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FBI Expands 'Witch Hunt' Against Antiwar Activists
The FBI on Tuesday added four more names to the list of antiwar activists subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of an investigation into whether members of the peace movement provided "material support" for terrorism.
In all, 23 people have been subpoenaed since September 24, when the FBI raided the offices and homes of prominent activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. None has been charged with a crime. Several have also refused to testify in what they say is a witch hunt aimed more at intimidating those who dare speak out against U.S. foreign policy than uncovering actual ties to terrorists.
And they're probably right.
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this past June, the definition of "material support" for terrorism is now so broad as to include any sort of "advice" to a State Department-designated terrorist group, even if that advice is "stop engaging in terrorism and embrace nonviolence." Former President Jimmy Carter and groups such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have spoken out against the ruling.
Because the definition is so broad, though, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen - just to name a few - as de facto support for terrorism.
"We are being targeted for the work we do to end U.S. fundig of the Israeli occupation, ending the war in Afghanistan and ending the occupation of Iraq," says Maureen Murphy, editor of the news outlet The Electronic Intifada and one of those subpoenaed on Tuesday. "What is at stake for all of us is our right to dissent and organize to change harmful US foreign policy."
Meredith Aby, another prominent antiwar activist who had her home raided by the FBI, likewise believes she is being targeted for exercising her right to free speech, not because the government actually believes she and other committed pacifists would actually support terrorist violence. She says that the questions U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wants activists to answer - like which activists they met with abroad and what ideas did they express - proves as much. And like other activists, she said she wasn't interested in answering.
"I've never killed anyone," Aby says in an interview. "I have no blood on my hands. The blood is on the hands of the U.S. government, on the Israeli government, on the Colombian government. I'm not interested in helping kill people, and so there's no way that I can testify at a grand jury about what people's political ideas in places as dangerous as Colombia and Palestine."
"We need to send a message that this has gone far enough," she said. "We need to send a message to politicians that they will understand."
Her advice? Tell Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald that you oppose using the law to intimidate committed, nonviolent peace activists whose only crime is exercising their right to dissent. Fitzgerald's office can be reached at (312) 353-5300, while Obama and Holder can be contacted by signing this petition.
"At the end of the day, these men are politicians," Aby says, "and they will make their decision in a political fashion about ... how wide this investigation will go."
87 Comments so far
Show All"Because the definition is so broad, though, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen - just to name a few - as de facto support for terrorism."
Read in my local paper just this AM that the District Court in DC has dismissed the case of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American citizen who had been placed on a secret government "kill list". Which means that, ultimately, Obama and a few other govt. officials have the power to order the assassinations of certain American citizens.
So... 5th Amendment -- bye, bye! A couple of well-placed bullets will silence any and all dissent.
Note also that Obama has still not rescinded Dubya's destruction of habeas corpus, wherein anybody the US Government deems an "enemy combatant" has no right to due process.
The definition of "enemy combatant" is whatever the US Government wants it to be.
Now that is something that should be corrected.
Every sane adult knows who is or is not an "enemy combatant", who is or is not a traitor to his or her country. The only reason to equivocate and broaden those definitions or catagories (or by transference) is to push your own political agenda.
TROLL says, "Every sane adult knows who is or is not an "enemy combatant"..."
Really? How does TROLL know this? Please, do tell.
How are you doing well down there girl? Hope your Christmas is Merry and Bright!!
Feliz Navidad!
mightymite says, "The only reason to equivocate and broaden those definitions or categories (or by transference) is to push your own political agenda."
I see you (inadvertently) get it. Now, why do you think the definition of "enemy combatant" was broadened in the Military Commissions Act? Why was the definition of "domestic terrorism" broadened and made vague in the USA"PATRIOT" Act? Bingo, you got it. It was to "push a political agenda."
If they had defined either of these terms in the bills as "what any sane person knows", they could have supercharged our motion along the trajectory to a police state. Boy, were they dumb.
Is Rumsfeld a traitor to his country? How about Carl Rove? Bush number two? I think so. I'm sane. Does this mean my government is insane?
