuted and, within the prison walls, compelled to become the very radical his prosecutors argued he was in court.

Meanwhile, he awaits word on two legal fronts: first, whether the California 9th Circuit believes jurors should have heard about his autism, and second, whether the federal courts will mirror the California Supreme Court in declaring judge-rendered sentence enhancements unconstitutional.

Back when he was sentenced in April 2005 to eight and a half years in prison, the judge, an ex-Marine named R. Gary Klausner, didn’t think Cottrell’s intellect or his autism should have justified leniency. But a great many scientists around the world, including Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, have publicly objected to the apparent fact that his intellect and psychological quirks, combined with the “terrorism” label attached to his crime, have provoked prison guards to single him out.

“Billy has been selected for the especially harsh treatment reserved for ‘a terrorist,’ ” reads a letter in Cottrell’s defense signed by Hawking and seven other prominent scientists. “[His] treatment in prison, far from being rehabilitative, is nothing short of nightmarish.”

The letter was distributed to prison authorities and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at Cottrell’s October 18 hearing, held to determine whether the jury should have understood his psychiatric diagnosis — which the judge barred from the trial. But instead of helping him in prison, the letter seemed only to make things worse: Two weeks after the hearing, Cottrell was mysteriously thrown in the Hole.

University of Chicago professor Peter Freund, who drafted the letter his colleagues, including Hawking, later edited and signed, calls Cottrell’s ordeal “a tragedy.” One of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on theoretical physics, Freund supervised Cottrell’s senior thesis on string theory, the work that landed him a coveted spot working with Hiroshi Ooguri in Caltech’s physics department.

“If you told me John Doe was treated this way, someone I didn’t know at all, I’d feel revulsion at this systematic way the prison system is destroying a human being,” Freund says. “It’s horrible and it’s unfair. But with Billy, it’s also a loss to science. It’s too painful to watch without doing everything you can to stop it.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when Billy Cottrell was an eccentric but amiable Ph.D. candidate at Caltech, “a few degrees removed from reality,” according to Freund, but harmless. He had not yet been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, the peculiar form of autism whose sufferers typically excel at advanced math and fail miserably at social skills.

But looking back, the signs were there: You might imagine him similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, only less eccentric, much smarter and, as he would tell you, much better-looking. “He always talked kind of fast, like a robot,” says his mother, Heidi Schwiebert. “I used to call him my little Mr. Spock.”

Cottrell disliked silly, institutional rules: At the University of Chicago, he once refused to complete an assignment and instead turned in a lengthy and detailed essay on why the assignment was dumb. And he displayed bad judgment sometimes, says his friend Jesse Bloom, who has known him since the two were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. “When we had [David] Letterman on campus at Caltech,” Bloom remembers, “Billy ‘streaked’ [naked] across campus because people were daring him to do that.”

But he was not much of an environmentalist, or even all that liberal. In fact, in his 2004 trial, covered by Newsweek and CNN, no evidence ever emerged — and the prosecutors never suggested — that Cottrell was involved in the environmental movement at all. He watched Bill O’Reilly as regularly as he read The Nation. He voted for Schwarzenegger. He did not rebel against society so much as hold accountable the lazy people running it.

“Billy believed that most problems could be traced to lazy people who would rather complain than put in a little hard work, and he thought they should show more determination and stop making excuses,” says Bloom. “But I never saw him be mean or hostile to anyone.”

On the night of August 22, 2003, Cottrell would later testify, he had only intended to tour around Southern California with his friends Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe, plastering SUVs with bumper stickers. Going in, the plan was so innocuous, rising only to the level of a graffiti prank, that even Cottrell’s mom, Heidi, was involved.

An attractive blonde in her 50s, with big blue eyes and a curly bob haircut, Schwiebert is a horsewoman, although that’s where her interest in environmentalism ends. But she was fed up enough with polluting road hogs that she volunteered to print up bumper stickers for the three young people that would say “SUV = TERRORISM.” “I told the printer I didn’t particularly agree with the slogan myself, but I supported their right to free speech,” she recalled. At the printer’s, another “I” slipped in, and the stickers came out condemning “TERRIORISM.”

In the defense account of that night, Tyler Johnson, angry about the misspelling, demanded that Cottrell pay him back the $200 he’d spent on materials. Johnson offered to forgo the $200 if Cottrell would use his own car to chauffeur Johnson and his girlfriend, Michie Oe, around town while they spray-painted the offending gas-guzzlers.

Johnson and Oe, say Cottrell and his lawyers, had run out of gas. Cottrell agreed to take his car instead. On the way, Cottrell stopped at a gas station, and they filled several containers with gasoline.

