[News] Today’s activism in support of Palestinian liberation - On Political Repression: A Hard Crackers Discussion

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  On Political Repression: A Hard Crackers Discussion with Michael Deutsch

John Garvey and Mike Morgan — March 6, 2024

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Deutsch.jpg

Michael Deutsch is an experienced human rights attorney in the U.S., 
perhaps one of the most veteran and well-informed lawyers at that 
extremely difficult craft in this country.  Michael graciously allowed 
us at Hard Crackers to pick his brains and share some of his experiences 
with us. To give you some idea of Michael’s journey down that road, here 
are some of the important things he has done:

/Michael Deutsch has been a lawyer with the People’s Law Office and a 
Guild member since 1970. From 1991-1996 he was the Legal Director of the 
Center for Constitutional Rights./

/Michael’s legal career has been devoted to the representation of 
political activists and political prisoners. He was one of the criminal 
defense lawyers for the rebelling Attica prisoners, a coordinator of the 
Attica Brothers Legal Defense, and one of the class counsel in the 
Attica civil suit which, after two decades of litigation, resulted in a 
12 million dollar settlement./

///He was attorney for the five Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners 
imprisoned in the 1950’s who won an unconditional sentence commutation 
from President Carter in 1979, and represented Puerto Rican 
independentistas in Chicago, New York and Hartford who were charged with 
seditious conspiracy, the Wells Fargo expropriation, and subpoenaed 
before federal grand juries. He also helped to develop the “Prisoner of 
War” claim under international law for Puerto Rican prisoners./

/Michael has defended Black Panthers, Black prisoners facing the death 
penalty, and was part of the legal team that challenged the first use of 
the high security “control units” for men at Marion Federal Prison and 
for women at Lexington Federal Prison./

/More recently, Michael successfully defended Chicago Palestinian 
community activist Muhammad Salah charged with Terrorism and RICO as 
well as Palestinian community organizers targeted by the FBI and 
subpoenaed to a federal grand jury. /

/Also more recently, Michael represented Rasmea Odeh, the deputy 
director of the Arab-American Action Network (AANN), a former 
Palestinian political prisoner and torture survivor, who had been 
charged with providing false information on her naturalization 
application, nine years after she had received her citizenship. She 
//was stripped of her US citizenship and after months of litigation was 
deported to Jordan and now resides in Ramallah./

/Michael Deutsch has written and lectured extensively on prisons, 
international human rights, and political repression./

The following is a transcript of our very recent discussion with Michael 
Deutsch (MD) – Mike Morgan (MM) and John Garvey (JG)

*MM:*  We’ve drawn up a kind of roadmap script of the issues and 
questions for the discussion. This includes essentially what we 
originally sent to you, but hopefully it allows for an easier flow from 
one topic to the other. I’m going to apologize ahead of time for reading 
here and there. You’ll be much more patient with my reading than you 
would be with my stammering, and stuttering, etc.

Okay, so let’s get going. The plan for this discussion was the result of 
a small group of us discussing the central issues around repression that 
would likely have an impact on today’s activism in support of 
Palestinian liberation.

The group is especially concerned that activists often do not understand 
very much about how state agencies implement different repressive 
strategies. And, as a result, they are unprepared to avoid unnecessary 
interference in their organizing and don’t know how to deal with 
different repressive scenarios when they’re faced with them. We don’t 
know anyone who’s probably more qualified than you are to help us think 
through some of these issues.

Obviously, there’s no need to tell you about what’s been going on in 
Palestine since October 7^th , although we are hesitant to assume 
complete agreement when it comes to the actual events of October 7^th . 
Unless you think otherwise, we don’t think we need to explore those issues.

Anyway, within days of the initiation of the Israeli assault on the 
Gaza, many thousand supporters of Palestinian freedom in the United 
States began going into the streets and taking other actions to express 
their solidarity with the people of Gaza and their opposition to the 
Israeli invasion. By all accounts the depth and breadth of these 
demonstrations has far exceeded any previous mobilization on behalf of 
the Palestinians. Within that movement we’ve all also witnessed a new 
level of cooperation between Arab Palestinian groups and Jewish 
anti-Zionist organizations. It doesn’t appear that this movement will go 
away anytime soon

Would you agree with that brief assessment, Michael? And what would you 
add to it?