But you see, they're hard to spot because they're so rare. It's really troubling how rare they are--how are people going to spot the enemy combatants and turn them in if we can't find any? We have to do all their planning and pay them lots of money just to try to blow something up so we can stop them and get it in the papers. We have to let them fly here without passports to get the surveillance thing going, which is embarrassing when it comes out.
It's the same damned confusion over there. It's hard to tell the insurgents from the civilians until you kill them. Then you automatically know, unless they happen to be journalists or something. Which is also embarrassing.
But the real problem is the peace activists, who are trying to make us look divided (they're not making much headway, heh heh heh). Then those enemy combatants really go after us because they think we're weak. Some old teacher once said the pen is mightier than the sword, so I'd say that those peace activists are combating us with something even scarier than swords and so they're our enemies. Wow, she did teach me something I could use!
You say:Every sane adult knows who is or is not an "enemy combatant", who is or is not a traitor to his or her country.
I'm sorry to inform you that I haven't a clue what an enemy combatant is and I sure don't have a definition for "traitor to his or her country". In my book GWB, BHO, GHWB, WJC and all of their cohorts are traitors to this country. NONE of them are likely to be prosecuted any time soon.
If speaking out about what is wrong with invading and occupying other countries is traitorous, then I guess I am a traitor.
I find this posting of yours to be puerile, mightmite, as are so many of them.
Americans have died from day one dissenting. "A couple of well-placed bullets" will never silence the truth.
i thought about calling the number. but what am i supposed to say? please, don't go too far? you should put yourselves in prison? they can/will come and put ME in prison for anything i say.
if / when "they" conclude that the population is against their agenda, "they" will simply pull the next stop.
"they" are NOT doing what they are doing because they think the people understand and approve of it but because they think they can do it despite the public opposition.
the wikileaks style shock and awe tactic, combined with civil-disobedience and system-wide boycott, is not the best way but the only way to bring change.
The more people the FBI can frighten with their Gestapo tactics, the less people protest the wars and other occupations,,,
Bush put into law the Patriot Acts, unleashed the FBI cointell pro program, warrant less surveillance and gave them all immunity from accountability and prosecution,,,
Obama promised transparency , and has continued the Bush Regime of 4th amendment and first amendment violations.
Is everyone starting to see what is going on here, and we need to stop the right vs. left crap , join forces, and clean house, restore constitutional rights and shit can the Patriot Acts and all warrant less surveillance ,
or people will start disappearing or being suicided ..
I have been posting for over three years , this stuff is has been getting worse , and I know what I am talking about.
As the author writes: "Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this past June, the definition of "material support" for terrorism is now so broad as to include any sort of "advice" to a State Department-designated terrorist group, even if that advice is "stop engaging in terrorism and embrace nonviolence."
Because the definition is so broad, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen - just to name a few - as de facto support for terrorism.
Although I have run new-york-commoners-law.com and dons-review.com over the past two years, sites that are radically Progressive and liberal but have little readership except among NYC's ultra-elite, conservative club of top lawyers, I likely will shut them down. I have a wife and a 10-year-old son to raise after being jobless for two years. One reason I've been jobless is that those law firms don't want to be associated with my websites. The last thing I need is for our shabby apartment to be raided at 2 a.m. with my son being traumatized. What I have written in the sites is what my grandparents and parents advocated since the Great Depression: rights for the little people and no wasting of money on stupid wars. Yet, today, that could be enough for the Feds to accuse me of aiding terrorists. Meet the new Weimar Republic before Hitler (Palin?) takes over.
"Meet the new Weimar Republic before Hitler (Palin?) takes over."
I would hazard a guess the US today is more like Rome just before the worst excesses of Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Elbagalbus combined.
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
I love how all these tough members of the MIC feel completely complacent with killing innocent people, wasting trillions of dollars of our money, throwing people in prison and torturing them without trial and violating every international treaty of the last 50 years but they can't face any criticism even as anemic as it is in 21st century America.
F*cking cowards.
It's been going on for so long now that most people don't even think about it let alone question it. Read a few of the quotes of Robert McNamarra when it apparently sunk into his bloody brain that what they did in Vietnam was a crime against humanity. Such as admitting that over 3 million Indonesians died though they had very little if nothing to do with our national security. Or how about talking about the end of World War II:
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
The proportionality thing sounds familiar when counting in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of mid-easterners slaughtered (almost entirely innocent men, women and children) to punish the killing of 3,000 Americans.
