Category Archives: civil liberties

Federal judge agrees to limit writer’s testimony

The New York Times reports:

A federal judge dealt a setback on Friday to the Obama administration’s crackdown on the leaking of government secrets to journalists, sharply limiting what prosecutors can ask the author of a book about the C.I.A. in court.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., issued an order that had been sought by the author, James Risen — who is also a reporter for The New York Times — restricting his testimony in the trial of a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Jeffrey A. Sterling, who is charged with providing classified information to Mr. Risen.

Specialists in media law portrayed the ruling as highly unusual, saying it could set an important precedent. While many states have so-called media shield laws that allow judges to quash subpoenas ordering reporters to testify about their sources by balancing the needs of prosecutors with the public interest, the federal government has no such statute.

“I think it’s an important victory for the First Amendment and for freedom of the press,” Mr. Risen said. “The protection of sources will allow for the American press to continue to find and report the truth.”

Federal prosecutors could appeal the judge’s decision. Alisa Finelli, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the ruling.

Prosecutors have charged Mr. Sterling with being a source for a chapter in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.” The chapter details an effort by the intelligence agency to sabotage Iranian nuclear research in 2000, portraying the operation as botched in a way that may have helped Iranian scientists gain valuable information about building a nuclear triggering device.

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Israel’s boycott ban is down to siege mentality

Carlo Strenger writes:

The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.

Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that was passed on Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech. This law makes any call for boycotting Israel economically, culturally or academically a civil offence that can be punished with a fine. Any public body making such a call will lose its legal status and will no longer be eligible for tax-deductible contributions.

The law, as Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz from the leftist Meretz party said, is outrageous, shameful and an embarrassment to Israel’s democracy.

Despite the outrage, I will try to analyse the question: what stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is simpler than many assume: it is fear, stupidity and confusion.

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NYT reporter seeks to quash subpoena; says gov’t tried to intimidate him

TPMMuckraker reports:

James Risen, the award-winning national security reporter for the New York Times who has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors to testify in a case against a CIA whistleblower, accused the government of attempting to intimidate him and his sources in an affidavit he filed to quash the subpoena.

“I take very seriously my obligations as a journalist when reporting about matters that may be classified or may implicate national security concerns,” Risen wrote. “I do not always publish all information that I have, even if it is newsworthy and true. If I believe that the publication of the information would cause real harm to our national security, I will not publish a piece.”

Risen has been called to testify against Jeffrey Sterling, who the government says gave Risen classified information that he used in his book “State of War.” The government has argued that Risen could testify about his previous relationship with Sterling without violating any confidentiality agreement with the former CIA agent.

But he wrote that he had found that the government “all too frequently” claims disclosure of certain information would harm national security, “when in reality, the government’s real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.”

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U.S. pressing its crackdown against leaks

The New York Times reports:

Stephen J. Kim, an arms expert who immigrated from South Korea as a child, spent a decade briefing top government officials on the dangers posed by North Korea. Then last August he was charged with violating the Espionage Act — not by aiding some foreign adversary, but by revealing classified information to a Fox News reporter.

Mr. Kim’s case is next in line in the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks, after the crumbling last week of the case against a former National Security Agency official, Thomas A. Drake. Accused of giving secrets to The Baltimore Sun, Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to a minor charge and will serve no prison time and pay no fine.

The Justice Department shows no sign of rethinking its campaign to punish unauthorized disclosures to the news media, with five criminal cases so far under President Obama, compared with three under all previous presidents combined. This week, a grand jury in Virginia heard testimony in a continuing investigation of WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, a rare effort to prosecute those who publish secrets, rather than those who leak them.

The string of cases reflects a broad belief across two administrations and in both parties in Congress that leaks have gotten out of hand, endangering intelligence agents and exposing American spying methods.

But Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the fizzling of the Drake prosecution “ought to be a signal to the government to rethink its approach to these cases.” He said the government had many options for punishing leaks: stripping an official’s security clearance, firing him or pursuing a misdemeanor charge. Instead, it “has been leaping to the most extreme response, felony charges,” he said.