*MD*:  Well, I’m not sure. Once there is a ceasefire, if there ever is 
one, the level of protest is going be reduced. There will be people who 
are always going to be out there supporting Palestinian rights. But I 
don’t know necessarily that the breadth and the numbers of people that 
have been demonstrating are going to continue at the level it has now. 
But that’s not determined. We don’t know when that is going be so. The 
movement is going to continue as long as Israel is committing genocide 
against the Palestinian people in Gaza. So that would be my response to 
that.

*MM*:  How would you describe the composition of the Arab Palestinian 
groups within the solidarity movement now, as compared to previous 
moments of heightened activity?

*MD*: I think it’s much broader than we’ve seen in the past. It involves 
a lot more people who have never been involved in demonstrations or have 
been involved in limited demonstrations. So, I think it is a point of 
departure from the past. But again, I don’t know what’s going to happen, 
once the immediate genocide in Gaza is ended, if people are going to 
continue to protest. But there are a lot of committed Palestinian and 
North American people and African American people who are outraged about 
it and have been educated about the whole history of the occupation for 
75 years against the Palestinian people, so I think consciousness has 
been raised amongst people that maybe never thought that much about it, 
and I assume that it will continue at some level even after the armed 
conflict that’s been going on. We just have to see what’s going to 
happen in terms of repression and in terms of people committed to going 
out and demonstrating as often as they’ve done recently.

*MM*: On the subject of U.S./Israeli collusion, particularly with regard 
to police and intelligence. So far groups have been subjected to some 
arbitrary arrests and a good deal of surveillance. We also have no doubt 
that a lot of intelligence data is being collected by a variety of 
methods. We have to assume that there are real attempts to infiltrate 
existing groups and perhaps even be involved in the creation of new ones.

We’ve recently read a report that the NYPD has an office in Jerusalem. 
How would you assess the current collusion of police intelligence 
operations in Israel with those in the US.

*MD*: Well, I think it’s at a high level. I think there’s a high level 
of cooperation and it’ll continue not only with the New York Police, but 
the FBI. I was involved in a case in 2007, where two people were accused 
of being the leaders of Hamas, and basically were charged with aiding 
and abetting terrorism. In the lead up to that case, the FBI was in in 
Israel constantly sharing information with Shin Bet and other 
intelligence officers of the Israeli surveillance and security agencies. 
When we went to trial, there were leaders of Shin Bet in federal court 
sitting at the table with the US attorneys–working closely with them and 
being part of the prosecution in a federal court in Chicago. The two 
clients were charged with being members of a conspiracy to carry out a 
RICO enterprise, and the enterprise was Hamas.

When we had a hearing about the torture of one of my clients, the judge 
emptied the courtroom. We had evidence that the torture had caused him 
to confess, but the government still wanted to put his confession into 
evidence. They cleared the courtroom but the Israeli security people 
were allowed to stay and, of course, some of the Shin Bet (tasked with 
domestic intelligence) and Mossad (responsible for foreign intelligence 
and special operations) interrogators actually testified in the 
courtroom, but the public was not allowed in the courtroom for that 
either. There’s a history of the Israelis working closely with the US 
security forces in terms of repressing Palestinian activists, both in 
Palestine and in the US.

*JG*: Mike and I both read your /Journal of Palestine Studies/ article 
about that that case and it is astonishing. Mike said he couldn’t put it 
down and I said they should make a movie out of it. To see the Israeli 
bad guys in the courtroom directing what the lawyers say is worth a 
1,000 pounds of gold. It’d be interesting if you talked just a little 
bit more about what happened in that trial and what lessons we might 
take from the whole proceeding as well as from the outcome.

I strongly recommend readers to check out the two /Journal of Palestine 
Studies/ articles authored by Michael Deutsch & Erica Thompson entitled 
/Secrets and Lies: The U.S. and Israeli Persecution of Muhammad Salah 
Parts 1 & 2. /See

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42042

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42077

*MM: *Could you spell out a little bit more detail around the defendant 
Mohammed Salah?

*MD*: He was an American citizen. A grocer in Bridgeport, Illinois. Not 
a very political activist. But he was reached out to bring some monies 
to over 400 Palestinians who were deported illegally to Lebanon and who 
were leaders of Hamas at that time. The Israelis sent them out of the 
country and made them live in this forest in Lebanon with no resources. 
Salah was asked to go there to deliver money to those people. This is 
one of the first things he ever did as an activist. As soon as he 
reached Israel, he was arrested and tortured for 57 days. And then they 
put out this thing that he was a military commander of Hamas and that 
the other defendant, Abdelhaleem Ashqar had run for President of the 
Palestinian Authority. He was a doctor of business management. He was 
not an active militant in Hamas. He was maybe associated with Hamas, but 
he was never involved in any type of illegal activities.

