[Ppnews] Year after FBI subpoena, civil liberties protections in US frighteningly eroded even further

[Political Prisoner News]

One year after FBI subpoena, civil liberties 
protections in US frighteningly eroded even further

Submitted by maureen on Thu, 12/22/2011 - 21:26
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maureen/one-year-after-fbi-subpoena-civil-liberties-protections-us-frighteningly-eroded-even 


A year ago yesterday, I got the dreaded house 
call from the FBI. I was at home working when two 
agents rang my buzzer and asked to speak with me.

I had been expecting such a visit; on 24 
September 2010 the FBI raided the homes of 
prominent anti-war and international solidarity 
organizers I have worked with over the years in 
Chicago, as well as the homes of activists in the 
Twin Cities and the office of the Anti War 
Committee there. In the weeks that followed, more 
Palestine solidarity organizers and Palestinian 
Americans in Chicago were delivered subpoenas to 
appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago as 
part of an investigation into violations of the 
laws banning material support for foreign terrorist organizations.

I declined to speak with the two agents who 
visited me; they then gave me a subpoena to 
appear before a federal grand jury on 25 January 
2011. I spent last Christmas and New Year 
convinced that I would soon be in federal prison 
for civil contempt of court. Even though it meant 
we risked being jailed, all 23 of us who have 
been subpoenaed as part of this grand jury 
fishing expedition have refused to testify. We 
have asserted that our first amendment rights 
guaranteed by the US Constitution, protecting 
free speech and freedom of association, are being trampled on.


A first amendment issue

The grand jury ­ essentially a secret court in 
which you’re not allowed to have a lawyer, and 
there is not even a judge presiding over the 
proceedings ­ has been long abused as a tool of 
inquisition into domestic political movements. 
Indeed, no specific crime has been identified related to our case.

The FBI’s operations manual for the September 
raids, discovered last April to have been 
accidentally left amongst a raided activist’s 
files, 
<http://www.stopfbi.net/2011/5/18/secret-fbi-documents-reveal-attack-democratic-rights-anti-war-and-international-solidarity>make 
it clear that they wanted to question activists 
about associational information ­ who activists 
know and work with in the US, Colombia and 
Palestine, and how activists organize and what 
they believe. They wanted people to name everyone 
they know who has ever traveled to the Middle East or South America.

<http://www.stopfbi.net/2011/10/2/government-continues-trumped-case-against-carlos-montes-protest-demands->It 
is also obvious the FBI put up the LA County 
Sheriff to raid the home of veteran Chicano 
liberation activist Carlos Montes last May; he 
faces trumped-up technical firearms violation 
charges and serious prison time. The FBI was on 
hand during the raid to question Montes about his 
political associations (an organizer of the 2008 
Republican National Convention protests, he was 
named in the search warrant used to raid the Anti 
War Committee office) and took material from his 
home related to his long history of political 
organizing. They even took a kuffiyeh ­ the 
traditional checkered Palestinian scarf ­ only 
one example of many demonstrating how federal 
agents so arbitrarily confiscated property from activists’ homes.

And while the threat of indictments looms, I am 
not spending Christmas and new year’s in federal 
prison for civil contempt of court. This is, I 
believe, thanks to the vocal protest that 
countless people around the US and around the 
world have made in support of the 24 of us and in 
support of civil liberties. This is a huge 
victory. But at the same time, civil liberties 
and constitutional protections have further 
eroded even in the last year. More protest must 
be shown before the situation gets even worse.


A bad time for civil liberties

Even The New York Times has excoriated the Obama 
administration over its civil liberties record 
after its justice department went even further 
than Bush’s to expand the FBI’s powers to 
investigate US citizens, “even when there is no 
firm basis for suspecting any wrongdoing.” 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19sun1.html>In 
an editorial entitled “Backward at the FBI,” the 
Times takes the FBI’s new operations manual to 
task, as revised guidelines “will give agents 
significant new powers to search law enforcement 
and private databases, go through household trash 
or deploy surveillance teams, with even fewer checks against abuse.”

The Times adds:
They also expand the special rules covering 
“undisclosed participation” in an organization by 
an FBI agent or informant. The current rules are 
not public, and, as things stand they still won’t 
be. But we do know the changes allow an agent or 
informant to surreptitiously attend up to five 
meetings of a group before the rules for 
undisclosed participation ­ whatever they are ­ kick in.

[
]

The FBI’s recent history includes the abuse of 
national security letters to gather information 
about law-abiding citizens without court orders, 
and inappropriate investigations of antiwar and 
environmental activists. That is hardly a 
foundation for further loosening the rules for 
conducting investigations or watering down 
internal record-keeping and oversight.

