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<h5><b>December 13, 2010<br>
</b></h5><h1><b>Terrorist by Association<br>
</b></h1><h2><b>The Justice Department targets nonviolent solidarity
activists. <br><br>
</b></h2><h3><b>By
<a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/community/profile/6159">Jeremy
Gantz</a></b></h3><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6745/terrorist_by_association/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6745/terrorist_by_association/<br><br>
</a></font>September 24 began like any other Friday for Joe Iosbaker and
Stephanie Weiner. Then, at 7 a.m., FBI agents knocked on the door of the
Chicago couple’s house in the city’s North Side. <br><br>
Armed with a search warrant, more than 20 agents examined the couple’s
home, photographing every room and combing through notebooks, family
videos and books, even their children’s drawings. Some items were
connected to their decades of anti-war and international solidarity
activism, but others were not. “Folders were opened, letters were pulled
out of envelopes,” says Weiner, an adult education professor at Wilbur
Wright College. “They had rubber gloves and they went through every
aspect of our home.” (See video interview with Weiner and Iosbaker
below.)<br><br>
Ten hours after their arrival, as television news crews filmed and
activist supporters stood on the sidewalk, the agents drove away with
nearly 30 boxes of material, including t-shirts and a photograph of
Malcolm X. By that time, Iosbaker and Weiner had been served subpoenas to
appear before a grand jury investigating “material support” for “foreign
terrorist organizations.” And they knew theirs wasn’t the only home
invaded that day. More than 70 FBI agents had raided seven residences in
Chicago and Minneapolis and questioned activists in Michigan, California
and North Carolina, serving subpoenas to 11 people. A few days later, the
Justice Department subpoenaed three members of the Minnesota Anti-War
Committee (AWC), whose office was also raided on September 24. On
December 3, it subpoenaed another 3 Chicago-area activists, raising the
total number of people called to the grand jury to 17.<br><br>
The grand jury and FBI are looking for evidence that connects the 17
activists and their “potential co-conspirators” to two organizations: the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which are both on the State
Department’s “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” list. None of the 17 has
been charged with a crime, and all deny providing “material support,”
including money, to any foreign organization. <br><br>
Citing the Fifth Amendment, all 17 are refusing to testify before the
grand jury, which they say is a secretive arm of a government intent on
silencing critics. (The U.S. Attorney’s office conducting the
investigation declined to comment.) <br><br>
Most of those subpoenaed, including Weiner and Iosbaker, have been active
in the labor movement and/or are members of the Freedom Road Socialist
Organization (FRSO), a self-described “socialist and Marxist-Leninist
organization” with about 100 members. But affiliations vary: 71-year-old
great-grandmother Sarah Martin belongs to the Minneapolis-based group
Women Against Military Madness; Hatem Abudayyeh is executive director of
the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago social services agency;
others are connected to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the
Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago and the Colombia Action Network, which
has protested U.S. military aid to Colombia and the assassinations of
unionists there. The only connection they all have in common is that they
all participated in an AWC-organized rally outside the 2008 Republican
National Convention in St. Paul.<br><br>
Except for Mick Kelly and Tom Burke, FRSO members who have interviewed
PFLP leaders, and Jess Sundin, who met with FARC members 10 years ago
during a visit to Colombia, none of those subpoenaed say they have ever
communicated directly with members of FARC or PFLP. But many of the
activists are sympathetic to those organizations’ goals and some have
traveled to Colombia and Palestine as part of solidarity delegations.
<br><br>
“Anyone who does international solidarity or anti-war work, anyone who
goes against the grain of American politics, is affected by this,” says
Kelly, a University of Minnesota cook and Teamster. “It’s extremely
important to push back against this repression. It affects the movement
as a whole.”<br><br>
<h6><b>The Supreme Court’s ‘deeply chilling effect’</b></h6>The phrase
“material support for terrorism” brings to mind money and weapons, or
other goods and services that directly support a terrorist organization’s
violent objectives or actions. But in June, the Supreme Court in Holder
v. Humanitarian Law Project</i> upheld a much broader definition of
material supportone that criminalizes speech advocating peace and human
rights if it is “coordinated” with an official terrorist organization. It
is this ruling that sets the stage for September’s raids.<br><br>
“For the first time, [the court] actually says it’s criminal to speak
out, to associate,” says Michael Deutsch, an attorney with the
Chicago-based People’s Law Office and one of the National Lawyers Guild
members working with the activists. “The ruling criminalizes First
Amendment activity. It’s quite ominous.”<br><br>
Material support for terrorism was first criminalized by the