So those were the two defendants they picked out to bring this RICO 
charge against. I think one of the things that really made this case 
triable was our ability to talk about the issue of Palestine and really 
educate the jurors about what these people were trying to do, and what 
the repression was that they had experienced, and, in fact, that one of 
them was terribly tortured for 57 days.

At the end of this torture, they put Salah in a cell with Palestinians, 
who he thought were comrades, but they were what’s called “birds”. This 
is one of the tactics of the Israelis. These are Palestinians that have 
become informants for the Israelis, and they got him to admit under 
threats to give more information about his role in bringing the money to 
those people who had been deported to Lebanon.

It was an education for the jury that made them refuse to convict Salah 
on the charge of being a member of a RICO enterprise, a RICO conspiracy, 
because we told them all about it. We had experts talk about Palestine. 
They came and testified about the occupation. These were leading experts 
from Israel and human rights experts. I think that if you have the time 
and the evidence to educate a jury, you’re going to get, in most cases, 
a positive result.

Mohammed Salah was convicted of lying in an “interrogatory” where 
pro-Israel groups had brought a civil lawsuit and he was subpoenaed to 
testify about violent acts. He was convicted of testifying that he was a 
member of a mosque in Bridgeport, Illinois but he wasn’t a member of 
Hamas. Apparently the jury felt that maybe he was a member of Hamas, but 
he wasn’t part of a RICO conspiracy, so they convicted him of that much 
lesser charge of lying at a civil interrogatory which is almost never used.

The other defendant, Abdelhaleem Ashqar. was convicted of not testifying 
in front of a grand jury that was investigating Palestine liberation. 
This man had been interned for civil contempt of a grand jury in New 
York, and he spent eight months in prison, and then the judge found that 
civil contempt could no longer force him, had no effect on his ability 
to testify and his willingness to testify.

*MM*: So he was let loose?

*MD*: And then, sure enough, they subpoenaed Dr. Ashqar again to a grand 
jury in Chicago, and he refused to testify in front of this grand jury, 
and they charged him in this indictment with criminal contempt. And that 
was what he was convicted of, not the Hamas RICO charges, not anything 
connected with violence, but simply not testifying in front of a grand 
jury. He was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment. Civil contempt is where 
you’ll ultimately be forced to testify because you want to get out of 
jail. If you testify, you get out of jail. But criminal contempt is a 
crime which has no statutory limit for punishment and could be up to 
life imprisonment. You can’t get out by testifying, because the 
violation is refusing to testify.

These were two, very peaceable, educated people. And I think the jury 
understood that this was unfair overreach. And another interesting point 
in that trial is, at the time of doing what they were accused of, Hamas 
was not on a terrorist list, a designated terrorist list. That’s one of 
the reasons they brought the RICO charge. But they also decided that 
they couldn’t bring a material support charge at that time, because 
Hamas was not a designated terrorist organization. Subsequently it was. 
And so they brought a charge of violating some terrorist law against Mr. 
Salah. They said he was a military commander of Hamas, and they had an 
informant, a Palestinian guy that was going to testify about that. And 
then at the last minute, they withdrew his testimony and they withdrew 
the charge of material support. They were just left with these` two RICO 
conspiracy charges against Ashqar and Salah.

*MM*: But Salah had been imprisoned in Israel for 5 years for bringing 
the money, right?

*MD:* Yes, he was. He was tortured, and then they brought him to trial. 
He was convicted and served five years in prison. Obviously, if he was a 
terrorist, they would not have given him a five-year sentence. But while 
his trial was going on, they were putting out propaganda that he was a 
military commander of Hamas, which was absurd, and they knew it was 
absurd, and yet that was their justification for torturing him and then 
imprisoning him. And finally, when he came home, that’s when the US 
brought this other charge, this RICO charge against him.

*JG:* Are those guys doing okay now?

*MD:* Well, Salah died a few years ago from kidney cancer. When he came 
back, he was picking up people for dialysis and transporting them to 
hospitals. But he got cancer himself and died three or four years ago. 
Ashqar is still fighting. They’re trying to deport him to Israel, or 
even to the Palestinian Authority, and he’s still fighting that because 
he claims under the Convention against Torture (CAT) that he was likely 
to be tortured if he was sent back to Israel. He just had a hearing in 
the DC Court but lost the hearing, and now it’s going to be on appeal. 
But he’s been out of prison all this time and living with his wife in 
the DC area, but they’re still wanting to deport him.

