Victory! Lynne Stewart is free!

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mendation he would be inclined to approve it. And he Lynne’s husband, Ralph Poynter, en route to a routine visit to Lynne at the time, was unaware of these devel­ opments until he landed at the Fort Worth, Texas, air­ port. Poynter immediately contacted prison officials, who agreed to Lynne’s immediate release. Poynter met Lynne, still in prison-issued clothing, at the door to Car­ swell’s visiting room, and off they went, a few boxes of medical and other materials in hand, to a local hotel for a few moments of exhilarating relaxation and to book the first flight home. After three years at Carswell, an ecstatic Lynne told me that evening, it was like jumping Prison doctors have predicted that Lynne’s Stage 4 metastasized breast cancer may allow her some 12-18 Jeff Mackler is the West Coast coordinator of the Lynne months to live. But Sloan Kettering Hospital has pledged to do their best to retard her incurable cancer, in an ef­ fort extend her life even longer. Lynne is set to visit a pa­ Lynne Stewart is free! With almost 100 family and sup­ role officer in the next few weeks, where she will learn porters chanting, “We love you, Lynne,” she rose from a if any restrictions are placed on her political activities. wheelchair and bravely walked forward for a half-hour A million thanks to everyone who joined the interna­ rally at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. She landed at tional effort to press the BOP to grant compassionate 1:10 p.m. on New Year’s Day after a whirlwind, if not un­ release. We have always believed in Lynne’s total inno­ expected turn of events. “How does freedom feel, a bevy cence and fought against the malicious 10-year sentence of reporters asked? “It’s the best,” Stewart replied, as she imposed on her for faithfully representing her client, the explained why all prisoners desperately need the kind “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rachman, an Egyptian cleric of solidarity that she received. “I’m here to fight,” said who was similarly a victim of a U.S. government frameOn Dec. 31, Federal District Court Judge John Koeltl Lynne was originally convicted on charges of conspira­ ordered that the crusading attorney be released from cy to aid and abet terrorism stemming from her release Having made that clear, her impending freedom will be prison. The judge’s order stated, “The defendant’s ter­ of a press statement on behalf of Rachman. This alleged nevertheless our collective victory. Having her home, minal medical condition and very limited life expectan­ violation of a government-issued Special Administrator safe, and in the care of family and friends is the best that cy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that Measure (SAM), even if valid, usually carries with it the we could have hoped for in these times when civil liber­ warrant the requested reduction” in the time she must most minor of punishments—perhaps a letter of repri­ ties are being trashed as never before in recent memory.

mand from a government official and a ban on attorney- Lynne’s release did not come easy, Tens, if not hun­ Stewart’s attorney, Bob Boyle, noted that the Bureau of client visits for a few months. In Lynne’s case, Judge dreds of thousands of people demanded it—repeatedly Prisons (BOP) had at long last certified the recommen­ Koeltl, who originally had sentenced her to 28 months calling, writing, and e-mailing the BOP and Justice De­ dation for compassionate release by FMC Carswell pris­ in prison in 2005, extended the sentence to 10 years af­ partment head Eric Holder. We celebrate this victory on officials, and that the Justice Department then gave ter federal prosecutors appealed to the Second Circuit and wish everyone well for a fighting New Year, when the stamp of approval needed for Judge Koeltl’s final ac­ Court of Appeals with the argument that 28 months was we must continue the battle for justice for all political tion. Koeltl had stated in court several months earlier prisoners and all who suffer the plagues of oppression that if the BOP/Justice Department made such a recom­ Lynne should not have served a single day in prison. that the U.S. government spreads around the world. n SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2014 5 Stewart Defense Committee.

Stewart undaunted. serve of her sentence.

... Snowden (continued from page 1: “Why Edward Snowden has already won”)

Gellman’s Dec. 23 Post article recount­ ing his interview is a treasure trove of critical information reviewing the evo­ lution of Snowden’s impact on U.S. and world politics. The Washington Post, along with the British Guardian and The New York Times, have been among the leading newspapers whose staff regu­ larly receive classified material from Snowden, whose trove has now been estimated to be 1.7 million documents, only a tiny fraction of which have been released to date.

The volume of the government’s “vacuuming” the personal communica­ tions of Americans and people around the world is astounding. Gellman re­ ports: “With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiberoptic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Spe­ cial Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingest­ ing ‘one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,’ had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.