After that editorial was published in June, 
things only got worse. The United States 
government sanctioned and carried out the 
assassination of one of its citizens on foreign 
soil despite the fact that he posed no immediate 
danger to public safety. Vince Warren, executive 
director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, 
<http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-condemns-targeted-assassination-of-u.s.-citizen-anwar-al-awlaki>stated 
after the Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a US drone in Yemen:
The targeted assassination program that started 
under President Bush and expanded under the Obama 
Administration essentially grants the executive 
the power to kill any US citizen deemed a threat, 
without any judicial oversight, or any of the 
rights afforded by our Constitution. If we allow 
such gross overreaches of power to continue, we 
are setting the stage for increasing erosions of 
civil liberties and the rule of law.

Other stains on civil liberties this year 
included the persecution and conviction of the 
the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/irvine-11>Irvine 
11 ­ a group of students (all of the Muslim, all 
of them young men) who were subjected to a 
criminal trial for briefly and nonviolently 
disrupting the speech of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

<http://electronicintifada.net/blog/nora/nationwide-condemnation-irvine-11-convictions-student-and-activist-groups>Tens 
of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine 
said it best in a statement following the convictions:
We unequivocally condemn these charges, which 
unfairly single out and criminalize Muslim 
students who chose to exercise their First 
Amendment right to speak out against Israel’s 
human rights abuses. Had the speaker not been 
Israeli, had the issue not been Palestine, had 
the students not been Muslim, these charges never 
would have been pursued. Rather, these charges 
reflect a climate of Islamophobia and an 
irrational exceptionalism for Israel when it 
comes to free speech. The charges chill the free 
exchange of ideas and students’ right to protest at universities nationwide.


Guantanamo comes to the US

But perhaps the scariest development in the war 
on civil liberties this year is the National 
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012, which 
if enacted would allow the indefinite detention 
of US citizens without trial, not unlike Israel’s 
use of administrative detention. Indeed, 
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/01/us-president-should-veto-detainee-bill>as 
Human Rights Watch summarizes, “In addition to 
codifying indefinite detention without charge in 
US law, the bill would require that the military, 
rather than federal, state, or local law 
enforcement, handle certain terrorism cases.”

The bill has been already passed by Congress, and 
now Obama has dropped his threats to veto the 
bill. Constitutional law attorney Glenn Greenwald 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/19/obama_prepares_to_authorize_indefinite_detention>described 
the potential ramifications of the legislation on 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/19/obama_prepares_to_authorize_indefinite_detention>Democracy 
Now!:
it will be the first time that the United States 
Congress has codified the power of indefinite 
detention into the law since the McCarthy era of 
the 1950s. The 1950 Congress passed a bill saying 
that communists and subversives could be 
imprisoned without a trial, without full due 
process, based on the allegation that they 
presented a national threat, an emergency, a 
threat to the national security of the United 
States. President Truman, knowing that the bill 
would­the veto would be overridden, nonetheless 
vetoed it and said that it made a mockery of the 
Bill of Rights. That law was repealed in 1971 
with the Non-Detention Act, that said you cannot 
hold people in prison without charging them with 
a crime. The war on terror has eroded that 
principle, under both the Bush and Obama 
administrations, but Congress is now, with the 
Democrats in control of the Senate and a 
Democratic president, is about to enact into law 
the first bill that will say that the military 
and the United States government do have this 
power. It’s muddled whether it applies to US 
citizens on U.S. soil, but it’s clearly 
indefinite detention, and there’s a very strong 
case to make that it includes US citizens, as 
well, which, as we know, the Obama administration 
already claims anyway, and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

Not only is the Obama administration not closing 
Guantanamo, but it is paving the way for more 
Guantanamo-style indefinite detention of US 
citizens in a military court system.

Of course, there are already so-called “litte 
Guantanamos” around the US ­ “Communications 
Management Units,” or 
<http://www.thenation.com/article/159161/gitmo-heartland>secret 
prisons populated almost exclusively with Arab 
and Muslim detainees so as to segregate them from 
the general prison population.

Following the dismissing of an appeal for the 
Holy Land Foundation Case, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/12/my-father-will-not-be-forgotten/>Noor 
Elashi described on Counterpunch last week how 
her father ­ one of five men persecuted and 
convicted in the US because of the their 
humanitarian work in support of Palestinians 
living under US-funded Israeli occupation ­ has 
ended up in one of these facilities, and how his 
“significantly diminished phone calls and 
visitations are scheduled in advance and live-monitored from Washington DC.”

