Prison authorities try to silence Mumia

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SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2013 7 The California-based Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal has released the following statement by Mumia’s attor­ ney, Rachel Wolkenstein.

June 29, 2013—Just days after Mu­ mia’s appeal argument challenging the state’s “secret sentencing” of him to life imprisonment without parole, the Pennsylvania Department of Correc­ tions cut off Mumia’s phone calls for two weeks.

Late Thursday evening, June 27, Mu­ mia called his wife, Wadiya Jamal, and told her he was “written up” for a phone interview with Philadelphia attorney Michael Coard, on his WURD program, “Radio Courtroom,” and didn’t know when he would be able to call next. The next day Mumia’s phone calls were stopped for two weeks.

This is the first time since 1995, with the infamous Department of Correc­ tion (DOC) attempt to stop Mumia’s radio commentaries and punish him for the publication of his book, “Live From Death Row,” that Mumia has re­ ceived any prison disciplinary action. Punishing Mumia for his speech and writing was found unconstitutional by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, as a violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. See Abu-Jamal v. Price, 154 F3d 122 (3rd Circ. 1998).

In another act of harassment, the DOC refuses to process contact visitation be­ tween Mumia and his son, Jamal Hart. In August 2012, Hart had a four-hour contact visit without incident with his father, the first contact visit between fa­ ther and son in 30 years. But the DOC is refusing to grant additional contact visits.

These are attacks on Mumia—in an attempt to isolate Mumia from his fam­ ily and supporters and to silence him. These harassments and restrictions of Mumia’s rights to speech and communi­ cation and his human right to have con­ tact with his family must be fought— immediately and loudly.

The state was defeated in its threedecades-long vendetta to “legally lynch” Mumia. But the state has not stopped in trying to silence him. In general popu­ lation since Jan. 26, 2012, Mumia has continued recording his incisive indict­ ments of U.S. imperialism. His journal­ ism and political commitment since his youth is publicized in the acclaimed new film “Long Distance Revolution­ ary.” His innocence and frame-up con­ viction is exposed in the new short film, “Manufacturing Guilt.”

Mumia will not be silenced. We will not tolerate him being harassed. We need to fight to keep his voice in the public and to have contact with his family. We need to ensure Mumia has contact visitation with his family.

Write, call, email and fax the central offices of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections: John E. Wetzel, Secre­ tary, Pennsylvania Department of Cor­ rections, 1920 Technology Pkwy, Me­ chanicsburg, PA 17050. Phone: (717) 728-2573. Fax: (717) 728-0312. Email: [email protected]. n

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... Snowden reveals Obama spy operation 8 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2013 (continued from page 1: “Snowden blows whistle on Obama’s spy apparatus”)

There was no mention of ongoing FBI threats to fine internet companies who refuse to install devices in their equip­ ment to facilitate government surveil­ lance of every person in the country. That such devices are operative is be­ yond doubt, but we are told that the acquired information is funneled into a “non-government-associated” holding apparatus, accessible only when per­ mission is granted by some secret gov­ ernment oversight body—to be sure, one “sworn” to protect our constitu­ tional rights from people or institutions like the president, the NSA, the FBI, and all the others who might be tempted to abuse them.

Snowden: Spy in from the cold To the great embarrassment of Obama and his posturing co-conspirators at ev­ ery level of government, within days of his “pledge of openness” speech, the lid was blown off any and all pretence of democratic functioning in the U.S. This took place when a 29-year-old former CIA intelligence technician, Edward Joseph Snowden, currently employed at Booz Allen Hamilton, a multi-bil­ lion-dollar government-contracted spy agency, publicly announced what no one could deny—that he was the source of the British Guardian and Washington Post revelations during the previous week.

Snowden disclosed secret and long­ standing FISA court orders demanding that virtually all of the nation’s internet providers—including Yahoo, Microsoft, Paytalk, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Skype and YouTube—allow for the unprec­ edented, secretly conducted, and ongo­ ing government sweep of phone calls, audio and video chats, e-mails, photo­ graphs, documents, connection logs, and other communications used daily by American citizens.

The government spy program, codenamed Prism, supposedly allowed cor­ porations like Apple Computer to offi­ cially deny that they were the “direct” source that inspected the information or allowed immediate government ac­ cess to it. They could point out instead that they served as merely a conduit that funneled all such information into Prism. In all, the whistleblowers report­ ed that the NSA collects phone records on 3 billion private communications per day!