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FBI agents get leeway to push privacy bounds

The New York Times reports:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

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Criminalizing free speech

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress rightly takes Sen. Rand Paul to task for going on Sean Hannity’s radio program — one week after commendably leading opposition to the Patriot Act on civil liberties grounds — and advocating the arrest of people who “attend radical political speeches.”  After claiming to be against racial and religious profiling, Paul said:  ”But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.”  Seitz-Wald correctly notes the obvious:  ”Paul’s suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process.” 

Indeed, the First Amendment not only protects the mere “attending” of a speech “promoting the violent overthrow of our government,” but also the giving of such a speech.  The government is absolutely barred by the Free Speech clause from punishing people even for advocating violence.  That has been true since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

The KKK leader in Brandenburg was convicted under an Ohio statute that made it a crime to ”advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform” and/or to “voluntarily assemble with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.”  The Court struck down the statute on the ground that it “purports to punish mere advocacy” and thus “sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.”  The Court ruled that “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” — meaning conduct such as standing outside someone’s house with an angry mob and urging them to burn the house down that moment — “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force“ (emphasis added).

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Obama’s mental bookkeeping

David Bromwich writes:

Minutes before midnight last night [on May 26], President Obama, in Paris, by a species of teleportable pen signed into law a four-year extension of the Patriot Act: the central domestic support of the security apparatus devised by the Bush administration, after the bombings of 11 September 2001 and the ‘anthrax letters’ a week later. The first Patriot Act passed the senate on 25 October 2001, by a vote of 98-1 – the opposing vote coming from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. In the years that followed, a minority view developed, which said that the Patriot Act ‘went too far’; but its steadiest opponents have come from outside the mainstream media: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute, and libertarian columnists such as Glenn Greenwald and Nat Hentoff.

In the last few days, two senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, took up the mantle of Senator Feingold (who lost his bid for re-election in the anti-Obama midterm disaster of 2010). Both spoke against a government interpretation of the new Patriot Act which has not yet been shared with the American people.

The senate as a whole voted (this time 72-23) to renew a law that citizens have had no opportunity to understand, as Wyden and Udall present it, and that few members of Congress have looked into, even to the limited extent allowed. The Patriot Act controls secret investigations. The government, however, according to Wyden, has a private understanding of the law. This interpretation has been classified. So the meaning of a law about secrets is hidden because the government’s view of the law is itself a secret.

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A post-9/11 registration effort ends, but not its effects

The New York Times reports:

In the jittery months after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government created a program that required thousands of Arab and Muslim men to register with the authorities, in an effort to uncover terror links and immigration violations.

After complaints that the practice, known as special registration, amounted to racial profiling, the Homeland Security Department scaled back the program in 2003, and ended it late last month, saying it “no longer provides a unique security value.”

But for Mohammed G. Azam, a 26-year-old Bangladeshi native who came to the United States when he was 9, its legacy lives on. When he registered in Manhattan in 2003, officials began deportation proceedings, and now, eight years and numerous hearings later, his case has outlasted the program.

Mr. Azam is one of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of people still caught in the program’s net, immigration experts say.

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Liberté, égalité, fraternité – unless you choose to wear a burqa

The Associated Press reports:

Police on Saturday arrested 61 people — including 19 women — for attempting to hold an outlawed Paris protest against France’s pending ban on face-covering Islamic veils, a top police official said.

Fifty-nine people were detained while trying to demonstrate at Place de la Nation in eastern Paris, as were two others while traveling there from Britain and Belgium, said Nicolas Lerner, chief of staff for the Paris police chief.

The arrests come amid in a rising, if small, groundswell of controversy over Monday’s start of an official ban of garments that hide the face, which includes Muslim veils such as the slit-eyed niqab and the full face-covering burqa. Women who disobey the law risk a fine, special classes and a police record.