Will this become the bleak reality for not just 
Palestinian political prisoners in the US, but 
also those who stand in solidarity with the 
Palestinian people? It’s a serious question as 
<http://electronicintifada.net/content/us-activists-face-new-repression-political-prisoners-fight-justice/9108>the 
US government moves to further criminalize 
solidarity with the Palestinian people ­ as they 
have criminalized almost all of Palestinian 
society itself by placing all the major 
Palestinian political parties (except that which 
collaborates with the US and Israel) on the State 
Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

<http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/hillary-clinton-gives-green-light-israeli-attack-gaza-flotilla>The 
US State Department has threatened more than once 
to use the material support laws against 
organizers of the US Boat to Gaza. And if passed, 
a bill introduced in Congress in October would 
require the State Department to investigate US 
Boat to Gaza organizers for “terrorist” ties, 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/bill-congress-seeks-investigate-us-boat-gaza-terrorist-ties>as 
Ali Abunimah reported last month.


Who’s a “domestic terrorist”?

The proposed legislation to allow the US military 
to indefinitely detain without trial “domestic 
terrorism” suspects who are US citizens is 
especially scary considering that political 
activists are increasingly being treated as 
terrorists ­ whether it be 
<http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-undercover-investigators-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act/5440/>animal 
welfare activists investigating factory farms or 
activists who organized in protest of the 2008 
Republican National Convention. And now 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/09cncpolice.html>the 
Chicago Police Department is creating a 
counterterrorism unit for the May 2012 NATO and 
G8 summits in Chicago, at the same time that the 
city refuses to meet with or issue protest 
permits to antiwar activists mobilizing large 
demonstrations against the meetings.


Political repression in the US

Prosecuting Palestine solidarity activists for 
support of terrorism and going after 
environmentalists and animal rights organizers is 
not about protecting public safety. It’s about crushing dissent.

The laws banning material support to foreign 
terrorist organizations has been expanded so 
broadly in recent years that the US government 
defines as “material support” immaterial things 
like political speech, and travel to places like 
Colombia and Palestine are now grounds for a 
judge to approve a search warrant on someone’s 
home ­ things thought to be protected by the first amendment.

And Glenn Greenwald, the aforementioned 
constitutional law attorney, 
<http://www.salon.com/2011/11/17/ows_inspired_activism/>had 
this to say about the use of para-militarized 
forces to crush Occupy Wall Street protests around the US:

A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life 
expectations, devote itself to the interests of 
its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle 
class without triggering 
<http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/london-riots-refute-islamophobes.html>sustained 
citizen fury.

The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its 
police forces is precisely to control this type 
of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to 
imagine its not being deployed in full against a 
growing protest movement aimed at grossly and 
corruptly unequal resource distribution. As 
Madeleine Albright 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/govt/admin/stories/albright120896.htm>said 
when arguing for U.S. military intervention in 
the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this 
superb military you’re always talking about if we 
can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, 
big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the 
stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech 
helicopters, and the 
<http://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/tampa-could-add-surveillance-cameras-for-republican-national-convention/1195245>coming-soon 
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/08/rick-perry-predator-drones-obama-mexico.html>drone 
technology lavished on them in the wake of 
the<http://www.salon.com/2011/08/29/terrorism_39/singleton/> 
post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say 
nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement 
apparatus that, more than anything else, 
resembles a standing army which is 
<http://www.salon.com/2009/07/22/eavesdropping_2/>increasingly directed inward.

Most of this militarization has been justified by 
invoking Scary Foreign Threats ­ primarily the 
Terrorist ­ but its prime purpose is domestic. As 
civil libertarians endlessly point out, the 
primary reason to oppose new expansions of 
government power is because it always ­ always ­ 
vastly expands beyond its original realm.



Reasons to be hopeful

It’s easy to get depressed about the increasingly 
repressive conditions in the US. But there are reasons to be hopeful.

I’m inspired and humbled by the courage shown by 
campus solidarity activists in the wake of the 
Irvine 11 convictions. 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maureen/video-chicago-students-say-mic-check-fact-check-protest-standwithus-propaganda-event>Students 
are showing that they have not been intimidated 
into silence and are continuing to challenge 
Israeli government spokespersons and their propagandists.

The potential for true change was made 
brilliantly clear this year when huge numbers of 
people come out into the streets for a common 
goal ­ whether it be protecting workers’ rights 
in Wisconsin, calling for the downfall of the 
regimes in Tunisia and Egypt or for economic 
justice on Wall Street. Or when young 
Palestinians born refugees in Syria and Lebanon 
attempted to march back to their homeland, 
unafraid of Israel’s landmines and machine guns.

Because of collective action’s power to change, 
this is precisely why it is being so severely 
repressed in the US right now. We must stay 
strong, keep our chins up and keep fighting for a better future.




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415 863-9977

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