*MM:* Going back to Salah. When he was eventually released by the 
Israelis, he spent a number of years here before they bought the second 
case. Right?

*MD:* That’s when they stuck the informant on him. The informant was at 
the airport when Salah came home as part of a group to greet him. That’s 
how they were planning to get him. The informant tried to talk to him 
about placing bombs in Chicago, at the Federal Building. And in all of 
this, nothing ever came of it except that they were trying to entice 
him. This was the US Attorney’s office in Chicago, leading this with the 
FBI and working very closely with Israeli intelligence.

*MM:* This is the Jack Mustafa character?

*MD:* Yes, exactly.

*MM:*  John, do you have anything more to ask?

*JG: *Yesterday, when Mike and I talked about the /Palestine Studies/ 
article, I commented that in preparation for this conversation that a 
lot of the concerns I’d been preoccupied with were what the police and 
possibly FBI agents do at the level of getting themselves involved in 
groups, disrupting them, spying on them, setting people up–that kind of 
stuff. I underestimated the extent to which repression strategies are 
also grounded inside entities like the US Attorney’s office and the 
government beyond the police apparatuses. There’s the legal juridical 
apparatus which also plays an active part.

One other thing. Often times, it appears as if the US is the controlling 
nation. They’re pulling the strings and Israel does what it’s told. It 
seems now that the United States was basically at the beck and call of 
the Israeli Shin Bet and Mossad.

*MD:*  Yes, actually the US Attorney’s office made between 30 and 40 
trips to Israel to confer and meet with Israeli security. And they 
worked together hand in hand. When they came in the courtroom, when they 
cleared the courtroom, the prosecution table was 2 US Attorneys and 3 
Israeli intelligence officers sitting there.

*MM:* The Shin Bet people they brought over were the guys who had 
performed “the good cop, bad cop” roles?

*MD:* These were the interrogators. Yes, these were the interrogators 
and, of course, a lot of what they did was classified. We had to deal 
with the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA), where you don’t 
get the real testimony. You get a kind of summary of the testimony and 
the judge has to look at the real testimony and then decide what you can 
hear and what you can’t hear about the methods that they use. We were 
not allowed to go into that. It’s very difficult cross examining these 
guys because a lot of stuff was classified, and we weren’t allowed to 
get into it.

*MM:* I also noticed in reading the articles you sent that this Judith 
Miller person from the /Times/ testified.

*MD:* Yes. She was brought to the prison to talk to Salah to come back 
and write an article for /The New York Times/, saying that he was fine 
and he wasn’t being ill-treated. She was like someone that was like 
cleaning up the work of the Israelis. But the jury didn’t buy a lot of 
it. I’ll tell you. The jury was very good in terms of not accepting all 
this stuff, and acquitting them of the RICO conspiracy was a big, big 
move on their part. When we talked to some of them afterwards, they said 
they didn’t trust the Israelis. They didn’t trust the interrogators and 
they felt like the case was totally overblown.

*MM: *Right. What would they have gotten? What would have happened to 
them if they’d been found guilty?

*MD:* For a RICO conspiracy, up to 20 years.

*MM:* Alright. Well, that’s pretty fascinating stuff. We’re going to 
move on to another topic.  Let me just read this to you. It’s our 
expectation that the authorities will make concerted efforts to 
distinguish between what we would describe as system-loyal opposition 
and system-disloyal opposition to justify more severe repressive steps 
against the latter. Would you agree with that?

*MD:* Yes, I would agree with that.

*JG:* Have you seen any evidence of that so far?

*MD:* Well, I’ve been notified that the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force 
of the FBI has paid some visits to activists in Chicago. And obviously, 
they’re not going to talk to them. But they are kind of acting around 
the edges in terms of trying to criminalize this movement. But one of 
the things that you should understand is that, in 1996, they passed the 
Anti-Terrorism Act and in that act the US Secretary of State is 
empowered to designate foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and, as of 
now, they have all the major Palestine resistance groups on that list as 
specially designated terrorist organizations.

The statute says there are two forms of terrorism. One is terrorism 
where you provide material support to commit an act of terrorism for a 
specially designated terrorist organization. I’ll give you the cite. 
It’s 18, USC. 2339 A. And then there’s 2339 B, which criminalizes 
providing material support of any kind. It could be writing a hotheaded 
article, or providing money or transportation, or anything which doesn’t 
have to be related directly to a terrorist act. But it’s material 
support for a specially designated terrorist organization, and that’s a 
very, very broad charge.