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The 2001 PATRIOT
Act broadened the definition of “material support” to include “expert
advice or assistance” and provided a maximum sentence of 15 years. (The
American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh was charged with, but not
convicted of, providing material support to al Qaeda.) In 1998 the
Humanitarian Law Project went to federal court to challenge the material
support statute. The nonprofit group wanted to assist the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) with conflict resolution and human rights
monitoring. It was later joined in the lawsuit by Tamil-American
organizations wishing to provide medical assistance to victims of the
2004 South Asian tsunami, which would have required working with the
now-defeated Tamil Tigers, which, like the PKK, is a State
Department-listed terrorist group.<br><br>
The Humanitarian Law Project argued that the material support law
violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech. But a majority of
the Supreme Court accepted the government’s argumentmade by
then-Solicitor General and current Justice Elena Kaganthat all
nonviolent aid is properly illegal because it “frees up other resources
within the organization that may be put to violent ends” and
“legitimates” foreign terrorist groups. Writing for the majority, Chief
Justice John Roberts clarified that the law only criminalizes speech
“under the direction of, or in coordination with foreign groups,” leaving
“independent advocacy” on the right side of the law. <br><br>
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor strongly
disagreed, writing: “Not even the ‘serious and deadly problem’ of
international terrorism can require automatic forfeiture of First
Amendment rights.”<br><br>
University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq takes issue with the court’s
distinction between “independent” and “coordinated” speecha critical
distinction if any of the 17 activists are charged with “material
support” of FARC and PFLP. “There is some kind of speech that is not
possible to do independently,” Huq says. “There are speech interests that
are squelched here.”<br><br>
Deutsch agrees: “It creates a chilling effect on people who are
challenging U.S. foreign policy. If you speak out for the rights of
Palestinians or question the government of Colombia, or are supportive of
the Kurds’ right to their homeland, you’ve invariably going to come into
contact with these groups. You’re going to be advocating some of the
things that they’re promoting.”<br><br>
That’s a point familiar to former anti-apartheid activists, who organized
to end white supremacy in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement took
direction from the African National Congress (ANC), which was called a
terrorist organization by President Reagan in 1986. If the material
support statute had been in place in the 1970s, the thousands of people
who led anti-apartheid protests across the United States could have been
considered criminals. (The ANC and its leader, Nelson Mandela, were not
removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations until 2008,
15 years after Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize.)<br><br>
“This is almost the 1950s coming back. It’s overreaching,” says Jim
Fennerty, another attorney assisting the subpoenaed activists. Similarly,
he adds, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter could be charged with
“material support” for monitoring Lebanon’s 2009 elections, which
involved coordinated activity with Hezbollah, an official terrorist
organization that was on the ballot.<br><br>
In February, when the Supreme Court heard Holder v. Humanitarian Law
Project</i>, David Cole, the Center for Constitutional Rights attorney
sparred with Justice Antonin Scalia:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Cole: The New York Times</i>, the Washington Post</i>, and the
L.A.Times…published op-eds by Hamas spokespersons…thereby providing a
benefit to Hamas. [Under this statute,] they’re all criminals…President
Carter <br><br>
<dd>Scalia: [Interrupting]: Well, wewe can cross that bridge when we
come to it.<br><br>
</dl><h6><b>COINTELPRO redux? </b></h6><font size=3>While many in the
legal world condemn the material support law, the subpoenaed activists
are focusing their anger on those responsible for the grand jury and the
home raidsthe Justice Department and the FBI. The activists say the
fervor of the current harassment is reminiscent of the agency’s
COINTELPRO program of the 1950s and 1960s that targeted Martin Luther
King Jr., Malcolm X and Black Panther leaders, among many others. (The
long-running operation, which officially ended in 1971, also targeted the
entire “New Left” movement, including Students for a Democratic Society,
a chapter of which Weiner advises at her college.)<br><br>
“This is just another in a long line of cases of FBI and government
oppression against people who think like we do and try to do social
justice work to make changes in this country and other places,” says
Palestinian solidarity activist Hatem Abudayyeh, whose five-year-old
daughter was home when the FBI raided his Chicago house. (Many of the
subpoenas demanded activists produce any records of money given to
Abudayyeh, as well as PFLP and FARC.)<br><br>
Two trends over the past few years are particularly disturbing, according
to Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense
Committee, which advocates local legislation protecting civil liberties.