At a Mercedes lot in Arcadia, Johnson, Cottrell and Oe sprayed seven or eight $30,000-to-$40,000 vehicles with slogans like “Fat, Lazy Americans” and “I [heart] Pollution.” In nearby Monrovia, they sprayed a Toyota Tundra and a Honda Passport with “Polluter” and “Killer.” At one car lot in Duarte, they painted 21 SUVs with the words “SUV’S Suck Hi,” and “Smog Machine.” At another Duarte lot, they hit 26 more. And on several vehicles they scrawled the initials ELF, the acronym for Earth Liberation Front.

As far as anyone knows, no ELF really exists; its Web site, www.earthliberationfront.com, is no more than a front for Viagra and repo ads (and now it’s for sale) (See LA Weekly's "Earth to ELF: Come In, Please," December 22, 2005). But in April of 2003, a few months before the SUV vandalism spree and five months before Cottrell’s arrest, the FBI’s assistant deputy director for counterterrorism, John Lewis, had gone before a Senate committee claiming that ELF and like-minded groups were America’s greatest domestic-terrorist threat. The feds were eagerly prosecuting a number of alleged environmental saboteurs who fit that view.

Because of the acronym spray-painted on the vehicles, says one of Cottrell’s lawyers, Michael Mayock. “They were watching this case at the highest levels in Washington.”

Against this tense national backdrop, Cottrell’s lawyers, Mayock and Marvin Rudnick, had asked the jury to believe that Cottrell was shocked when Johnson, without warning, stuck a rag in one of the just-filled gas containers, lit it and lobbed the homemade Molotov cocktail at a red 2003 Hummer H2 at the Clippinger Hummer dealership in West Covina. Cottrell’s defense relied on his claim that he was not part of that plan, that he insisted Johnson stop, and that he believed that Johnson would not lob another device.

But Johnson pulled out another Molotov cocktail, and then another, and another. He pummeled the Clippinger Hummer lot with so many of the minibombs, in fact, that the fires lit up 14 vehicles. All told, on that August night, after several hours of cruising, defiling and burning, 125 SUVs and other vehicles were damaged and destroyed, racking up $5 million in damage to vehicles that had traveled between states — a technicality that invoked the Interstate Commerce clause and made Cottrell’s a federal case.

The jury didn’t buy Cottrell’s defense, and no wonder. Both Johnson and Oe had disappeared before Cottrell’s arrest, and are still at large. There was no extracting their story about their night of arson. The jury had plenty of evidence to place Cottrell at the crime, including the use of his red Toyota Camry and his image on one dealership’s surveillance video.

Most important of all, Judge Klausner allowed no discussion on how Asperger’s might have affected Billy Cottrell’s judgment.

One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence left behind in Duarte that night was the carefully scrawled equation e^ið + 1 = 0, a magical formula discovered by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the 18th century. It was also the very formula Cottrell and a friend had painted on the University of Chicago’s astronomy-building tower years ago, climbing up to write it in large print near the roof. The presence of the equation on the SUVs made it easier to connect the crime to Cottrell. In effect, Cottrell had left a calling card.

It takes a certain mastery of mathematics to appreciate the beauty of this equation, known as “Euler’s identity,” a simple, elegant line of code that employs five fundamental mathematical constants. If you can’t quite grasp that — most people can’t — you might be able to understand why Cottrell seems an oddball to so many people.

This strange line of symbols was a mark of his identity; a thing he celebrated in spray paint, breaking laws as he did so. It is a symptom consistent with Asperger’s syndrome, of a mind that can focus narrowly and cleanly on abstract hypotheses about the origins of the universe like string theory, but cannot detect ordinary nuances and gestures that signal when behavior might be questionable or when, as Cottrell still claims, a good friend holding a spray can assures him there will be no more violent explosions — and then there are many, many more.

Lead prosecutor Beverly Reid O’Connell, now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, when asked by the Weekly whether she believed at the time of the trial that she was prosecuting Cottrell for an act of terrorism, as the prison system seems to see it, responded, “I’m not going to comment on that.”

Was there an effort, from higher levels in Washington, to prosecute someone for “ecoterrorism” at the time? Reid O’Connell responded, “I can’t comment on that.” Her co-prosecutor, Jason De Bretteville, laughed out loud at the suggestion, denying that the feds were involved. In 2004, neither prosecutor had any trouble portraying Cottrell as Reid O’Connell described him to the jury: “A scheming, arrogant person who is disdainful of the law.”

His friend Jesse Bloom readily concedes, “Billy made a bad impression at his very first hearing. The newspapers were accurate when they described how he shook his head and ‘smirked’ at the judge. But they didn’t know Billy.”