The leader of the Senate Foreign In­ telligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, blithely dismissed the revelations en­ tirely, insisting that since they were FISA court-ordered—that is, issued by a secret court with virtually no govern­ ment oversight—they were perfectly legal. Feinstein did indicate that some unnamed government officials had been “briefed” on the matter.

While government officials also re­ torted that all three branches of govern­ ment had “signed off” on the telephone spying, a top ACLU official, Anthony Romero, denounced the program as a fundamental violation of civil liberties, saying, “A pox on all three houses of government,” regardless of what hid­ den approval devices were employed.

Another just-released 18-page presi­ dential memo has Obama, according to Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, writing in The Guardian, ordering intel­ ligence officials to “draw up a list for potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber attacks.” This never-published October 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 20 states that Offensive Cyber Effects Op­ erations “can offer unique and uncon­ ventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adver­ sary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damag­ ing.” The same objectives can be per­ petrated within the U.S., says Obama’s directive, but only with prior orders from the president, except in cases of “emergency.”

This alone should cause some anxiety among activists who might suffer under the illusion that Facebook and other such social media devices can function as a permanent democratic instrument to challenge capitalist abuse and power and to organize mass opposition. With a push of the government’s “emergen­ cy” button, these new and undoubtedly valuable but ultimately limited forms of communication can expected to be shut down in an instant.

And thus, in a matter of days, the Obama administration’s effort to pos­ ture as defenders of civil liberties went up in flames, and the police-state-type mechanisms that had been meticu­ lously put into place and illegally used for more than seven years, officially, were exposed around the world. What a small layer of political activists had justifiably taken for granted for decades and longer is now the public knowledge of millions—and exposed by a hand­ ful of leakers who will inevitably face severe government persecution. How could it be otherwise?

Edward Snowden was one of some 1.4 Bobby Yip / Reuters million intelligence technicians, opera­ tives, security specialists, or just plain spies who have earned—after the mini­ mum of a one-year investigation—toplevel national security classification status. Moreover, all of these individu­ als work for a mushrooming number of government and privatized spy agen­ cies charged with collecting data from every conceivable source. Indeed, the very rivalry between many of these agencies has fueled internal debates as to whether or not their efforts should be coordinated and the results “shared” to increase their efficiency and avoid duplication of effort.

It was these very “sharing” concerns that allowed Snowden, a relatively low-level employee at Booz Allen who specialized in such technical coordi­ nation, to gain access to the data of multiple agencies and their associated collections of government-classified documents. As with Bradley Manning’s leaks of millions of pages of classified “dirty-op” material to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks—including the release of videotapes of deliberate murder—this once again reveals that capitalism rec­ ognizes no limits when it comes to ad­ vancing its interests.

It is critical to state that Snowden’s revelations, the magnitude of which have yet to be determined, go far be­ yond the spy network daily used against U.S. citizens in violation of their rights to privacy, free speech, and association. It is highly probable that Snowden’s computers, four or five of which he is reported to keep in his possession at all times, contain classified material that includes the illegal U.S. spy operations conducted against virtually all nations on earth. This material ranges from military secrets to private-sector intel­ lectual property and data on scientific breakthroughs that relate to key as­ pects of capitalist production and trade, to documents of the very government and private banking institutions that collectively constitute the core opera­ tions of all U.S. rivals.

Snowden has demonstrated that the U.S. government installed listening de­ vices and other means to spy on all par­ ticipants, including heads of state, dur­ ing the 2009 meeting of the G-8 nations. This form of espionage was extended to the Washington and New York offices of the European Union, the Brusselsbased EU headquarters, and some 38 foreign embassies and missions. Eu­ ropean and Chinese leaders have re­ sponded with fury to these revelations.

(Left) Rally participants in Hong Kong hold up photo of Edward Snowden.

Snowden has now been charged un­ der the Espionage Act with at least three violations, which would total some 30 years in prison, assuming he is extradited, indicted, and convicted. The government is looking for other avenues to persecute this bright and conscience-driven youth, who has little or no previous political experience. Ma­ jor pressure was exerted on the Chinese government to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong, where he was reportedly in hiding with fears for his very life at the hands of U.S. operatives. The Chinese government was in no hurry to accede to the barrage of U.S. demands, espe­ cially when it learned from Snowden’s revelations that it too had been sub­ jected to illegal U.S. spy operations. Un­ daunted, the courageous Snowden con­ tinues to release swaths of illegal and secret U.S. government spy operations, creating an unprecedented nightmare for Obama and the U.S. government.