This is a charge that they’ve been using against Palestinians and which 
they could use against Palestinians involved in the present 
demonstrations that are going on across the country. And they could say 
that communication with somebody, or providing information or providing 
any type of material support, not necessarily any terrorist act, but 
material support is a violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act. So one of the 
things that I would worry about is those people who are most political 
and most militant. They’re going to try and say they’re providing 
material support for designated terrorist organizations. And if anything 
is under the direction of a one of a group of designated terrorist 
organizations, especially a terrorist group, or in coordination with a 
designated terrorist group, that is considered material support.

It could still be considered material support. I have people calling me 
all the time saying that, “We want to talk to Hamas. We want to put an 
article about Hamas in our publication.” And they’re worried because 
Hamas is a specially designated terrorist organization. Putting an 
article in about Hamas could be considered material support for Hamas, 
and you could be indicted under that anti-terrorism law. This is a long 
way of answering that the most militant Palestinian protesters can be 
easily accused of providing material support for a terrorist 
organization. Even organizations like the Popular Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine. They’re on the list. The group in Lebanon, 
Hezbollah, is on the list.

*MM:* So if you have any communication with these liberation groups, 
you’re running the risk of being charged with material support. Right? 
And it’s your sense that people here, activists here, have some 
familiarity with that law. Correct?

*MD:* Yes, oh, very much so very much so. They’re very conscious of the 
statute and how it’s been used in the past, and from all my 
consideration, they’re not providing material support to these groups in 
any way, but it’s easy to manipulate that and to bring that charge. So 
that was one thing that I would be concerned about in terms of the 
government going after the most activist and militant people in the in 
this resistance movement in the US.

*MM:* I’m going to jump ahead to another question. And that’s about 
domestic versus international terrorism.

*MD:* The FBI has a definition of domestic terrorism and I can read that 
to you if you want but there is no Federal crime statute for domestic 
terrorism standing alone. There’s not a crime. How then can you be 
convicted of a crime of domestic terrorism?

A law that passed after the Patriot Act was put into effect, as part of 
the Patriot Act, basically states that what are called any activities 
that involve added dangers to human life are in violation of the 
criminal laws of the US, or any State. Then it adds if they appear to be 
intentional, or to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to 
influence the policy of a government. And then they say there are 
certain crimes which they call Federal crimes of terrorism. And then 
they list Federal crimes of terrorism which are essentially 
assassination, kidnapping, destruction of aircraft, chemical weapons, 
nuclear weapons, attacks on Federal facilities, killing of officers and 
employees of the US, the taking of hostages*, *violence against mass 
transit, attacks on Federal facilities. Those are the crimes that are 
considered acts of domestic terrorism if they’re intended to influence 
or intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the 
policy of a government. But there are no other crimes that are 
considered part of domestic terrorism. So these are very serious crimes, 
very intentional crimes, and they’re limited. In other words, protesting 
or doing civil disobedience, or challenging something of that nature is 
not a crime of domestic terrorism. There is no crime standing alone of 
domestic terrorism.

*MM:* That was our next question. How common is the invocation of 
domestic terrorism? Let me give you an example. In the last couple of 
weeks, a City Councilwoman from Queens put forward a proposed bill 
stating that the blocking of tunnels and bridges, etc., by the 
pro-Palestinian protesters should be treated as domestic terrorism. It 
seems to be more prevalent right now that they’re raising that issue.

*MD:* Yes, they’re using “domestic terrorism”. The definition of 
domestic terrorism from the FBI is violent, criminal acts committed by 
individuals or groups to further ideological goals, stemming from 
domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, 
racial, or environmental nature. That’s not in the criminal law; that’s 
not in the Federal law. But this is what the FBI uses to start an 
investigation or to justify an investigation. But if they’re going to 
charge somebody with domestic terrorism, they have to show that these 
are acts of Federal crimes of terrorism that are in those definitions of 
Federal crimes of terrorism. So that act would not be considered a 
Federal crime of terrorism. You can call it domestic terrorism, but it’s 
not really the crime under the Federal law.

Now, also, I should mention there are a lot of state terrorism laws. In 
fact, I had a trial a couple of years ago of NATO protesters in Chicago. 
They were charged under an Illinois statute of terrorism. Basically, 
what the Illinois statute said was that terrorism included any act that 
is intended to cause or create a risk of death or great bodily harm, the 
use of violence or threat of violence in pursuit of political 
objectives, intended to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of 
the civilian population.

