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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">On Political Repression: A Hard
Crackers Discussion with Michael Deutsch</h1>
<p class="entry-meta"><span style="color:red"><span
class="entry-author"><span class="entry-author-name">John
Garvey and Mike Morgan</span></span></span> — March 6,
2024 </p>
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<p>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:</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em> </em><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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. </em></p>
<p><em>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 </em><em>was stripped
of her US citizenship and after months of litigation
was deported to Jordan and now resides in Ramallah.</em></p>
<p><em>Michael Deutsch has written and lectured
extensively on prisons, international human rights,
and political repression.</em></p>
<p>The following is a transcript of our very recent
discussion with Michael Deutsch (MD) – Mike Morgan
(MM) and John Garvey (JG)</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Obviously, there’s no need to tell you about what’s
been going on in Palestine since October 7<sup>th</sup>,
although we are hesitant to assume complete agreement
when it comes to the actual events of October 7<sup>th</sup>.
Unless you think otherwise, we don’t think we need to
explore those issues.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>Would you agree with that brief assessment, Michael?
And what would you add to it?</p>
<p><strong>MD</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM</strong>: How would you describe the
composition of the Arab Palestinian groups within the
solidarity movement now, as compared to previous
moments of heightened activity?</p>
<p><strong>MD</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MD</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JG</strong>: Mike and I both read your <em>Journal
of Palestine Studies</em> 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.</p>
<p>I strongly recommend readers to check out the two <em>Journal
of Palestine Studies</em> articles authored by
Michael Deutsch & Erica Thompson entitled <em>Secrets
and Lies: The U.S. and Israeli Persecution of
Muhammad Salah Parts 1 & 2. </em>See</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42042"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42042</a></p>
<p><a
href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42077"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42077</a></p>
<p><strong>MM: </strong>Could you spell out a little
bit more detail around the defendant Mohammed Salah?</p>
<p><strong>MD</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM</strong>: So he was let loose?</p>
<p><strong>MD</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM</strong>: But Salah had been imprisoned in
Israel for 5 years for bringing the money, right?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>JG:</strong> Are those guys doing okay now?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> This is the Jack Mustafa
character?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> Yes, exactly.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> John, do you have anything more
to ask?</p>
<p><strong>JG: </strong>Yesterday, when Mike and I
talked about the <em>Palestine Studies</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> The Shin Bet people they brought
over were the guys who had performed “the good cop,
bad cop” roles?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> I also noticed in reading the
articles you sent that this Judith Miller person from
the <em>Times</em> testified.</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> Yes. She was brought to the
prison to talk to Salah to come back and write an
article for <em>The New York Times</em>, 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM: </strong>Right. What would they have
gotten? What would have happened to them if they’d
been found guilty?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> For a RICO conspiracy, up to 20
years.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> Yes, I would agree with that.</p>
<p><strong>JG:</strong> Have you seen any evidence of
that so far?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> I’m going to jump ahead to
another question. And that’s about domestic versus
international terrorism.</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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?</p>
<p>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<strong>, </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I should mention some other acts that use terrorism
as well. Just so we round it all out.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JG:</strong> So, Mike, why don’t we jump then
to talking to Michael about the MLN since he brought
it up.</p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> Were they successful in terms of
getting people to accept an offer of cooperation?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> Were they in prison for a long
time?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> Right? Didn’t Clinton grant some
pardons?</p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> Michael, would you categorize
that as taking a stand as a prisoner-of-war?</p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>JG:</strong> Michael, I wonder if we could go
in a slightly different direction. You know I
mentioned that we had read your article in the <em>Northwestern
Law Review</em> 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 <a
href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol75/iss4/6"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://scholarlycommons.law.nor</a></p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JG:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>You have to be on wary of any type of information
sharing with people you don’t know well or trust.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> Should groups that have large
numbers of non-citizens be doing anything special to
decrease the likelihood of deportation?</p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>MM:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>MD: </strong>Yes, the Iranian students. I
represented some of them back when they were all
arrested, and that a lot of them were deported.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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