Police State Repression
Know Your Rights!
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Booklet from the Center for Constitutional Rights |
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Also see:
Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the Homeland (a joint project of the ACLU of Massachusetts and Truthout)
U.S. Arming Egyptian Military Clampdown
- Category: Police State Repression
When the Center for American Progress’ Think Progress blog recently compiled all of the inspiring foreign policy successes of our nation’s strong and resolute Commander-in-Chief, they listed — alongside the assassination of a U.S. citizen without due process and increased deference to Israel — what they hailed as the President’s having “supported democratic transition in Egypt.”
President Obama apparently deserves credit for this notwithstanding the fact that his administration supported President Mubarak up to the very last minute; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2009, proclaimed: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family”; and Obama, once Mubarak’s fall became inevitable, tried to engineer the empowerment of Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s long-time trusted lieutenant most responsible for its torture, brutality and domestic repression. If that’s supporting democracy in Egypt, I would hate to see what opposition entails.
Mumia; Obama's Birth Control Obstruction; Actions Vs. Torture
- Category: Police State Repression
DA Drops Death Penalty Case Against Mumia Abu-Jamal
- Category: Police State Repression
from Russia Today 
Just days before the thirtieth anniversary of his conviction, Mumia Abu-Jamal is being spared the death penalty after the district attorney in Philadelphia announced Wednesday that prosecutors will no longer be pursuing that sentence.
Abu-Jamal, rallied world-wide as a victim of an unjust American legal system, has been on death row since being sentenced to execution in the summer of 1982. The previous December he was convicted of murdering a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, though the case and the subsequent sentencing has been of great debate across the globe in the decades that followed.
On Wednesday morning, District Attorney Seth Williams announced that prosecutors will no longer be going after the death penalty, instead accepting a term of life in prison without parole.
Amerika’s Decaying Facade of Democracy
- Category: Police State Repression
Land of the free.
It sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Just don’t try to exercise said freedom. That can come with serious helpings of intimidation and punishment. Pepper spraying, clubbing, incarceration.
Actually, thanks to our United States Senate last week -- with a stunning bipartisan vote of 93 to 7 -- you now can get efficiently and LEGALLY “disappeared” for exercising your HERETOFORE constitutional freedoms. Free speech. Assembly, etc.
Are Americans in Line for Gitmo?
- Category: Police State Repression
by Ray McGovern 
Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.
And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”
The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.” “The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.
Indefinite Detention and the Eviction of Occupys
- Category: Police State Repression
Senate Endorses Military Detention of Civilians
- Category: Police State Repression
A bill co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and GOP Sen. John McCain (S. 1867) — included in the pending defense authorization bill — is predictably on its way to passage. It is triggering substantial alarm in many circles, including from the ACLU – and rightly so.
But there are also many misconceptions about it that have been circulating that should be clarified, including a possible White House veto. Here are the bill’s three most important provisions:
US Senate: Votes for Permanent Detention of All "Terror Suspects", Permanent Guantanamo
- Category: Police State Repression
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On December 1 the shameful dinosaurs of the Senate — hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making — approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF).
This bill contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions — Sections 1031 and 1032, designed to make mandatory the indefinite military detention of terror suspects until the end of hostilities in a “war on terror” that seems to have no end (if they are identified as a member of al-Qaeda or an alleged affiliate, or have planned or carried out an attack on the United States), ending a long and entirely appropriate tradition of trying terror suspects in federal court for their alleged crimes, and Sections 1033 and 1034, which seek to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by imposing onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and banning the use of funds to purchase an alternative prison anywhere else.
Three Prisoners from Hunger Strike Die—Prison Officials Withhold Information
- Category: Police State Repression
via Revolution:
The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity (PHSS) website reported on November 17 that in the month after the second phase of the California prisoner hunger strike that ended on September 22, three prisoners who had been on strike committed suicide.
Johnny Owens Vick and another prisoner were both confined in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU). Hozel Alanzo Blanchard was confined in the Calipatria Administrative Segregation Unit (ASU).
Fighting the New Jim Crow
- Category: Police State Repression
Police State Repression