Three activists who came to Chicago to protest the NATO meeting were 
infiltrated by undercover police. The police were saying, “Let’s go make 
Molotov Cocktails”, or let’s do that. Well, they never did anything but 
because the police said they intended to do something, they indicted 
them under the Illinois law for terrorism. They were acquitted of those 
terrorism charges. But we’ve always got to be worried about that as well.

I assume that’s what the Queens City Council member is talking about is 
making it a state law. Right? Well, I don’t know what the New York State 
law is. I’m not familiar with that, but so far no one’s been charged 
other than in Illinois, as far as I know, under a State law. But they’re 
on the books in a lot of different states.

I should mention some other acts that use terrorism as well. Just so we 
round it all out.

There’s an act called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Basically, 
what it says is that terrorism applies to any intentional physical 
destruction of an animal enterprise, damaging or interfering with the 
operations of an animal enterprise, or placing this enterprise in fear 
of injury. I represented people who went into a lab to free rats because 
the rats were being experimented on. Another guy in Southern Illinois 
rescued a bunch of minks and was arrested and charged under the Animal 
Enterprise Terrorism Act.

There’s also seditious conspiracy which we should talk about as well, 
because it involves a conspiracy. This is what the Puerto Ricans were 
charged with. And this is basically a conspiracy to oppose by force the 
government of the US. It’s as simple as that. And that’s a twenty-year 
sentence.

*JG:* So, Mike, why don’t we jump then to talking to Michael about the 
MLN since he brought it up.

*MD: *The Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN) was an above-ground, 
Puerto Rican independence solidarity group. They were very active in in 
Chicago and New York. But the FALN or Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion 
Nacional was a Puerto Rican underground group. It took credit for a lot 
of bombings, of military places and other things and a lot of similar acts.

Jose Lopez, was the Director of the MLN. His brother, Oscar, was a 
leader in the FALN. But they never brought any charges against any of 
the people who were in the MLN. What they did was subpoena some of the 
leaders of the MLN to a grand jury. They were trying to get information 
about the activities of the FALN, which maybe some members of the MLN 
were in touch with, but they never charged anybody with being part of 
the FALN. They just wanted them to be informants and gather information 
about the activities of the FALN. The people who were subpoenaed to 
appear in front of the grand jury refused to cooperate, so they were 
sent to jail for contempt, first civil contempt, and then ultimately, 
when they still refused, criminal contempt. That was the way they went 
after the above-ground group, by using the Federal grand jury to try and 
turn them.

The FBI raided the MLN’s high school in Chicago and harassed a lot of 
people. They paid a lot of visits to people in their workplaces and in 
apartments. The FBI was after them and following them, but they never 
brought any charges against those people who were in the above-ground 
Puerto Rican independence movement.

*MM:* Were they successful in terms of getting people to accept an offer 
of cooperation?

*MD:* No one collaborated, and 10 people were imprisoned in Chicago and 
New York. 3 Mexicano/Chicano activists were also subpoenaed and 
imprisoned in solidarity with the Puerto Rican independence movement. 
So, you had people that were in prison but not charged with any type of 
terrorism act or criminal act

*MM:* Were they in prison for a long time?

*MD:* No, as I recall, it was months. Finally, the government realized 
they couldn’t be coerced. The government could have charged them with 
criminal contempt. But they didn’t do that. They let them go. They were 
set free, and they went back about their political work.

The FALN members were arrested on April 4th, I think, in 1980. They 
arrested a bunch of them, and then, later on, they arrested more of the 
leadership. The government had a guy who was part of the FALN, which I 
think came up in your letter, whose name was Alfredo Mendez, who became 
a cooperator with the FBI and Government, and he testified against them.

There were trials when the FALN was ultimately captured. They had a 
couple of seditious conspiracy trials, and what they were charged with 
was opposing the authority of the US over Puerto Rico by force. In the 
trial as defense counsel we tried to say, “Well, the US Government 
doesn’t have a legitimate authority over Puerto Rico. It’s a colonial 
authority, and that shouldn’t be considered.”  And in the first trial, 
the FALN didn’t participate. They refused to recognize the jurisdiction 
of the court, kind of following the leadership of the original Puerto 
Rican Nationalists who went to prison in 1954 for attacking the US 
Congress. Those people had refused to participate in their trials, and 
they refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the US Court.  So these 
captured FALN people took up that issue as well, and they did not 
testify at their trial, nor did they participate in the trial.