In November of 2004, Billy Cottrell was convicted on one count of conspiracy and seven counts of arson, carrying a minimum sentence of five years. In April 2005, Klausner sentenced Cottrell to five years, plus three and a half years — on the grounds that his acts could be defined as terrorism.

A California Supreme Court ruling on January 22 declared that such “determinate sentencing” violates the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a trial by an impartial jury by “placing sentence-elevating fact-finding within a judge’s province.” But that doesn’t directly help Cottrell, who was convicted in federal court. Even though no evidence emerged during the trial that Cottrell was a “terrorist,” the judge decided he was, and sentenced him accordingly.

Friends watched from the outside as Cottrell struggled to make something of his time in prison. They ordered him physics books and newly published papers from science journals so he could continue his physics studies. Cottrell even persuaded the Lompoc education coordinator to order Chinese-language tapes and textbooks for the library, because he wanted to study Mandarin. On Saturdays, Cottrell organized relay races on the prison track.

The majority of prison inmates read below the ninth-grade level. The prison system encourages them to get GEDs and, on paper at least, encourages earning higher degrees. Cottrell thought he could help. In the fall of 2005, he submitted proposals to prison officials for a calculus class, “complete with four months’ worth of homework, quizzes and tests” that Cottrell had written out from scratch on yellow legal pads in his cell.

He may not have been popular with the guards, but his fellow inmates knew a good thing when they saw one: One hundred hardened criminals signed up to study calculus, according to Cottrell. Cottrell would be Jaime Escalante, teaching tough math to the underprivileged.

But Cottrell was a very rare item in the federal prison system — a real, homegrown environmental “terrorist” in the eyes of prison officials. After all, even though prosecutors did not present a single piece of evidence linking the strange genius Cottrell to any radical movements — either before or after that night in the Los Angeles suburbs — hadn’t a judge convicted him?

First, prison officials claimed they had “lost” his calculus syllabus — twice, Cottrell says. He resubmitted it, patiently handwritten, three more times. Then, Cottrell got the news that no one would be studying math with him in prison at all. As with the mowing job and the boiler-room work, he says the prison administration created special rules for their unusual new prisoner who came with the word “terrorist” attached. They feared, they told him, he would teach other inmates how to make bombs — “something,” Cottrell wrote to the Weekly, “that I know absolutely nothing about.”

In court, Cottrell had come off as obnoxious and weird, which did not endear him to the jury. “Objection!” he’d yell. “Irrelevant!” When prosecutor Beverly Reid O’Connell, then an assistant U.S. attorney, cut him off once, he shouted, “But I know this one! I know this one!” (Interestingly, Reid O’Connell today insists she recalls none of his inappropriate courtroom antics.)

In prison, he was regarded as downright freakish. His mother believes that prison guards took an early dislike to him because he wasn’t able to play their games. “He can’t play the subordinate,” she says. “He’d die first.” Cottrell himself thinks the guards were jealous of his intelligence. Whatever the truth, Cottrell has been hardly more popular with the prison guards than he was with the jury.

Next, Cottrell told friends and family on the outside, the guards assigned him a new cellmate, an especially tough bad actor known around prison for starting fights. In the summer of 2005, that man at first tried to tear apart Cottrell’s books, then tried to poke his eyes out with a broom, according to Cottrell. Cottrell fought him off and, he says, got blamed for the fight.

In his letters to the Weekly, he says one prison official took away his physics papers, telling him that the science he was studying conflicted with the teachings of Jesus. Another forbade his Chinese studies, even after he had learned Mandarin so well that, he says, he served as a translator between guards and a Chinese-speaking prisoner.

But his worst months in prison came late last year. Shortly after the Bureau of Prisons Office of Inspector General released a report suggesting that federal prisons — including Lompoc — were not dealing harshly enough with convicted international terrorists inside the prisons, Cottrell was told he would have to serve as a witness in a bizarre “investigation.”

The probe focused on Lompoc’s Department of Corrections education coordinator, who procured the Chinese-language study materials for Cottrell. Cottrell says that when he refused to testify against the education coordinator, he was thrown into the Hole at Lompoc, and denied visitors and phone calls.

Cottrell says he was not given a clear explanation for his detention. “I haven’t been given any formal sanctions, no lock-up order from the Captain [of the prison guards], no rationale, no date of release, no anything,” wrote Cottrell in a December 18 letter to the Weekly. “They’ve taken every single physics text, Chinese story and piece of literature I’ve accumulated . . . and told me it’s all going to be burned.

“As far as I know,” he concluded, “I’m in the Hole for studying Chinese.”

Prison officials refuse to comment on many of his allegations, but concede that some of what Cottrell claims may have indeed occurred.

