[Ppnews] The Decline of Resistance from the Red Scare to the War on Terror

[Political Prisoner News]

[an important article but unfortunately skips over the significance 
of Cointelpro and the targeting of the Black Liberation Movement, 
Indigenous Struggles, Puerto Rican Independence and Chicano 
Liberation movements and their supporters. Revolutionary activists 
were assassinated, from Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 
1969 to the 2005 FBI murder of Filiberto Ojeda Rios in Puerto Rico - 
groups were destroyed by the FBI and other government and police 
agencies - and importantly scores of political prisoners continue to 
be caged for more than 3 and 4 decades for their consciousness and 
their leadership and their participation in liberation struggles. The 
San Francisco 8 prosecution of former Panthers is a current 
prosecution, as is the 2000 imprisonment of Jamil Al Amin and the 
threat to execute Mumia Abu Jamal.Let's make all the connections!]

http://www.counterpunch.org/gelderloos08232010.html

August 23, 2010


What's Missing is Solidarity


The Decline of Resistance from the Red Scare to the War on Terror

By PETER GELDERLOOS

August 23, 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused and 
convicted of a double murder in the course of an armed robbery, are 
sent to the electric chair. Ten thousand mourners come to pay their 
last respects, twenty thousand take to the Boston Common in protest, 
and many thousands more march in the streets or attack US embassies 
and banks around the world to honor their passing.

Historian Paul Avrich convincingly argued that the two were innocent 
of the robbery and murders, and were the victims of a judicial 
lynching. The evidence was spotty, the media convicted them in 
advance, and the judge didn't even hide his political vendetta 
against the two.

On the other hand, Sacco and Vanzetti were probably engaged in other 
highly illegal activities, as participants in a tense and bloody 
workers' struggle. And it's beyond dispute that the two of them, from 
prison, continued to call for revolution against capitalism, and for 
vengeance against their executioners.

The most remarkable aspect of the whole affair is how much public 
support they received, not only on the streets, but from 
internationally renowned political figures and intellectuals. People 
like John Dos Passos, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, H.G. 
Wells, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Albert Einstein wrote letters and 
protested in their defense. In today's political climate, no one who 
cared about their social status would be caught dead speaking out in 
favor of a political criminal who espoused fiery and radical ideas.

The War on Terror is even more replete with frame-ups and judicial 
lynchings than the Red Scare, although life imprisonment and solitary 
confinement, arguably far more cruel than capital punishment, have 
come to replace the electric chair.

The main targets of this War are Muslims and Middle Eastern or South 
Asian immigrants, radical environmentalists, and anarchists. In one 
sense, not so much has changed, as immigrants also bore the brunt of 
the Red Scare. The resounding difference is the general silence 
outside the most directly affected communities.

How many people today even know the names of Tarek Mehanna, Marie 
Mason, and Eric McDavid?

In a massive campaign of racial profiling after September 11th, 2001, 
the FBI visited and questioned people in every single Muslim and 
Middle Eastern or South Asian immigrant community in the country. 
Afraid of groups they saw as not culturally integrated, they 
pressured thousands of people into becoming informants for them, 
repeating the COINTELPRO tactic that helped destroy resistance in 
black communities in the '60s and '70s. An unknown number of Muslims 
have been disappeared to secret prisons in other countries, separated 
from their children, and tortured over the course of years. Some are 
unaccounted for and may have been killed.

Tarek Mehanna is a 27 year old Muslim Egyptian born in the US, with a 
doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. He is respected 
both in the local Muslim and interfaith communities, which may 
explain why the FBI was so interested in turning him into a snitch. 
They began visiting him several years before his first arrest, trying 
to recruit him as a paid informant, which would involve giving 
fill-in-the-blank testimony for the feds against other people in his 
community. As he consistently refused, the FBI became more and more 
threatening.

In 2008 they seized the opportunity to arrest him on a technicality, 
indicting him for making false statements during an earlier 
interrogation in 2006, concerning the whereabouts of a friend of his.

Mehanna was released, but then rearrested in October, 2009, amid a 
wave of Terror arrests carried out in the first year of the Obama 
administration, at a time when the new president needed to 
demonstrate his toughness. No new evidence was presented for the 
second arrest, except for the testimony of another member of the 
Muslim community, who had rolled over and agreed to work for the FBI 
after being bribed with a reduced prison sentence, doing exactly the 
kind of dirty work Mehanna refused.

With the second arrest, the media hyped any story the FBI fed them, 
perfectly comfortable with the Bureau's long track record of 
manufacturing evidence and using the press to spread disinformation. 
In no time, Tarek Mehanna was turned from a tolerant Muslim into a 
"fanatic" who was plotting to go on a shooting rampage in a shopping 
mall (that most sacred of American temples), to kill US officials, 
and to join terrorist training camps along with a friend (or rather, 
"co-conspirator"). For lack of evidence, the FBI story had to concede 
that the pair did not actually succeed in making contact with any 
training camps, but this did not at all diminish their concocted 
image as dangerous terrorists. An article in Time even made a big 
deal out of repeating the rumour that at his first court appearance, 
Mehanna wore all black and acted rudely. Oddly enough, none of these 
accusations of concrete terror plots actually appear in any of the 
indictments filed against Mehanna, according to his supporters.

Nonetheless, Tarek is currently being held in solitary confinement 
and charged with aiding and abetting terrorism, which could come with 
a prison sentence of life plus 75 years.