Subsequently, the leader of the FALN, whose name was Oscar Lopez, was 
captured. And he decided he was going to represent himself, and he 
decided he was going to confront this guy, Alfredo Mendez, who was a 
government witness by then and was testifying against him. In that 
limited way, he participated in the trial by confronting Mendez, but 
beyond that he didn’t do anything else. The FALN people got big 
sentences–55 years and 35 years. They also had state cases where they 
didn’t participate and got more time there as well. Ultimately, the only 
way they got out was a clemency by Clinton to let most of them out, and 
then several others were let out later.

*MM:* Right? Didn’t Clinton grant some pardons?

*MD: * Clinton gave them unconditional release because they wouldn’t 
accept parole or any conditions on their release. So he gave them all an 
unconditional release and, subsequently, a couple of people who weren’t 
part of that first group, Oscar Lopez and Carlos Torres, ultimately got 
parole and they accepted it. This was years later.

*MM:* Michael, would you categorize that as taking a stand as a 
prisoner-of-war?

*MD: *Yeah, I guess so. That that’s what they said. They were 
prisoners-of-war, and they didn’t intend to recognize the US. We 
submitted international law pleadings. Because, you know, under 
international law, you have the right to resist colonialism by any means 
necessary. And we tried to get the judge to go along with understanding 
that. But we had two different judges. One was a hanging judge, all the 
way. He’s the one that gave out the 55-year sentences. And there was 
another judge who was from the Cape Verde Islands, a judge of African 
heritage. He was a little more reasonable, although he didn’t allow us 
to put on our defense in front of a jury The FALN people in front of him 
got slightly lesser sentences, like 35 years.

*JG:* Michael, I wonder if we could go in a slightly different 
direction. You know I mentioned that we had read your article in the 
/Northwestern Law Review/ about grand juries, and clearly one of the 
things that you urge people to do when they’re faced with the prospect 
of a subpoena is not to testify and not fall into the trap or whatever 
the right words are but to not take the offer, especially when this is 
presented as: “Look, If you have nothing to hide, why don’t you just 
testify.” Could you explain a little bit why you would probably still 
give that advice today to people who are faced with a grand jury 
subpoena? See https://scholarlycommons.law.nor 
<https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol75/iss4/6>

*MD: *Well, it kind of depends on the person and the milieu that they’re 
involved with. A grand jury can ask you about anything and you don’t 
have a lawyer in there. So you might think you don’t have any 
information. But you might really have some information that will tie it 
to something else that they have, and therefore they want you to 
cooperate with them.

The ethic of the Puerto Rican Independence movement at that time was 
non-collaboration with grand juries because grand juries were just a 
tool of the repression against their activists.

But it depends on the individual. If you have somebody that literally 
doesn’t have any information at all based on their background and who 
they are, it’s possible that they could go in there and just say, “You 
know I don’t know anything, and I don’t have any information,” but it’s 
a very tricky slope, because you don’t know what they know. And of 
course, if you lie to a grand jury, that’s perjury, and you could go to 
prison for 5 or 10 years, depending on the nature of the lies.

*JG:* So going to go back to the Palestinian solidarity movement. What 
should groups be doing now to prepare for the possibility of facing 
repression in the months to come, or perhaps even as we speak? How do 
you get ready for that?

*MD:* Well, you have to try and minimize the damage by making people 
understand that some of these groups could be infiltrated. You have to 
be wary of that. You also have to understand that, despite what you 
think, you don’t know if you may have information that is going to be 
helpful to the FBI. That’s why you’re subpoenaed to the grand jury 
because they have some kernel of information that they want you to 
expand on. You should also be wary of people in your group who could be 
informants. Informants and infiltrators can create some kind of 
situation when you’ve got somebody saying something like, “Let’s do an 
action. Let’s do this or that.” And the next thing you know they’re 
being charged. So activists have to be very wary of their conversations 
with other people, and not be macho and proclaim: “We’re going to do 
this, and we’re going do that,” because the person next to them who they 
think they may know might have been approached by the FBI and 
threatened. And now they’ve agreed to provide information to the FBI.

You have to be on wary of any type of information sharing with people 
you don’t know well or trust.

*MM:* Should groups that have large numbers of non-citizens be doing 
anything special to decrease the likelihood of deportation?