It is interesting to note here that both Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden state that they took care to not release material that might cause harm to U.S. spies or otherwise directly jeopardize their operations, a form of innocent self-censorship in this writer’s view, that they perhaps believed might limit government efforts to lock them in jail forever—if not worse. This distinction was also employed by the Washington Post and other media who in the past, as with The New York Times’s 1971 re­ lease of the Pentagon Papers and the more recent Wikileaks material, actu­ ally submitted the materials they re­ ceived for prior government perusal— that is, censorship.

In the case of the corporate media, it is simply a matter of doing the bidding of the U.S. ruling elite while attempting to maintain the semblance of a “free press” at the same time. A 1996 Times article noted that the Pentagon Papers, which revealed secret U.S. operations in Vietnam over the course of some 25 years, “demonstrated, among other things, that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Con­ gress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.” The Pentagon Papers, were not declassified and publicly released until June 2011, that is, some 40 years after they were first leaked by RAND Corporation top-level military analyst and former Penta­ gon military specialist, Daniel Ellsberg.

The prosecution and punishment of the leakers remains a top priority, with government officials already investigat­ ing how to inflict the greatest harm to Glenn Greenwald, one of the country’s most democratically minded bloggers and the British Guardian reporter who first exposed this most recent whole­ sale violation of fundamental rights. Greenwald has toured the country and the world for years warning of the dan­ gers of today’s unchecked surveillance and the resulting criminal acts perpe­ trated in the name of national security. This includes a national tour last year, when Greenwald minced no words in damning the government’s persecution of 700,000 members of the U.S. Muslim community since 9-11.

These latest revelations are but the tip of the iceberg. It is only a matter of time until the thousands and more of the millions of U.S. spies “come in from the cold” to expose the daily police-state measures, engineered wars, and mass murders that constitute a key portion of ruling-class policy today.

What Snowden has revealed with re­ gard to government spying differs little from the ever-deepening coordinated military-police measures being put into place in preparation for quelling the massive protests the ruling elite fully (continued on page 9)

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SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2013 9 (continued from page 8)

expect as their ongoing auster­ ity measures inflict deepening misery on U.S. workers.

There was little specific men­ tion in Obama’s May 23 oration on the drone bombings that have to date taken the lives of almost 5000 civilians around the world, including a number of Americans in foreign coun­ tries deemed to be “terrorist suspects” and killed by some remote satellite-guided drone operator halfway around the world. The president did sug­ gest that perhaps the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, might be assigned to drone warfare, thus leaving the CIA free to focus on perhaps more important objec­ tives, including economic and military espionage.

Stealing corporate secrets, pat­ ents, research, and “intellectual property rights” of America’s corporate competitors—an ac­ tivity always considered fair game in today’s thus-far mostly non-military competition for global econom­ ic domination, ranks high in top corpo­ rate circles. To be accurate, Obama did pledge that drone “signature strikes” would perhaps now continue with some vaguely-stated congressional or secret “public oversight,” as opposed to the present criteria of murdering peo­ ple because they live in a region alleged to be in the vicinity of “terrorist opera­ tions.” The latter are defined as any that challenge the ongoing U.S. wars and in­ terventions against their countries.

As in the decade of the Vietnam War, where the unofficial U.S. objective was, perhaps humorously stated, to “teach the Vietnamese not to invade the land that they were born in,” a war that slaughtered four million Vietnamese, terrorists are defined as anyone who opposes U.S. occupations and the rape of their country. In decades past this included the South African forces of the African National Congress, today the governing party of that nation.

To be sure, Iraq and Afghanistan were excluded from the president’s new and non-specific guidelines because these are “real wars,” as compared to Paki­ stan, where thousands of civilian drone murders have been systematically documented even though the U.S. is not “officially” at war in that country. Given this “fact,” the U.S. admits to no drone killings there, a fiction necessary to maintain a semblance of credibility— that is, to everyone except the Pakistani victims.

The use of surveillance drones to daily spy on American citizens was ex­ cluded—at least for the time being by the “democratic” chief of state. Again, maintaining the fiction of U.S. capital­ ist democracy at home still concerns U.S. policy makers, although this fiction stands exposed today more than ever as a crude fraud. The most recent rev­ elations include evidence of the use of drones for U.S. domestic surveillance.