Bruce Kates first alerted the Weekly to Cottrell’s situation. A musician and professional piano tuner, Kates also attended Caltech as a math student. (“I didn’t have the goods,” he said, “but I could recognize people who did.”)

Kates is solemn, earnest and scholarly-looking. He is balding, wears glasses and speaks gently, in carefully punctuated syllables. It was clear that he cared deeply about Cottrell. Several times, as his voice rose with emotion, I thought he might weep. “If Billy loses his mind in prison,” he said, “we have lost a great resource in the world of science.”

I met with Kates the first time the day before Thanksgiving last year, along with Cottrell’s mother, who had cobbled together frequent-flier miles to come to Los Angeles in hopes that she could visit her son on Thanksgiving, even though the prison administrators had warned her that she couldn’t.

Schwiebert didn’t have any illusions that her son deserved special sympathy; she didn’t think it was newsworthy that her son was in prison. She just wanted the prison to follow its own rules. “You’re not supposed to be denied privileges unless you’re doing something wrong,” she said. “And they don’t tell us what he’s done wrong.”

She also wanted to get clear information about his well-being and whereabouts. Cottrell had been in the Hole since early November, and communication since then had been almost nonexistent. “At this point,” she said, “we don’t even know whether he’s dead.”

Schwiebert did manage to get through the gates on Thanksgiving Day, when holiday substitutes were on duty. But the next day, with the regular prison staff back in force, she was once again told her son would not be allowed visitors for months.

Cottrell went into the Hole on November 3 and stayed there until early January. It was cold. When Kates visited him, he found the temperature in Cottrell’s cell was at a chilly 68 degrees, and Cottrell was wearing only a T-shirt.

Intermittently, his books were confiscated, returned and taken away again. Once, he says, his physics study papers were snatched up because they were a “fire hazard” — one of the few claims made to the Weekly by Cottrell that Lompoc spokesperson Erwin Meinberg obliquely confirms. “They might take papers away if they’re a fire hazard,” Meinberg says, an echo of Cottrell’s account. Another time, Cottrell wrote in a letter to the Weekly dated January 10, his books were taken because he didn’t have the receipts to prove he owned them.

Again, Meinberg doesn’t dispute that this might have happened. “Sometimes [inmates] have to have proof that something belongs to them,” he says. “[The guards] might take things away if they think that they’re stolen.”

To which Cottrell replied in a letter, “How could I have that proof? I’m in the Hole.”

Meinberg does deny that any prison official swiped Cottrell’s physics texts on religious grounds. “I’ve never heard of something like that happening,” he says.

Both Schwiebert and Kates believed that Cottrell’s situation in prison had grown worse since October 18, when his appeal was heard before the 9th Circuit.

The hearing had gone extremely well, according to Cottrell’s lawyers, who argued before the court that Cottrell’s Asperger’s diagnosis should have been heard during his trial. “There’s a precedent in California,” says Rudnick, “that if you have a ‘gross and identifiable disability,’ it can be used to explain the actions of the defendant. But we weren’t allowed to do that. It was as if [Billy] was blind, and the jury was extra hard on him because he could not answer the question ‘What did you see?’ ”

Psychiatrist Gary Mesibov, retained by the defense, had diagnosed Cottrell with Asperger’s. The psychiatrist working for the prosecution did not dispute it. But while Judge Klausner allowed Cottrell’s lawyers to discuss his condition in their opening statements, Klausner changed his mind soon after. The jury never heard another word about it.

There is some reason to believe the 9th Circuit appeals court might view Cottrell’s Asperger’s and its influence on his behavior as relevant to how he behaved the night of the SUV arsons. In contrast to Judge Klausner, 9th Circuit Judge Harry Pregerson last October seemed to indicate some knowledge about what it means to suffer from Asperger’s. Pregerson asked Mayock and Rudnick how their client was doing in jail. The lawyers remain hopeful that the court will reverse the conviction and send it back for a new trial, or change his sentencing.

“I have not seen such interest by judges in a criminal defendant’s case,” Rudnick says of Pregerson. “We’ve come a long way since the conviction. The judges seemed very, very concerned about his case and his welfare in prison. It looks to me like they wanted to do something.”

But they have not acted yet, and with each day that passes, Rudnick’s optimism seems to flag. “I am puzzled about the failure of the 9th Circuit to follow up on its seemingly supportive position,” he wrote to the Weekly in January. “Since the applicability of Asperger’s is new to the criminal law, and this is a terrorist case, the only thing I can think of is that they may be waiting for another decision from another panel. Or they may be fighting over language in the decision in order to get a 3-0 vote instead of what looked like a 2-1 vote.”