Viv Groskop writes:

There was a time when Shazia Mirza, stand-up comic and British Asian Muslim, performed as a character who wore a hijab. She doesn’t now. But she still has a good line on the full-body veil. “All my cousins in France wear the burqa. Which is great. Because they all use the same bus pass.”

Not any more. Tomorrow, France launches a full-scale ban. For Sarkozy and his friends, the burqa is no joke. It’s dangerous and illegal. Women wearing the burqa and the niqab (the more common facial veil) will not exactly be arrested on sight. But if they wear a veil over their face in a public place, anyone can ask them to uncover their face – or leave. Not quite stop and search. Just stop and unmask. If a woman refuses to co-operate, citizens are advised to call the police. The fine is €150.

Does this sound a little unfriendly to you? If so, be very worried. Because this trend is spreading. A ban is already in operation in Belgium and under discussion in Canada, Denmark and Spain. It is likely to become law in the Netherlands this year or next. There have been calls in Sweden for the niqab to be prohibited in schools and universities.

A de facto ban already exists in Italy (where a 1975 antiterrorism law forbids the covering of the face) and Berlusconi’s party has drafted a new, more specific ruling. Last year, a Tunisian woman was fined €500 for wearing a burqa in Italy’s Piedmont region.

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The National Security State of America

An American teenager, forced into temporary exile and then tortured in Kuwait– almost certainly with the knowledge of the Obama administration — has been freed.

A Northern Virginia teen who had been barred from flying home from Kuwait landed in Washington on Friday morning, four weeks after being detained, allegedly beaten by Kuwait authorities and questioned by FBI agents about possible terrorist connections.

Gulet Mohamed, dressed in a worn hooded sweat shirt and sweat pants, was embraced by his family after he arrived at Dulles International Airport, the end of an ordeal that he said had “made me stronger.”

The United States “is built upon fighting for your rights,” Mohamed, 19, said in an interview.

Civil liberties groups charge that his case is the latest episode in which the U.S. government has temporarily exiled U.S. citizens or legal residents so they can be questioned about possible terrorist links without legal counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 17 citizens or legal residents who were not allowed to board flights to, from or within the United States, presumably because, like Mohamed, they were on the government’s no-fly list. Of those stranded overseas, all were eventually told they could return, often after they agreed to speak to the FBI. None was arrested upon their return.

The ACLU suit, filed in Portland, Ore., alleges that Americans placed on the no-fly list are denied due process because there is no effective way to challenge their inclusion. The government does not acknowledge that any particular individual is on the no-fly list or its other watch lists. Nor will it reveal the exact criteria it uses to place people on its list.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports:

The drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is entering the national airspace: Unmanned aircraft are patrolling the border with Mexico, searching for missing persons over difficult terrain, flying into hurricanes to collect weather data, photographing traffic accident scenes and tracking the spread of forest fires.

But the operation outside Austin [described at the beginning of this report] presaged what could prove to be one of the most far-reaching and potentially controversial uses of drones: as a new and relatively cheap surveillance tool in domestic law enforcement.

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration – which controls the national airspace – requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground – high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

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Why the FBI wants you to join Facebook

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom, interviewed by RFE/RL:

RFE/RL: One of your chapters is called “Why The KGB Wants You To Join Facebook.” Why does the KGB want us to join Facebook?

Evgeny Morozov: Part of the argument I’m making in the book is that authoritarian governments have immensely benefited from the web, and I point to three features. One of them is propaganda; one of them is new ways of censorship; and one of them is increased surveillance, more sophisticated surveillance.

The reason why the KGB wants you to join Facebook is because it allows them to, first of all, learn more about you from afar. I mean, they don’t have to come and interrogate you, and obviously you disclose quite a bit. It allows them to identify certain social graphs and social connections between activists. Many of these relationships are now self-disclosed by activists, by joining various groups. You can actually go and see which causes are more popular than others.

But also, it is possible to start identifying trends on the macro level. You can actually go and, using data posted to social-media sites (not just Facebook — I’m talking here more broadly about blogs and about tweets), you can actually start identifying which way social sentiment in a country is going. And that way you may get ahead of real developments.