“Each year,” Gellman continues, “NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cell phone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.”

Referring to the standard non-disclo­ sure form that Snowden signed upon taking a job with the NSA, Snowden told the Post, “The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy. That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander [NSA director] and James Clapper [National Intelligence di­ rector] did not.”

Gellman adds: “Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by Brit­ did, almost instantly. into a “parallel universe.” up on terrorism charges. too lenient. ish authorities in Colonial America, when ‘general warrants’ allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, ‘is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s meta­ data. The last time that happened, we fought a war [referring to the American Revolution of 1776] over it,’ he said.”

Meanwhile two panels, one appointed by Obama and another, supposedly in­ dependent, have recommended that the NSA’s surveillance power be curtailed to one extent or another. The so-called independent panel, consisting of five “intelligence and legal experts,” recom­ mended on Dec. 18 that the metadata remain in the hands of private telecom­ munications companies or a “private consortium.” “Mining the data” from these groups, the “experts” suggest, should require a court order—as op­ posed to the NSA’s simply stealing the data, as it virtually does today, or get­ ting a secret judge to sign on to its never denied “requests.”

In this view, the NSA’s unlimited spy power would be a bit restricted and Tony Savino / Socialist Action supposedly placed under some form of judicial or Congressional review. This would, the experts conclude, “safeguard the privacy and dignity of American citizens and promote public trust while allowing the intelligence community to do what must be done to respond to genuine threats.”

Leaving aside the rhetoric employed to assuage public outrage, the decisions of the two district court judges, as well as the panels advising the president, all accept the proposition that the state power—the government of the United States—acts in the public interest, as opposed to the interests of the minor­ ity corporate ruling class. The so-called national-security interests of the state power, which functions as the executive committee of the corporate elite, have nothing in common with the interests of the American or world’s working people, who yearn for freedom, dignity, democracy, and a decent life.

Today, every U.S. war is justified in the name of defending “national secu­ rity” interests—that is, the right of the (Photo) Nov. 17 Socialist Action forum in New York City discussed Snowden and U.S. government spying.

Panelists were (from left) Jeff Mackler, civil rights attorney Michael Smith, antiwar (UNAC) co-coordinator Joe Lombardo, and Ralph Poynter of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee.

corporate owning class to wage war to steal the resources of oppressed people and nations everywhere. The oil wars of the Middle East and North Africa today are deemed “national security wars,” as are the deportations of one million immigrants since Obama came to of­ fice, or the persecution, interrogation, and investigation of 700,000 American Muslims since 9/11—all to defend the “national security” state, in the name of fighting the “war on terrorism.”

“For me,” said a proud Snowden to Gellman, “in terms of personal satis­ faction, the mission’s already accom­ plished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, every­ thing that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

Snowden’s unending revelations have stirred the ire of top military and other government officials, who have called for his head. Court proceedings are un­ derway to charge him with espionage and felony theft of document docu­ ments. Others speculate, with no evi­ dence, that Snowden may have down­ loaded his material to Russia and China, a charge that he categorically denies.

But with 99 percent of his material not yet released, others have thought twice about how to resolve Snowden’s ongo­ ing threat to the government’s credibil­ ity. No one knows when the next timely Snowden missile will be launched.

NSA Deputy Security Director Rick Ledgett told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he favored negotiating an amnesty with (continued on page 11, in “Blue Book as a guide for revolutionaries”)

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the sequester defense spending cuts allowed to go into effect in 2014, Pentagon spending would have declined from current $518 billion in 2013 to $498 billion in 2014. The Ryan-Mur­ ray budget deal sets Pentagon spending for the coming year at $520.5 billion.

As the Washington Post indicated in a lead article on Dec. 12, with the recent budget deal the U.S. House has temporarily retreated from deficit cutting “in favor of Republican concerns about the Pentagon budget,” with The Wall Street Journal adding on Dec. 13 that the budget deal is “nearly erasing the impact of sequestra­ tion on the military”.

That the budget deal is primarily about re­ storing defense cuts was further evident in that the same day the budget deal was passed by the House, it immediately voted to pass the Nation­ al Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, thus lock­ ing in the restoration of Pentagon spending in 2014 at a level above 2013.

Non-defense spending: smoke & mirrors While the proposed sequester defense cuts have been essentially restored for 2014-15, and effectively removed from further deficit spend­ ing cuts in the future (as had tax hikes on the