The FBI’s subpoenaing 24 members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organiza­ tion to appear before a Chicago Grand Jury investigating terrorism tells us that the now officially-admitted spy­ ing on virtually the entire nation will be accompanied by persecution and imprisonment of social activists merely because of their political views. This attack on a socialist organization, the first in a generation, and on a group prominently involved in the U.S. anti­ war movement and in the leadership of the broadly representative United Na­ tional Antiwar Coalition, is an ominous sign that worse is to come. The list of antiwar and social justice organizations that have reported and proven govern­ ment and police surveillance is ever in­ creasing.

On the trade-union front, Obama ne­ glected to explain why top government officials threatened to use the military to break strikes by the Longview, Wash., longshore strikers last year and in the not-so-recent past, when the striking ILWU was threatened with “national se­ curity” injunctions and the use of Navy crane operators to break a West Coast ILWU strike.

The monstrous persecution of “whis­ tle blowers” like Bradley Manning— who exposed hundreds of thousands of pages of illegal government spying around the world as well as revealing videotape proof of the conscious mur­ der of U.S. and foreign journalists, as well as civilians, by U.S. helicopter pi­ lots who followed orders to gun down the innocent—never made the presi­ dent’s list of democratic concerns. Per­ secuting the truth tellers rather than the murderers is standard U.S. policy— necessary, again, to defend the “nation­ al security” interests of the U.S. elite.

The shattering of fundamental consti­ tutional rights is today commonplace in today’s legal system. In the name of the war on terror, attorney-client con­ fidentiality has been eliminated via “legalized” electronic surveillance. In the case of Lynne Stewart her private government-taped conversations with her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rachman, were introduced in court as evidence against her—yet another example of trashing democratic rights in the fake war on terrorism.

Immigrants & Muslims persecuted Obama also declined to mention that his administration has deported more immigrants, 300,000-plus over each of the past three years, than any adminis­ tration in history—criminalizing, again in the name of national security, the poorest sectors of the working class, who labor most often at sub-minimum wages to satiate agri-business and oth­ er corporate requirements to re­ main competitive in world markets.

Furthermore, the Obama admin­ istration is using the immigration system to expand surveillance of the entire U.S. population. A FOIA request submitted by immigrant rights groups in 2011 revealed that Secure Communities, a program used to deport immigrants through the jail system, is the precursor of a national biometric database called Next Generation Identifica­ tion, which is currently being de­ veloped by the FBI. And the latest immigration reform proposal ex­ pands E-verify to cover all workers in the U.S. Soon everyone could be required to show a biometric ID when applying for any job. It’s clear from these few examples that at­ tacks on immigrants are attacks on all workers.

Since 9-11, the ever-expanding Homeland Security apparatus has in­ vestigated more than 700,000 Mus­ lims, again with the “justification” that this community represents a threat to the nation’s “national security.” There were no Obama apologies for these blatantly racist persecutions, as there are none for the “stop and frisk” legis­ lation wherein hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown working people are daily harassed, persecuted, and jailed. The U.S. today imprisons the largest number and percentage of its popula­ tion than any nation on earth. It ranks first as well in the number of execu­ tions, in both cases the majority victims of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Ameri­ cans.

With regard to his just admitted, and still unpunished, and therefore im­ pliedly justified, civil liberties incur­ sions, Obama pledged “to strike an appropriate balance [sometime in the future] between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are.” His contemplated formation of an “independent board” to preserve civil liberties, as if the myriad of Constitutional/Bill of Rights protec­ tions and the entire system of judges and juries sworn to defend them were no longer adequate to guarantee these rights, is more than ironic.

Preparation for deep repression These measures signal that the U.S. ruling class has been well aware of the massive mobilizations of workers around the world who have gone to new lengths to challenge the austerity measures imposed on them by a fail­ ing world capitalism that has no choice but to resolve its contradictions at the expense of the great majority. This in­ cludes the increased use of force, vio­ lence, and repression in its multiple forms to thwart the inevitable concert­ ed fightbacks ahead.

... Autonomism (continued from page 7: “Revolution? No thanks, we’re autonomists!”) all busily occupying (pun intended) themselves with their little everyday revolutions, and spreading their ex­ ample bit by bit—and not, god forbid, preparing themselves for what Sitrin herself sees as an inevitable attack by the state!