Shortly after the Weekly sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Bureau of Prisons, the slow-talking and personable Meinberg sent over a letter, by e-mail on January 5, stating that Cottrell’s phone and visiting privileges had suddenly been restored, and explaining that Cottrell had been placed in “administrative detention” following a “security breach.” In other words, he had been thrown in the Hole — but for what, neither Meinberg nor the Bureau of Prisons was saying.

When asked by the Weekly to describe the security breach involving Cottrell, Meinberg remarked, “It’s in the realm of the secret squirrels” — conjuring up images of tiny creatures scurrying about the penitentiary halls, making decisions about the prisoners’ future in cackling little confabs. Meinberg insisted the details of the security breach were no secret to Cottrell, however: “Oh, he knows. He knows,” Meinberg intoned.

I requested a visit with Cottrell, but just before the request was reviewed, Cottrell was transferred to Victorville Federal Correctional Institution in the high-desert town of Adelanto, California. Again, I faxed over a request to visit. A few days later, Victorville’s spokesman, Ed Gaunder, told me, “We’re unable to have you conduct an interview because the warden, Joe Norwood, deems that there could be a security issue involved with this inmate. There’s some history there.”

When asked what that history was, Gaunder said he couldn’t talk about it. But his response seemed to suggest that prison officials see Cottrell as a true-blue terrorist, given their literal reading of his conviction. “You pretty much have to just read between the lines of his sentence,” he said.

When I asked him to confirm that he meant the nature of Cottrell’s crimes made him a security risk, even in a prison that holds Aryan Brotherhood murderers and Mexican Mafia hit men, Gaunder backed down, saying, “You’re taking that out of context... I guess I wish you wouldn’t have heard that.” Gaunder finally said, “Basically, the reason this interview won’t be conducted is because the security and safety of this institution is at stake. Therefore you will have to manufacture your story from what the inmate says.

“But I can tell you this,” he added before he hung up. “Prisons are run pretty similar through the federal system. We do not tolerate misconduct from staff members in the federal prison system. So I’m going to say that some of those [Lompoc] incidents did not happen... We don’t mistreat inmates in the federal prison system.”

Cottrell is not unaffected by his unusual treatment. Evidence in his letters implies that he is becoming increasingly radicalized — mimicking in some ways the kind of person the prosecutors tried to paint two years ago, when he was still a theoretical-physics scholar at Caltech.

In a letter to the Weekly in December, he worried that media coverage of his situation in prison might make his story “seem rare and unusual... But although my case is unique in its details, there are many, many good, productive people in prison for no apparent reason. The majority of people are here for victimless crimes and were supporting families at the time of their arrest.”

By the end of December, in a letter to Bruce Kates, he sounded more bitter and focused in his anger: “Many people in prison speak openly about revolution. How many of these people can our government produce through its abusive penal system before we have one on our hands?”

The mind that should have been dialed into exploring the great problems of our scientific age instead wanders idly inside a federal prison, examining the social order in all its perverse detail. While stewing in the Hole, Cottrell began to compare his situation, and the situation of other prisoners like him, to the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

“Focusing too much on the artificial constructs of our government lends credence to the idea that they somehow represent the morality which we really value,” he wrote to the Weekly, in urging the paper not to focus on his imprisonment when, he now argues, much greater issues are at stake. “It’s as if the SS were to execute a Jew for not wearing his armband, and an underground newspaper were to indignantly report that the SS was wrong since the armband was merely too dirty to see.”

When scientist Peter Freund drafted the letter protesting Cottrell’s mistreatment in prison, he initially included language about rehabilitation. “Then I had a lawyer read it, and he said, ‘Oh, you are so naive! Their stated purpose is not to rehabilitate. It is to punish.’”

But in fact, the Bureau of Prisons Web site states that the bureau exists to “reduce the potential for future criminal activity by encouraging inmates to participate in a range of programs that have been proven to reduce recidivism.”

In practice, Freund is right. None of what’s allegedly being done to Cottrell is reducing his potential for criminal activity in the future.

Rehabilitating somebody with Asperger’s syndrome like Billy Cottrell would mean doing something the federal system is not set up to do: plying him with so many physics texts that he wouldn’t have time to socialize, and allowing him to work out his anxiety and energy on the prison track. It would also mean letting him use his overachieving brain to teach physics and calculus (it arguably would help other prisoners too).

Heidi Schwiebert says that life has improved for her son at Victorville, especially now that he has been released from his horrific months in the Hole.