First, the government is criminalizing speech that was formerly
constitutionally protected, and second, the FBI is regaining access to
intrusive investigative tactics. Buttar co-wrote a November 19 letter to
the Obama administration and Congress signed by 45 advocacy
organizations, that noted “an ongoing trend of intrusive government
surveillance of progressive activists in the United States.”<br><br>
The same week the FBI raided activists’ homes, the Justice Department’s
Inspector General released a report saying the agency had improperly
spied on American activists involved in First Amendment-protected
activities in the years following 9/11. The report, which reviewed FBI
investigations between 2002 and 2006 of advocacy groups including
Greenpeace and the Religious Society of Friends (i.e. the Quakers), said
the FBI had inappropriately labeled nonviolent civil disobedience as
terrorism, thereby improperly placing activists on federal terrorist
watch lists.<br><br>
Weiner says what angers her most about the FBI raid on her home is that
the agents’ motivations were cloaked in secrecy; they didn’t have to
provide any evidence of criminal activity. “The trauma is due to the
[FBI’s] audacitythey took the broadest approachthey didn’t know what
they were looking for.”<br><br>
Buttar says that FBI surveillance of activists without any implicating
evidence has “accelerated” under the Obama administration. In December
2008, former Attorney General Michael Mucasey issued more permissive
guidelines governing FBI investigations. Current Attorney General Eric
Holder could amend those guidelines but has not. “We had thought that
these abuses had ended after the [post-Watergate] Church Committee,”
Buttar says. “But the FBI’s abuses of the constitutional rights of
activists have only expanded under Obama.”<br><br>
Barbara Ransby, who along with Barack Obama was an anti-apartheid
activist while a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, says
that given the long history of abusive FBI surveillance of political
activists, the recent raids aren’t surprising. But the fact that it
happened under the first black U.S. president matters. “In some ways that
gives it more cover,” says Ransby, now a historian at the University of
Illinois-Chicago, who spoke at a recent meeting of the Chicago chapter of
the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “It makes
people hesitant to see it as an attack. As a community of progressives,
at moments like this, we really have to step up and embrace people who
are under attack and defend them without question.”<br><br>
</font><h6><b>‘Undemocratic and biased’</b></h6><font size=3>The
activists directly affected have not hesitated to see the raids and
subpoenas as attacks. Just weeks after the raids, those subpoenaed and
their allies formed the <a href="http://www.stopfbi.net">Committee to
Stop FBI Repression</a>, which is demanding an end to “the repression of
anti-war and international solidarity activists,” the return of all
materials confiscated by the FBI (some have already been returned) and an
end to the grand jury proceeding, which began in August 2009.<br><br>
“I don’t think there’s anything fair about a grand jury,” says Tom Burke,
a central organizer of the committee who was subpoenaed in Grand Rapids,
Mich., after the FBI followed him to a coffee shop. “There’s no judge,
you aren’t allowed to have your lawyer with you. … It’s a totally
undemocratic and biased system, and it would be foolish to cooperate.”
<br><br>
The grand jury system was imported from England by American colonists,
who often used it to defend their rights and express grievances against
the king’s policies. But the unique subpoena power of the modern grand
jury system, in use virtually nowhere else, has long since morphed into
something different, according to attorney Deutsch. Since the Nixon era,
he says, the Justice Department has used grand juries against political
activists, “forcing them to testify [through compulsory immunity], even
what I call ‘interning’ them without charges.”<br><br>
If a subpoenaed person refuses to testify before the grand jury after
being offered immunity by the government, she can be jailed for
contemptwithout ever having been convicted of a crime. The government
considers this “coercion” a means of compelling testimony rather than
punishment; famous victims include former Weather Underground member
Bernadine Dohrn and former <i>New York Times</i> reporter Judith Miller.
Jail is an immediate possibility for some of the 17 activists, three of
whom were re-subpoenaed in November. (The Justice Department let all of
their initial appearance dates pass after they refused to testify.)
<br><br>
But while Dohrn and Miller were released after less than 12 months, the
uncooperative activists could face much more time because the current
grand jury is investigating support for terrorism. (“Terrorism
enhancement” sentencing guidelines, passed after the Oklahoma City
bombing, allow judges to dramatically increase sentences if an offense
“involved, or was intended to promote, a federal crime of
terrorism.”)<br><br>
“They’re not just looking at a few months in jail if they don’t testify,
they’re looking at years,” says Deutsch, pointing to the case of
Abdelhaleem Ashqar as the most egregious recent example of grand jury
abuse. In 2007, a federal judge sentenced Ashqar, a Palestinian and
former professor of business administration at Howard University, to more
than 11 years in prison for refusing to testify before a grand juryafter
he was acquitted of all terrorism-related charges.<br><br>
He remains imprisoned.<br><br>
</font><h6><b>Solidarity drives pushback</b></h6><font size=3>While
they’d rather go to jail than be part of what they call a “government
witch hunt,” the 17 subpoenaed activists are trying to avoid both
outcomes by pressuring members of Congress and encouraging street
protests around the country. In October, the Committee to Stop FBI
Repression organized protests outside of the FBI’s Chicago and
Minneapolis offices, and during the week of November 29, it spearheaded a
series of protests in cities across the country. <br><br>
The committee also sent a delegation to Washington D.C. in November that
met four members of Congress, including Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Luis
Gutierrez (D-Ill.), and Andrea Martin, the executive director of the
Progressive Caucus. No politician had committed to sending a “Dear
Colleague” letter to fellow representatives, but committee members are
hoping that protests outside home district offices, a national petition
letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, and
additional visits to the Capitol will cause influential people to condemn
the grand jury investigation. <br><br>
While the Justice Department’s next step is unclearit could offer
immunity to those subpoenaed, push for indictments or impanel a new grand
jury after the current one expires in Februarythe reaction to its
investigation is not. More than 140 organizations from around the
country, including the Green Party, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations and dozens of labor unions and councils, have condemned the
government’s actions. <br><br>
Jess Sundin, the antiwar activist who traveled to Colombia 10 years ago,
sees those actions as an affront to her freedomsand conscience. “The
idea that it could be against the law for Americans to meet with people
who our government doesn’t supportI never imagined that that was
illegal. I always believed that we had a right and responsibility to
speak our opinions and to dissent when our government is making
mistakes.”<br><br>
<i>This article was updated to note the subpoenas delivered to additional
activists on December 3, the day after </i>In These Times<i>’ January
2011 issue went to press.<br><br>
<br><br>
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