For revolutionaries, those strug­ gles—like the ones engaged in by the heroic teachers of Greece—are means of accumulating the self-confidence needed for workers to take power as a class through their democratic or­ gans of struggle. But for Sitrin, they must limit their scope and ambitions (in much the same way as the liberal wing of Solidarnosc demanded a “selfWorld capitalism faces per­ haps its greatest crisis in the modern era. Its solution, with few if any exceptions, is to make working people and the most oppressed pay the price of the system’s universal economic failures. The tens of trillions of dollars exacted through nearuniversal austerity measures are used to bail out a system with no recourse other than more of the same—if not fam­ ine, endless wars, and the de­ struction of the environment.

What the capitalist minority fears most is the conscious or­ ganization by dedicated, disci­ plined, and deeply rooted revo­ lutionary fighters of the vast majority, who alone can chal­ lenge its rule and replace it with an egalitarian society where the fulfillment of human needs of the earth’s people and the con­ struction of a world free from war and environmental de­ struction trumps the dictator­ ship of the capitalist profiteers.

This dictatorship reveals its sharp teeth in the threatening code words imbedded in President Obama’s still guarded rhetoric, including his prom­ ise of “democracy” for all. Behind this stilted language, always inclusive of ex­ plicit “national security” justifications for repression, murder, and war, stands a failing system preparing to use any all means necessary to achieve its politi­ cally and morally degenerate ends.

Today, U.S. capitalism still rules with the relative consent of the majority, who despite their growing anger and frustrations, retain the illusion that their lives can be improved, in time, by the operation of the system rather than through their active intervention as revolutionary subjects.

But the ruling rich nevertheless con­ stantly prepare for the time when these illusions are shattered, and mass work­ ing-class forces led by conscious revo­ lutionary socialist fighters and parties that have earned a reputation for being the most consistent representatives of the broad workers’ movement in all its manifestations begin to call into ques­ tion the system itself.

We can see important institutional el­ ements for future repression being me­ thodically moved into place, from major infringements of civil and democratic rights, to preparations for mass arrests, detentions, and imprisonment. A whiff of fascist repression is in the air, await­ ing the time when its real expression becomes a requirement for continued capitalist rule. Between now and then, time remains to organize the working-class millions to defend their own in­ terests and thwart this onslaught with a power far beyond the control of any and all would-be tyrants. n A longer version of this article is avail­ able at www.socialistaction.org.

limiting” revolution—one that ended up handing power back to Capital against the wishes of genuine Polish revolutionaries).

In the next article, I’ll look at some more examples of problems with hori­ zontalist autonomy as revealed in this book.

Let me close here by noting in pass­ ing that given all the above, it’s not surprising—although extremely dis­ quieting—to read on pages 99-100 a passage from Grace Lee Boggs ex­ plicitly counterposing Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X, insisting that the (supposed) absolute nonviolence of the former should have been adopted by the Black movement of the 1960s, and even blaming its downfall at least partly on its failure to have done so. n

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Celia Sanchez (left) with Haydee Santamaria in action as guerrilla fighters in the Sierra Maestra. in the Sierra Maestra.

While small of stature with a frag­ ile appearance, she proved herself to be tough and resilient, capable of the physical hardship of living in the mountains and engaging in combat. She seemed not only accepted by the men and commanders with whom she worked but was respected and relied upon. Her intellect was said to match Fidel’s, and she became his official facilitator. People would go to her to get to him.

All of that alone is enough of a story! But what strikes me, fills me with female pride, is how true to herself she seemed to remain. She was very flexible, able to walk in many worlds. By planting flowers, collecting cuttings of coleus from women around the country who sup­ ported the Revolution and planting marching long distances, canned milk for families with babies that were supporting them, extra blankets for the extremely cold nights, etc.

This is just one example of how her thinking well for the whole group boosted morale, and therefore led to the successes the rebel forces experienced. I think it is fair to say she did not deny the positive aspects of her female gender condition­ ing, while almost simultaneously adopting tough, decisive action when it was called for.

There has always been much speculation about Celia’s relationship with Fidel. I like that Nancy Stout gives little importance to the details of their friendship although she does record that Fidel proposed marriage twice to Celia after they defeated Batista. She declined each time, saying that she