If the Tunisian government had a sophisticated system of data-mining and analyzing everything that is happening in the country on social media, I bet they would have been much better prepared for what followed. Much of that outrage has been growing on Facebook early on and it was possible to go and check how angry people really were.

And I think many of these tools have already been developed by Western companies mostly, to do brand analysis. So there are a lot of interesting tools already to track consumer sentiment toward goods, and they can very easily be redeployed to study political sentiment. So this is one of the things which I think drives interest from governments in social media.

And not just authoritarian countries, but in the West as well. We have something called In-Q-Tel, which is the venture fund of the CIA, which has been investing in such social-media tracking and monitoring tools for several years now. It is definitely something that is attractive to all governments — not just authoritarian ones.

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The reflexive call for fewer liberties

Glenn Greenwald writes:

William Galston — former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow — has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties. The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it’s too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will. This, he says, is the fault of “civil libertarians,” who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others). As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).

Listen to what he proposes: “first, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance”; those reporting obligations should apply not only to family and friends, but extend to “school authorities and other involved parties.” And “second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others”; instead, involuntary commitment should be imposed whenever there is “delusional loss of contact with reality.” He concludes on this melodramatic note: ‘How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?”

There’s so much warped reasoning embedded in this argument that it’s hard to know where to begin. Galston seems to be unaware of this, but what motivated the reforms in this area were the decades of severe, horrifying abuses which those with mental illnesses — and even those who had none — suffered as a result of permissive involuntary commitment standards and prolonged forced incarceration. Those who suffered mental illnesses were locked away for years and sometimes decades despite having done nothing wrong and despite not being a threat to anyone, while countless people who simply exhibited strange or out-of-the-ordinary behavior were deemed mentally ill and similarly consigned. The psychitaric social worker Alicia Curtis provided just one example: “There is also a large history of the forced treatment of homosexuality as mental ‘illness’.” Indeed, involuntarily committing people in mental hospitals is a time-honored way for stifling any individuality and dissent; see this 2010 New York Times article on how China uses that repressive tactic.

Then there are the factually incoherent claims Galston makes. He harkens back to some sort of Golden Age of the 1960s when thousands of people were incarcerated against their will who did nothing wrong — as though that era were relatively free of political assassinations because all the “crazies” were where locked up where they belonged. Of course, the opposite is true: there were far more violent attacks on political figures back then (MLK, JFK, RFK, George Wallace, Malcolm X, etc.) than there have been during the relatively peaceful time beginning in the 1980s when involuntary commitment became much more difficult.

Worse, Galston assumes, without offering any evidence, that there is a significant correlation between mental illness and violence, but the reality is the opposite: the vast, vast majority of people with mental illnesses never hurt anyone. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t be distracted by body scanners: government spying and the Fourth Amendment

Martin Lijtmaer writes:

On December 15, Bill of Rights Day, the uproar over body scanners had brought the Fourth Amendment to the front of the public debate. There are legitimate reasons to be upset over invasive, costly and arguably ineffective measures adopted in the guise of protecting national security. But the call to arms over body scanners is a distraction.

First, it’s debatable whether body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment. There is a plausible argument that such security measures are reasonable in light of potential hijacking threats. With 9/11 still etched in our national psyche, it’s hard to imagine that courts would deem body scanners unconstitutional.

Second and more important, the uproar over body scanners distracts us from far more egregious constitutional violations routinely committed by our government.

The Fourth Amendment explicitly prohibits authorities from conducting “unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires judicially authorized warrants based on “probable cause” that “particularly describ[es] the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.” Thanks to the Fourth Amendment, police must reasonably suspect criminal activity before conducting a stop and, absent rare exceptions, must secure a warrant, signed by a judge, before conducting a search.

However, in the wake of 9/11, federal agencies have fully ignored these constitutional restraints.