Marie Mason is a 46 year old mother of two, a member of Earth First! 
and the IWW, a gardener, musician, and community organizer who worked 
as an extended care assistant at a Cincinnati school at the time of 
her arrest in March, 2008. After it came to light that her former 
husband was working as an FBI informant, Marie pled guilty to two 
politically motivated acts of property destruction, against a genetic 
research laboratory at Michigan State University in December, 1999, 
and against logging equipment in Mesick, Michigan, in January 2000. 
Both actions were claimed by the Earth Liberation Front, which the 
FBI identified as the number one domestic terrorism threat after 
September 11th, even though no one had ever been harmed in any ELF action.

Marie Mason's arrest came as part of the Green Scare, the targeting 
of environmental activists that has put over a dozen people in prison 
for political acts of property destruction. During the Green Scare, 
the FBI has made frequent use of grand juries to force activists and 
independent media workers to snitch on their friends or give 
information on political protests. Those who have refused have been 
jailed for up to a year.

In 2009, Marie Mason was sentenced to 22 years in prison.  Recently, 
she was transferred to FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. Carswell is 
believed to be the location of a third Communication Management Unit 
(CMU). The CMU is an even more extreme form of isolation, another of 
the gruesome artefacts developed for the War on Terror. Prisoners 
held in the CMU are closely monitored and their contact with the 
outside world is strictly limited. They are only allowed one fifteen 
minute phone call per week, only four hours of visitation, behind 
glass, per month, and all correspondence and conversations have to be 
in English, which is especially cruel for the majority of CMU inmates 
who are Muslim immigrants. In fact, one of the few CMU inmates who is 
not a Muslim is Daniel McGowan, another prisoner of the Green Scare.

Eric McDavid was presented as a dangerous terrorist upon his arrest, 
but as the details of his case emerged it became increasingly 
apparent that the bombing plot for which he was convicted was the 
fabrication of a paid FBI informant who was hired to infiltrate the 
US anarchist movement. The informant, known as "Anna," went to 
various anarchist gatherings around the country and found three other 
young people whom she pressured into forming a group with her. Over 
the course of a year and a half, Anna was paid $65,000 to manipulate 
and bully Eric and the two others into discussing potentially illegal 
political acts with her. She concocted a plan, fed to her by the FBI, 
to build a bomb, and used various forms of pressure, including sexual 
and romantic, to keep the group together. When finally the three had 
reached a point where they wanted out, the FBI sprang its trap before 
its entire conspiracy fell apart. They arrested Eric, along with 
Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner, in January 2006. Despite having no 
criminal record, Eric was denied bail and kept in solitary 
confinement for nearly two years until trial. In the meantime, 
Zachary and Lauren, who had very limited experience with political 
activism and were being threatened with decades in prison, snapped 
and agreed to testify against Eric in exchange for lighter sentences.

Only Eric refused to lie or snitch, and in 2007 he was convicted in a 
trial rife with misinformation provided by the FBI. Before jury 
deliberations the judge gave improper instructions that seriously 
hampered Eric's entrapment defense. Subsequent to the trial, after 
they had gotten all the facts two of the jurors even denounced FBI 
misconduct and stated Eric should get a new trial. The 
judge  sentenced Eric to 20 years in prison.

In all of these cases, despite the extremely abusive nature of the 
prosecution and the way the defendants were treated, and despite the 
threat these political maneuvers by the FBI represent to all of us, 
awareness about these cases and support for the defendants has 
generally remained within their own communities. Few other people 
know about them, and many of those who do remain silent. The 
executive board of the IWW, the famed wobblies of American labor 
history, even denounced Marie Mason after she admitted to 
participation in the acts of eco-sabotage.

Clearly, radical movements today are much weaker than they were in 
the days of Sacco and Vanzetti. But at least a part of that is our 
own choosing. Nowadays politically active people show a much greater 
sensitivity to the timeless smear campaigns of the media than they 
did in the past. Once upon a time everyone knew the newspapers 
belonged to the bosses, and their headlines were just the police 
truncheon in a new form. These days people are often afraid to be 
associated with anyone branded as "radical." Some folks even give 
credence to the term "terrorist," or to the accusations of FBI 
agents, even though the Bureau is composed of the same mix of liars, 
torturers, racists, homophobes, murderers and snitches as in the days 
of J. Edgar Hoover.

People continue to donate to NGOs that are already rolling in dough, 
and that have long since been shown to form a nonprofit industrial 
complex that opts for careers over real change, but they won't have 
anything to do with the support committees for prisoners like these.

What all this represents, far deeper than a general climate of fear, 
is an alienation of resistance itself, from a broad and multiform but 
nonetheless connected movement or struggle into a menagerie of 
isolated single-issues, each with their resident specialists and 
careerists. And the sites of struggle themselves have been split to 
such an extent that someone can "care about the issues" or "be 
informed" while being entirely apathetic towards, ignorant of, or 
even hostile to those who have put themselves on the line and 
suffered the consequences for following their conscience and not 
selling out to the various forces that have pacified resistance, from 
the FBI strong-arming people into becoming snitches to the NGOs 
persuading people to be pragmatic while paying their pricey rent 
through the perpetual management of these social problems.

We can break out of this isolation by choosing now to build a spirit 
of solidarity and a practice of common resistance against the War on 
Terror. An attack on one of us really is an attack on all of us, and 
all these judicial frame-ups are nothing but political repression.

Supporting our prisoners means defeating their attempts to terrify 
us, insisting on the dignity of our causes, and building communities 
in which we really do take care of one another, no matter what 
powerful interests we may be contradicting. Under capitalism, all 
true community is subversive.

<http://www.freetarek.com/>www.freetarek.com
<http://freemarie.org>freemarie.org
<http://www.supporteric.org/>www.supporteric.org

Peter Gelderloos is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0896087727/counterpunchmaga>How 
Nonviolence Protects the State.




Freedom Archives
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