*MD: *And yes, you have to be wary of immigration law. It has a 
definition of terrorist activity which I’ll read to you so you can get a 
sense of that. Any group that, either directly or through a terrorist 
group, engages in an activity regardless of whether or not such group is 
designated as a terrorist organization. This could include pro-democracy 
groups engaged in armed conflict against oppressive regimes. Those under 
scrutiny must show by clear and convincing evidence that they did not 
know such a group did engage in terrorist activities. If the groups are 
under that definition, then being involved with them, or supplying 
information to them or supporting them can result in immediate 
deportation even without a hearing. If Immigration believes you’re 
involved in terrorist activity, you could be deported by a ruling of a 
magistrate, or even a special master.

I remember in the letter that you sent me there was worry about mass 
deportations. But there are not going to be mass deportations. There are 
going to be individual deportations. But they could take up a massive 
amount of people who, if they don’t have legal status or their status is 
in question, are going to be deported. Even Dr. Ashgar (the co-defendant 
in the Federal Chicago Muhammad Salah RICO conspiracy trial) is still 
fighting it. Ten years later and they’re still trying to deport him to 
Israel. The power of the Immigration Service to deport people accused or 
believed to be active in terrorist activity means that a person can 
summarily be deported.

One of the things I wanted to mention is the FISA law, which is the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This allows the Government, 
without a court order, to gather information against groups that are 
considered to be involved in terrorist activity. It’s a very broad law 
which allows for the gathering of this information. Primarily, it is 
supposed to be against foreign groups. But ultimately, it has been 
learned that what happens is that when they do this intelligence, they 
often pull up information about U.S. citizens–their addresses, their 
workplaces, their bank statements. And so it’s kind of like an end-run, 
even though they can’t actually be gathering such information.

They often are gathering information about domestic terrorism. FISA’s 
targets include those who might be dangers to human life in violation of 
criminal laws, those intending to intimidate or coerce the American 
population or to influence the policy and effect the conduct of the US 
Government by such coercion.

And one of the things that FISA allowed was gathering all metadata, 
which is data about people’s internet activities, telephone activities 
etc. The gathering of this information, which is digital activity, is 
held by third parties and at one point they couldn’t even tell the 
customers that they were gathering their information.

And now FISA has not been reimplemented as of December of this year. The 
FISA law is not in effect, and they’re trying to get a new FISA law 
passed, and they can’t get it passed by the House of Representatives for 
some strange reason.

There was a new law called the US. Freedom Act of 2015, which was passed 
under Obama. And it supposedly stopped the government from collecting 
Metadata records. They were just grabbing every all the information they 
could from Internet servers or telephone servers. So now they have to do 
individual metadata collecting.

And the other thing that I think you should know about is that the 
Patriot Act is allowed to get records of digital activity held by third 
parties. The Patriot Act also allows law enforcement to share 
information with counterintelligence agents, and vice versa. Before they 
weren’t able to do that. But the Patriot Act has let them do that, and 
that is still in effect, as far as I know.

You need to know that there is still a broad capacity for federal 
intelligence surveillance to gather information and communication from 
allegedly foreign Intelligence agents. Now, in the course of doing that, 
they’re connecting information from US citizens which they’re not 
allowed to do, despite the Obama amendment and thanks to the Patriot Act.

*MM:* I have another final question here. I’m thinking of what is 
probably most historically comparable to the situation of the 
Palestinians here and now. When I think about it, I think about the 
Iranian students that were here in 1979 and 1980 and were deported and 
killed by the Khomeini regime. Do you have any comments on that?

*MD: *Yes, the Iranian students. I represented some of them back when 
they were all arrested, and that a lot of them were deported.

The thing that troubles me and I’ll repeat what I said earlier is that 
because all of these Palestinian resistance groups are on the special 
designated terrorist list, any activity that involves working with those 
groups in any direct or indirect way criminalizes the person that’s 
doing it. This makes it very easy to charge people, not only with 
domestic terrorism, but with material support for international terrorism.

And so that is a troubling thing. Somebody just called me yesterday 
saying that on NBC News a report is saying that all these people that 
are in the streets and protesting are working with Hamas and are under 
Hamas’s direction. That’s just a prelude to criminalizing the protestors 
as providing material support for terrorism.

I would think that was one of the ways that they would go after 
Palestinians. I mean, they could go after them, for, you know, blocking 
the road, and sitting in and doing stuff like that. But those are 
relatively minor criminal charges.

But if they go after them for providing material support for terrorism 
because they’re linked in some way to these designated groups, it’s an 
easier case with much higher stakes.

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