Let’s take, for example, the rampant use of national security letters (NSLs) by the FBI. NSLs are requests for information targeting an individual, but issued to third parties, such as Internet service providers, financial institutions or libraries. The Fourth Amendment requires that such information be obtained through a search warrant signed by a judge, supported by probable cause and specifically describing both the target of the warrant and reason for it.

However, the FBI employs NSLs unrestrained by any of these constitutional requirements. In other words, the FBI can access your highly personal and private information on a whim. And it has not used this power sparingly.

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My parents were executed under the unconstitutional Espionage Act — here’s why we must fight to protect Julian Assange

Robert Meeropol writes:

Rumors are swirling that the United States is preparing to indict Wikileaks leader Julian Assange for conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. The modern version of that act states among many, many other things that: “Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States” causes the disclosure or publication of this material, could be subject to massive criminal penalties. It also states that: “If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions … each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.” (18 U.S. Code, Chapter 37, Section 793.)

I view the Espionage Act of 1917 as a lifelong nemesis. My parents were charged, tried and ultimately executed after being indicted for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage under that act.

The 1917 Act has a notorious history. It originally served to squelch opposition to World War I. It criminalized criticism of the war effort, and sent hundreds of dissenters to jail just for voicing their opinions. It transformed dissent into treason.

Many who attacked the law noted that the framers of the Constitution had specifically limited what constituted treason by writing it into the Constituton: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” (Article III, section 3). The framers felt this narrow definition was necessary to prevent treason from becoming what some called “the weapon of a political faction.” Furthermore, in their discussions at the Constitutional Convention they agreed that spoken opposition was protected by the First Amendment and could never be considered treason.

It appears obvious that the Espionage Act is unconstitutional because it does exactly what the Constitution prohibits. It is, in other words, an effort to make an end run around the Treason Clause of the Constitution. Not surprisingly, however, as we’ve seen in times of political stress, the Supreme Court upheld its validity in a 5-4 decision. Although later decisions seemed to criticize and limit its scope, the Espionage Act of 1917 has never been declared unconstitutional. To this day, with a few notable exceptions that include my parents’ case, it has been a dormant sword of Damocles, awaiting the right political moment and an authoritarian Supreme Court to spring to life and slash at dissenters.

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2011: A Brave New Dystopia

Chris Hedges writes:

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

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Israel jails peaceful protester for riding a bike

Joseph Dana writes:

Of all the criminals involved with the 2008 Gaza war, an Israeli leftist will be going to jail for riding his bike against the war in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv Magistrates court judge Yitzhak Yitzhak convicted Israeli leftist Jonathan Pollak of illegal assembly for his participation in a January 2008 Critical Mass ride against the siege on Gaza and then sentenced him to three months imprisonment that will begin on January 11th, 2011. Pollak was the only one detained at the said protest, and was accused of doing nothing other than riding his bicycle in the same manner as the rest of the protesters. The conviction activates an older three-month suspended sentence imposed on Pollak in a previous trial for protesting the construction of the Separation Barrier. An additional three month prison term was also imposed for the current conviction, which will be served concurrently. His imprisonment is part of a clear strategy of silencing dissent in the Israeli left.

Jonathan Pollak is one of the founders of the Israeli leftist group “Anarchists Against the Wall“, which join weekly unarmed Palestinian protests throughout the West Bank against the Separation Wall and the Occupation. Since 2008, he has served the media coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, an Palestinian umbrella organization designed to garner media attention for the unarmed struggle in the West Bank.

Pollak gave the following statement in court today:

Your Honor, once found guilty, it is then customary for the accused to ask the court for leniency, and express remorse for having committed the offence. However, I find myself unable to do so. From its very beginning, this trial contained practically no disagreements over the facts. As the indictment states, I indeed rode my bicycle, alongside others, through the streets of Tel Aviv, to protest the siege on Gaza. And indeed, while riding our bicycles, which are legally vehicles belonging on the road, we may have slightly slowed down traffic. The sole and trivial disagreement in this entire case revolves around testimonies heard from police detectives, who claimed I played a leading role throughout the protest bicycle ride, something I, as well as the rest of the Defense witnesses, deny.