“He’s allowed to go outside now,” she says, “and he gets exercise.” But the many books she’s sent him on string theory and theoretical physics remain missing, she says, and new ones she sends don’t arrive. Deprived of those books, Cottrell’s mind goes without the stimulation of the scientific studies that have focused and calmed him ever since high school, when he went without sleep poring over Einstein.

From the inside, he watches the judicial system spend a small fortune in taxpayer dollars prosecuting, imprisoning, and then drumming up paranoia among prison guards and prisoners over a college kid who went on a vandalism spree against Hummers.

“Here we have [our] politicians, who are not charged with crimes, setting this planet on a disaster course for some fleeting political advantage, while others are sent to prison for taking a stance against this,” Cottrell wrote in his last, much more angry letter from Lompoc.

“The harsh sentence in my case was designed to both distract attention from the policies which motivated my friends’ actions, and to deter more people from supporting what is essentially a just cause.”

His arguments may contain the seeds of truth, but at this moment they can do him nothing but harm.

APRIL 2007 FREEDOM MONTH!!

The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign
The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign has designated April, "Freedom
Month!!"  Every April ProLibertad organizing a series of events to
commemorate the arrests of our political prisoners.  We use this
month as a time to raise awareness concerning the prisoners and of
Puerto Rico's colonial reality.

TENTATIVE FREEDOM MONTH APRIL 2007 Schedule
(An email with updated times and venues will be published shortly)

Saturday March 31st-ProLibertad Community March in the Bronx (See the
above announcement)

Sunday April 1st- Special mass dedicated to the Puerto Rican
Political Prisoners by La Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas/UCC at
11:30am

Friday April 6th-Militant Labor Forum event for the Puerto Rican
Political Prisoners at 6:30pm

Saturday April 7th- "Hands off Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia" (With
the added demands of "Free Puerto Rico" and "Free the Puerto Rican
Political Prisoners") at 1pm http://www.april7coalition.org

Friday April 13th-Puerto Rico/Political Prisoner Event with Fuerza de
la Revolucion Domincana at Centro Orlando Martinez in Inwood

Tuesday April 17th-Special ProLibertad Freedom Campaign Information
Session at Hunter College at 7pm Hunter college east building center
for Puerto Rican studies 14th floor room 1441 or the solarium

Thursday April 26th-ProLibertad Student Event with Hunter College's
Hostos Puerto Rican Club at 1pm

Saturday April 28th-ProLibertad Special fund-raiser (BOMBAZO) at 7pm

The ProLibertad Freedom Campaign
http://www.ProLibertadWeb.com
ProLibertad@hotmail.com and ProLibertad.Campaign@gmail.com
ProLibertad Hotline: 718-601-4751

Freeing Leonard Peltier and building the anti-war movement:

Published February 8th, 2007

February marks the 31st year that Native American activist Leonard Peltier has lived in a prison cell as a political prisoner. He was the target of an F.B.I. frame-up in response to the shooting of two agents during the governments’ occupation/war against progressive Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the early 1970s. He is kept in prison despite gaping holes in the government’s case because freeing him would expose the politically vengeful, racist, and fraudulent nature of the entire “justice system” that set him up. Moreover, throughout his years in prison Leonard Peltier has continued telling the truth as he sees it about the crimes of U.S. imperialism against Native Americans, the Iraqi people, and all of oppressed humanity. This is another likely reason the authorities keep him locked up, and another reason for justice-loving people to fight for his release.

February is also the Tacoma Leonard Peltier Support Group (LPSG)’s 14th Annual NW Leonard Peltier March in Tacoma. Leonard has had good legal people working on his case for decades, and well-known personalities and organizations all over the world have called for his freedom. It is necessary to fight on this front. The decisive issue in forcing the government to free a political prisoner, however, is building a mass movement for their release. This is part of the work to advance struggles of the oppressed masses on all fronts. The LPSG helps build this mass movement through its annual marches to demand Leonard’s freedom, by working to rally support for Native American struggles, and by fanning the flames of discontent against the war in Iraq and the growing U.S. police state.

Leonard Peltier became active as a young man when the Native American movement surged forward: from the struggle for treaty rights at Frank’s Landing and on the banks of the Puyallup; to the struggles of urban Indians in Chicago, Minneapolis, and in prisons; to the struggle on the Pine Ridge Reservation and Wounded Knee II—with many, many more battles in between. These Native American struggles were fueled and inspired by the mass actions of the African American people, the Vietnamese national liberation war, the battles of the anti-war movement in the streets of the U.S., and other movements. The Native American struggles in turn fueled and inspired these movements.