And his out and out recognition of what this country did and does during war:
"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
This country has a lot to atone for and being "good Germans" is not an excuse for letting it go on. We may be getting what we deserve, even though there are large percentages of us that have spoken out and continue to do so against the immorality and blood-thirsty "cowardice" of our government. Hopefully, we can somehow be spared, but Innocent people are always getting wasted.
Welcome.
With your PROMIS/ECHELON monitored comment (as all 'Net postings, e-mails, texts, and cell calls are these days), you just joined the 'No Fly' club for the Average Person.
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
And where is Professor Sami Al-Arian?
Today's Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times by Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C.:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-munayyer-mideast-20101222,0,3454024.story
Mr. Munayyer and his "Palestine Center" are most likely now making their way onto the FBI's "terrorist" list.
I was thinking about contacting the Palestine Center to see about contributing some money or giving them a "high fives" for the great article....
But then again....
Obama, you're going to lose the election for the Democrats
Friend, the democrats chances are long gone. Obama is a one termer unless the republicans lose their minds and allow something like the Alaskan Queen to obtain the nomination. (They will also lose more seats in 2012)
Never underestimate the Tbaggers. Their potential for failure is limitless.
Imagine Sarah Palin negotiating head to head with Kim Jong Il. Scary... This country had gone f*****g nuts...
ezeflyer
So what your point? You gonna donate and vote for him again?
Santa was killed
by a predator drone
The White House said
he was a terrorist.
These trite and absurd Nazi comparisons are becomin quite tiresome. Apparently some know very little about the Third Reich and how they worked. And some even less about the Imperial Japanese.
I didn't know an ostrich could type.
Apparently judging by a number of posts here they can.
Merry Christmas to you!
No, we do not commit Nazi atrocities among our citizens YET. That is the point: the legal basis for atrocities is being laid down now--with the abandonment of habeas corpus, indefinite detentions, targeted assassinations, illegal wiretapping, infiltration of organizations opposing US policy by FBI agents, sanctioned torture and more. Don't you see the danger in what is going on?
By the time it happens it will be too late. Drone strikes against Americans is just a breath away. The stage is being set, the cast of mercenaries trained, we're just waiting for the Big Guy to say: And, Action!
Yes you do, the Jews weren't German they were foreigners just like the Mexicans are to America. All you do is call someone a foreigner then you can kill and torture them all you like, doesn't matter whether they citizens or not.
Ask the American Japanese citizens in WW11, the rest of the world is watching with shock and awe at the rapid decline of the US.
Yes, I am all for repetition. But please add what you keep missing.
Yes you do, the Jews weren't German they were foreigners just like the Mexicans are to America. All you do is call someone a foreigner then you can kill and torture them all you like, doesn't matter whether they citizens or not.
Ask the American Japanese citizens in WW11, the rest of the world is watching with shock and awe at the rapid decline of the US, you will soon be a province of China.
Aren't you forgetting something? The decline of the USA was certified by its founding and its attendant crimes against the first people and the scourge of black enslavement.
Yes you do, the Jews weren't German they were foreigners just like the Mexicans are to America. All you do is call someone a foreigner then you can kill and torture them all you like, doesn't matter whether they citizens or not.
Ask the American Japanese citizens in WW11, the rest of the world is watching with shock and awe at the rapid decline of the US, you will soon be a province of China.
Interesting how they always miss that one.
"No, we do not commit Nazi atrocities among our citizens YET"
Really, how do you know they haven't done that to US citizens yet? Do you still believe the liars? Harold Koh Dean of Yale Law school is Obama's legal advisor, same as John Yoon Dubya's legal advisor (torture question). Harold Koh is the key behind the drone killing in Afghan and Pakistan and they have targeted killing two white British citizens. Don't understate the cruelty of Obama.
Everyman must pay his taxes.
Does that mean that Everyman has provided "material support" for terrorism?
With so many of our tax dollars going to Israeli spies prowling through our trash and reading our minds I'm sure the Thought Police will soon be kicking down our doors in the dead of night.
Ocean,
Not "Everyman must pay his taxes" Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle and Kathleen Sebelius did not pay or under pay their taxes.
aliensoup -
Robert McNamara said "Proportionality should be a guideline in war."
