[Ppnews] Cornell - Protest John Ashcroft Nov 29 - Support SF8 & fight repression

[Political Prisoner News]

CALL TO PROTEST ASHCROFT’S APPEARANCE ON CAMPUS
By Aaron Shuman

On November 29th, at 7:30pm, former Attorney 
General John Ashcroft will be speaking on "The 
Politics of National Security" at Statler 
Auditorium in a talk sponsored by the Cornell 
College Republicans. His biography states, "As 
Attorney General in the Bush administration from 
2001-2005... [Mr. Ashcroft] led the Department in 
initiating a tough anti-terrorism campaign that 
has been instrumental in disrupting numerous 
terrorist plots worldwide and dismantling 
terrorist cells in many cities across America."

As part of that campaign, Ashcroft did the following:

*punished U.S. political prisoners by moving them 
into solitary confinement after the 9/11 attacks;
*implemented a policy of special registration for 
people of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian descent 
that recalls the racism of the internment of 
Japanese-Americans during World War II;
*presided over such extralegal maneuvers as the 
classification of "enemy combatants", internment 
at Guantanamo, the USA Patriot Act, and the Bybee 
memo attempting to redefine torture, all of which 
have come under attack and rollback;
*reopened every unsolved case of so-called 
domestic terrorism, and in at least one case­the 
case of the San Francisco 8­rehired the very 
officers who had been implicated in using torture 
to extract confessions in the early 1970s;
*presided over the continued racist expansion of 
the prison-industrial complex under the “war on 
drugs”, the “war on gangs”, and “the war on 
immigrants”, as well as the expansion of the 
Department of Justice-owned and –operated 
corporation UNICOR (aka Federal Prison 
Industries), which has come under attack for 
fraud, labor abuses, and worker injuries up to and including death.

Exactly what have been the results of John 
Ashcroft’s “war on terror”­how many cases opened, 
how many convictions obtained, at what cost­is an interesting question.

In the case of the San Francisco 8, for instance, 
according to their website 
<http://www.freethesf8.org/>www.freethesf8.org, 
“eight former Black Panthers were arrested 
January 23rd in California, New York and Florida 
on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San 
Francisco police officer. Similar charges were 
thrown out after it was revealed that police used 
torture to extract confessions.” Announced with 
great fanfare and bail figures of $2-$3 million 
each, those figures have since been dropped by 
90%; six of the eight are currently out on bail; 
the government has been unable to produce key 
documents and accused of withholding them; the 
integrity of its informant has been called into 
question, and defense attorney Stuart Hanlon has 
vowed to put the government on trial. A 
revolution in recent Panther 
scholarship­including such recent products as the 
four-DVD set “What We Want, What We Believe: The 
Black Panther Party Library” and the book “Up 
Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and 
Unmaking of the Black Panther Party”­details the 
exact roles FBI informants played in sowing 
dissension, setting up leaders, and destroying 
the Party, as well as the work of movement 
lawyers who struggled against this government attack and won.

The documentary on the SF8 case, “Legacy of 
Torture: The War Against the Black Liberation 
Movement”, states that "No federal, state or city 
agent or police officer nor government agency has 
ever been held accountable for the illegal acts, 
violence, imprisonment, and murders conducted in 
the name of [the FBI program] COINTELPRO."

However, news such as the recent trial in Detroit 
of former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino 
for withholding evidence and the overturning of 
guilty verdicts in what the Associated Press 
called “the nation's first major terrorism trial 
after the Sept. 11 attacks” suggest that the 
foundations of the war on terrorism are under 
attack and possible to overturn or crumble. The 
upcoming appeal of the conviction of Eric McDavid 
on “eco-terrorism” charges offers another window 
into misconduct by an FBI informant. With people 
in Washington DC protesting outside the 
Department of Justice virtually every week 
against racist and homophobic prosecutions such 
as the Jena 6 and the New Jersey 4, and the call 
for a week of actions beginning November 21st 
called “Ceasefire: Stop Police Terrorism” against 
everyday police terror tactics, the very question 
of what justice means to the Department of 
Justice is being asked in the streets. Keeping in 
mind that famous revolutionaries such as Nelson 
Mandela, Fidel Castro, and Huey Newton all 
studied law, what is your responsibility and role 
to challenge the police state at this time?

A group of students has called for people to 
protest Ashcroft’s appearance on campus November 
29th. They are holding a planning meeting 
Saturday November 20th at 1pm at the Watermargin 
Co-op, 103 McGraw Place. For more information on 
“Ceasefire: Stop Police Terrorism”, see 
<http://www.myspace.com/freeallpoliticalprisoners>http://www.myspace.com/freeallpoliticalprisoners 
. For more information on the San Francisco 8, 
see 
<http://www.freethesf8.org/>http://www.freethesf8.org/. 
Four of the eight are expected to appear in New York City on November 30th.

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