This great mass upsurge was already declining when Leonard Peltier was imprisoned, and it declined further in the next decades. There were bleak years for those working for the freedom of Leonard, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other political prisoners. But today the anti-war movement again has momentum, while last year a huge movement for immigrant rights developed. Although there is not yet a huge movement in full swing, recent developments show that work to help bring one about will eventually bear fruit. And, an important part of such work is to orient the various movements of the oppressed against the common enemy, as well as work to win the masses within these movements to conscious and active support for the struggles others are waging. Successes along this path will give the demand for Leonard’s release a new authority.

Imperialism is the common enemy that the struggles of Native Americans and the anti-war movement both confront, and it’s the logical product of the capitalist system of production—a system that Native Americans have been resisting the effects of for 500 years! By the beginning of the 20th Century capitalism had already given rise to the merger of industrial and banking capital into huge conglomerations of wealth (monopolies) in the most industrially advanced countries; and they now divided the globe between themselves with their respective governments fighting war after war to advance their interests by dominating markets, sources of raw materials, and low-wage labor. This imperialist system is the cause of the Iraqi occupation, and it plunders Indian reservations as well. As the Tacoma LPSG so correctly says, “…The war in Iraq is about oil and the interests of the multi-national energy corporations. Behind the events that took place on the Pine Ridge Reservation were the interests of the multi-national energy corporations wanting uranium that was found there. In both cases armed force was used to seize control of those resources and to suppress opposition.”

“Let’s be honest. There is much to be gained by taking Iraq by force—for the US, for the multinational corporations—and very little, if anything, of the administration’s actions is about liberating Iraq’s people from a tyrannical regime…Iraqi oil is the key. It means everything in this so-called ‘War on Terror’…But the greed doesn’t end there. Reports in the last few weeks show private American corporations—profiteers like Vice-president Dick Cheney’s former employer—are already in place, ready to take government contracts to rebuild a war-ravaged country blown apart by American bombs and to service military personnel that this administration plans to house there. An occupation force, then…War is good for business.” -Leonard Peltier

Indeed, the young people of this country are being sent to kill and be killed in the interests of the oil giants and business, i.e., profit-making by the rich through capitalist expansion. Even more than in Vietnam these are sons and daughters of the working people, and especially sons and daughters of impoverished Native Americans, African Americans, and other discriminated against national minorities whose only reason for enlisting is that modern capitalism denies them jobs, job-training or higher education anywhere else. Thus the Native American youth (and their parents!) have a special interest in joining and building the anti-war movement, while other anti-war activists have interests in supporting the struggles of Native Americans.

During the imperialist aggression against Vietnam, Native Americans here in the Northwest were an important part of the anti-war movement, i.e., draft resisters and active-duty G.I.s repeatedly spoke at anti-war events, they joined with thousands of others to man barricades set up in Seattle’s University District, they organized against the war among tribal members, and so on. Other anti-war activists responded to calls from Native Americans to come to Ft. Lawton, and then to help defend the Puyallup’s Tacoma fishing encampment. Later, some of them joined with local Native Americans who traveled to Pine Ridge.

Today, Native Americans again participate in the anti-war movement, while other anti-war activists participate in the annual Leonard Peltier marches. Clearly, however, these are trends that need to be built further. To do so requires shedding light on what imperialism is, and of how it’s the common enemy. It requires work to expose that neither party in Washington offers a solution to the nightmare the U.S. has brought to Iraq because as long as millions of people continue to think the Democrats will do something against Bush’s war they’re less likely to get active against it.

Bush is now escalating this bloody war in Iraq, and the escalation may involve twice the number of troops that he first stated. The Democrats’ response is to posture against this by offering non-binding resolutions against funding it. They promise to continue funding the war however, just as they always have. And, with the U.S. imperial military project in the Middle East facing defeat while mass opposition develops at home, the Democrats (and moderate Republicans) also offer “withdrawal” plans. But these plans always involve more fighting, and they’re usually conditioned on meeting objectives that four years of war have been unable to attain. They talk of redeploying U.S. troops, but what they mean is shifting their mission somewhat, or moving troops out of certain areas, or moving them to the “periphery” of Iraq in order to launch attacks from there. For example, Liberal Jim McDermott compliments Bush’s saber-rattling against Iran with a call to re-deploy U.S. troops to the Iranian border. In the name of “withdrawal” these are alternative military strategies aimed at achieving the same end: imperialist domination of the oil-rich Middle East.

The Democrats act this way because they’re just as much an imperialist party as the Republicans are. We must therefore rely on ourselves and on anti-imperialist ideas to arouse the masses for struggle against imperialist barbarism abroad and at home. This is how all of the great movements of the 60s and 70s were built; with Leonard Peltier being just one of thousands of very ordinary Native American people who took political matters into their own hands. Today he writes “Our work will be unfinished until not one human being is hungry or battered, not one single person is forced to die in war, not one innocent languishes imprisoned and no one is persecuted for his or her beliefs.” The struggle must continue.