As said earlier, it is customary at this point of the proceedings to sound remorseful, and I would indeed like to voice my regrets regarding one particular aspect of that day’s events: if there is remorse in my heart, it is that, just as I argued during the trial, I did not play a prominent role in the protest that day, and thus did not fulfill my duty to do everything within my power to change the unbearable situation of Gaza’s inhabitants, and bring to an end Israel’s control over the Palestinians.

His Honor has stated during the court case, and will most likely state again in the future, that a trial is not a matter of politics, but of law. To this I reply that there is hardly anything to this trial except political disagreement. This Court may have impeded the mounting of an appropriate defense when it refused to hear arguments regarding political selectiveness in the Police’s conduct, but even from the testimonies which were admitted, it became clear such a selectiveness exists.

The subject of my alleged offense, as well as the motivation behind it were political. This is something that cannot be sidestepped. The State of Israel maintains an illegitimate, inhuman and illegal siege on the Gaza Strip, which still is occupied territory according to international law. This siege, carried out in my name and in yours as well, sir, in fact in all of our names, is a cruel collective punishment inflicted on ordinary citizens, residents of the Gaza strip, subjects-without-rights under Israeli occupation.

In the face of this reality, and as a stance against it, we chose on January 31st, 2008, to exercise the freedom of speech afforded to Jewish citizens of Israel. However, it appears that here in our one-of-many-faux-democracies in the Middle East, even this freedom is no longer freely granted, even to society’s privileged sons.

I am not surprised by the Court’s decision to convict me despite having no doubt in my mind that our actions on that day correspond to the most basic, elementary definitions of a person’s right to protest.

Indeed, as the Prosecution pointed out, a suspended prison sentence hung over my head at the time of the bicycle protest, having been convicted before under an identical article of law. And, although I still maintain I did not commit any offense whatsoever, I was aware of the possibility that under Israeli justice, my suspended sentence would be imposed.

I must add that, if His Honor decides to go ahead and impose my suspended prison sentence, I will go to prison wholeheartedly and with my head held high. It will be the justice system itself, I believe, that ought to lower its eyes in the face of the suffering inflicted on Gaza’s inhabitants, just like it lowers its eyes and averts its vision each and every day when faced with the realities of the occupation.

In a profile for The Independent, Donald Macintyre wrote:

[Pollak] attended the first of very many demonstrations as a months-old babe-in-arms at the huge mass rally in Tel Aviv calling for an end to the first Lebanon war in 1982. What makes him and his Israeli comrades unusual, however, is the decision to go beyond mere demonstrations to, as he himself puts it, “crossing sides, moving from protest to joining resistance”.

A high school dropout at 15, he was a teenage animal right activist, a cause with few Israeli adherents – and most of those Israelis who were part of it were anarchists. Very much part of Tel Aviv’s young counterculture in the politically relatively relaxed Nineties, Mr Pollak became one too. He remains an anarchist and a vegan, still a strong believer in animal rights, which he sees as consistent with his wider politics. For him, “racism, chauvinism, sexism, speciesism all come from the same place of belittling the other”, he said.

A few minor brushes with the law appear to have been enough to convince the army that he was not suitable material for compulsory military service. “I don’t think they wanted me any more than I wanted them,” he said. He spent two years in the Netherlands, living in a squat, before being deported back to Israel.

By this time, the second intifada was at its peak, and Mr Pollak found himself drawn, despite the dangers for a young Israeli of visiting the West Bank at the time, to the unarmed dimension of the Palestinian cause – including, most significantly, the very first anti-barrier protests in the West Bank village of Jayyous.

According to [Ayed] Morrar [the director of Budrus], a long-term opponent of armed uprising, “Jonathan… is a man trying to prove that those who believe in occupation cannot claim to be humanitarian or civilised. He also wants to prove that resisting oppression and occupation does not mean being a terrorist or killing”.

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