McNamara, reflecting upon his World War II experience with Curtis LeMay and his stint as Secretary of Defense for Lyndon Johnson when the war in Vietnam escalated, was actually restating part of the famous just war theory of St. Augustine. The just war thesis holds that in addition to being justified at its inception only in self defense or defense of another, only when confronted with a truly existential threat, then only as a last resort when all alternatives have failed, etc., once begun, the lethality of war must be proportionate to the collateral consequences that are unleashed as it is waged, and the evil that is to be eradicated as the war's final goal.
Held to that standard, neither the invasion of Iraq nor Afghanistan come close to satisfying the just war theory's criteria. One senses that is why the "global war on terror" seeks to blur and mush together the distinction between military and paramilitary behavior, the activities of soldiers and the black ops activity of spies.
What happens to the principle of proportionality when the primary means of waging war are the use of shadowy special ops raids and Predator drone surveillance with only an occasional "surgical" Hellfire missle strike, only when the actionable intelligence planets are aligned? Well, it is more proportionate than Hiroshima, but that rather begs the question doesn't it?
On the major point of this article, it is appalling that the federal grand jury system is going after domestic peace activists while George Bush and Dick Cheney cavort about the countryside smirking, speechifying, and peddling their self-serving memoirs. Torture, warrantless wiretapping, the fixing of intelligence to lie the nation into wars where massive thefts of public funds take place in broad daylight? No crimes here worth investigating.....
Instead, the Department of Justice dusts off the Espionage Act of 1917 and the open ended "material support" statute to go after Wikileaks and the domestic US antiwar movement.
This is not change. It is a return to the tactics of post WWII McCarthyism, and the post WWI Red Scare.
It certainly is not change you can believe in. And we shall not forget.
Bill from Saginaw
"...there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen - just to name a few - as de facto support for terrorism."
I guess that makes me a terrorist. Do you see this Obama? This is my middle finger. Investigate that.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed it was inevitable that the United States would take its place as the world's largest totalitarian country. The brutal repressive policies it imposed on the world through military force in wars of conquest have now been brought home to be used against their own people. Americans for all their talk about rugged individulism and freedom are more like sheep than anything else.
Moving from environmental issues to a more political area, we find again that, "we have met the enemy and he is us" (Pogo - Walt Kelly"). It seems that we are scapegoating ourselves.
Every sane adult knows who is or is not an "enemy combatant", who is or is not a traitor to his or her country.
Well, I don't know about that.. I don't think many people could have seen Timothy McVeigh coming, decorated war hero, and all...
This sounds very much like what Russia did. The FREEDOMS are being whittled away. Make criminals of people who do not want WAR!!!!!!!!!
Exactly! Being for peace means being a terrorist?! Very sick indeed.
If one does research will certainly realize the United States and friend Israel most certainly used the Hiterian policies especally after our Reichstag,and the Bush Administion, with the same use of -"HomeLand", and you are With us or Against,--- illegally invading countries. Bush used the same good Christian bit as Hitler did, and even the religious leaders followed the nazi road to hell. The Bush/Israel road is very active, as Obama was picked to keep it opened. Just like in Germany-1930-you were not allowed to defy the leader or be shot. Will the Blackwater Gang, or CIA become our Gestapo to make sure we become puppets like the Germans back then????
" the religious leaders followed the nazi road to hell "
Some, but not enough were incarcerated because they did not ... about 300, if I remember correctly.
While the Empire hectors and jails anti-war protesters Obomba lights the fuse to the PAKISTAN WAR -- the war being started right NOW:
If Obomba is so gutless and complicit with the ruling-elite's corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE that now IS the US government, that he signs off on opening a war front in Pakistan, then all hell (literally) will break loose.
The idea of US troops invading Pakistan to 'catch' Taliban fighters, as clearly described in this NYT article, is absofuckinglutely insane --- and will start WWIII.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/world/asia/21intel.html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/paki-d22.shtml
Although I must be insane myself for thinking that posting this in Huffington will do any friggin good. I might as well raise the alarm with the FOXy team, or Glenn Beck himself.
God save us all,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
John, what did you think about Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History"?
Just asking.
Best,
Alan