Free Leonard Peltier!
Build the movement against imperialist war!

Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee, February 8, 2007

Hoping Against Hope?

A review of a new audio documentary about the struggle against colonialism in Canada

From The Dominion (http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1019)

A recently released audio documentary finds that in today’s Canada, Indigenous communities are “beset with record levels of suicide, high infant mortality rates, rampant sexual exploitation, epidemic levels of gas-sniffing, and alcohol, drug and solvent abuse. Furthermore there is an over-representation of Indigenous people in the prison system and chronic levels of desperate poverty.” These findings aren’t much different from what’s occasionally found in media headlines, but the root causes the documentary points to and the solutions it proposes are radically different from anything found in mainstream discourse.

The documentary begins with a question listeners will find difficult to ignore. “What if the Holocaust had never stopped?” asks Dr. Roland Chrisjohn, an Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) and Director of Native Studies at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. “What if, instead, with the passage of time, the world came to accept the State’s actions as the rightful and lawful policies of a sovereign nation to deal with creatures that were less than fully human…Then, you would have Canada’s treatment of the North American Aboriginal population in general and the Indian Residential School experience in particular.”

Praxis Media Productions and the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group have produced a three-part radio series, Hoping Against Hope? The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada, which examines colonialism and genocide in Canada today.

In 1876, the Canadian government enacted the Indian Act -- a tool for ethnic cleansing. The Act replaced traditional Indigenous government with a band council system. This allowed the government to determine who was an “official” Indian and reduce Indian numbers.

The professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Boulder in Colorado, Ward Churchill, describes the practice in Hoping Against Hope (HH) as a “sort of revitalized eugenics movement” based on what percentage Indian blood one has.

The next step was the consolidation of territory by the colonizers. Treaties were often the instruments used to accomplish this. Andrea Bear Nicholas, who holds the Atlantic Chair in Native Studies at St. Thomas University, points out that in the Maritime Provinces, most treaties were nation-to-nation agreements -- peace agreements between the encroaching settlers and Original Peoples. They were not land treaties.

“When you add it all up,” says Chrisjohn, “for about 90 per cent of Canada, even under the best possible scenario, there is no legal transfer of title from the Aboriginal inhabitants to the Crown.”

The method originally used to seize control of the land was genocide of the people living there. As evidence of this, Bear Nicholas recalls the bounties that were offered by the Crown for Indian scalps. Incidentally, this practice has been wiped from most Canadian textbooks -- a process she calls “historicide.”

The forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and placement in residential schools exemplifies assimilation as a form of genocide. Assimilation, says Bear Nicholas, is based on “the idea that a colonized people must have their identity, their being, literally wiped away from them and that they must be remolded, refashioned in the image of the colonizers, primarily for purposes of control and exploitation

HH quotes the civil servant Duncan Campbell Scott, who described Canadian Indian policy as “tak[ing] the Indian out of the Indian.”

De-Indianizing the Indians has been a multi-pronged process, but “the main vehicle for assimilating Indigenous peoples,” has been the “education route,” says Bear Nicholas.

HH notes, “Schools have colluded in the attack on Aboriginal forms of life. Schools maintain the hegemony of the western world view -- promoting individualism instead of communities, and economic and material acquisition over equitable distribution and co-operation.”

HH cites Statistics Canada figures that indicate that fewer than a handful out of nearly 60 Indigenous languages in Canada are expected to survive until the middle of the century. Tove Skuttnab-Kangas, a linguist at Roskilde University in Denmark, calls this “linguicide.”

Linguicide, asserts Bear Nicholas, “also carries with it the idea that the languages that we speak…are not just dying out by some sort of natural force that happens to every minority language, but that there’s an actual deliberateness, there’s actually agency involved.”

As for the crimes of genocide, historicide and linguicide, HH says: “The Canadian government and the churches have been evading responsibility for their crimes, focusing instead on healing Native people, rather than providing justice. Somehow, it is the victims of genocide who are the sick ones, not the perpetrators. When genocide is brought up, it’s denied.”

Ward Churchill provides a simple solution to colonialism: “Law enforcement, more than that, obedience to law. I don’t think we need amendments, I think we need some adherence to the existent laws.”

“I am hoping,” says Chrisjohn, “hoping against hope, that the average Canadian will read what their Government did in their name to human beings…what their churches did to human beings in their name, because their churches are not telling them. The government is not telling them. They will not allow the word genocide to come up in discussion.”

**************

The CD is available through G-7 Welcomming Committee Records or check out www.praxismedia.ca