This past summer, Craig Johnson joined dozens of other activists in a San Diego-area park to protest the expansion of a fence along the US-Mexico border.

An associate professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, Johnson says he took his two children, aged 8 and 10, to Border Field State Park in Imperial Beach in June. Scores of border patrol agents were on the scene, Johnson said, and some were recording license plate numbers from protesters' cars parked a more than a mile away from the border.

It seems that Johnson's participation in the anti-fence demonstration may have landed him on a government watch list that has inhibited his ability to travel freely between the US and Mexico. A professor of Music, Johnson said he traveled to Tijuana about a week after the protest; upon returning to the US, Johnson says he was handcuffed and arrested by customs agents after a listing associated with his name pegged him as armed and dangerous.

"I was thoroughly and aggressively searched. ... Every inch and crack and crevice of my body was poked and prodded," Johnson said. "I was in complete bewilderment of what was going on; I felt violated and frankly was embarrassed."

Prior to that visit, Johnson said he had traveled regularly between the US and Mexico for a variety of reasons without facing any harassment. After the June visit, Johnson said he did not cross the border again until October, when he decided to go simply to see whether he could re-enter the country easily. He was subjected to the same harassment.

"It took me four months to return to Mexico," he said. "Not because I'm afraid of traveling outside my own country, but rather because I'm afraid of returning home."

Johnson spoke Wednesday at a gathering organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is highlighting the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security is expanding the authority it claims at US border crossings to infringe upon Americans rights.

The ACLU says a "Constitution-free zone" exists within 100 miles of the US border, where DHS claims the authority to stop, search and detain anyone for any reason. Nearly two-thirds of the US population lives within 100 miles of the border, according to the ACLU, and the border zone encompasses scores of major metropolitan areas and even entire states.



Customs and Border Patrol, a component of DHS, was authorized by Congress to operate within a "reasonable" distance of the border, and that distance has been set at 100 miles in regulations governing CBP, the ACLU says. The authorization has been in place for decades, but complaints about abuses of the extended border zone began to ramp up as CBP was expanded and folded into DHS after 9/11.

Also of concern, according to the group, is the border patrol's use of massive databases and watch lists to screen travelers. Much remains unknown about how those lists are compiled and it is exceedingly difficult for a person to be removed from the list once he or she is added to it.

ACLU affiliates around the country have fielded dozens of calls from people claiming they were harassed by border agents, and the group believes there are untold numbers of other victims who are afraid to come forward.

No lawsuits have yet been filed against DHS or CBP, but the ACLU says its attorneys in border states are preparing cases.

"Part of what we're trying to do is to draw our own line in the sand here and say this has to stop," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, said Wednesday. "We cannot determine two-thirds of America as a Constitution free zone."

DHS 33 "interior checkpoints" that are monitored by the border patrol, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report. The ACLU assumes more checkpoints have been established since then, and group affiliates have complained about checkpoints as far as 93 miles from the border.

ACLU lobbyists are working with members of Congress to rein in DHS's border authority. Caroline Fredrickson, the group's chief legislative counsel, praised a measure introduced by Sen. Russ Feingold and others to ban suspicionless laptop searches at the border.

"We need to restore the Constitution to the Constitution-free zone," Fredrickson said.




Wednesday's event also featured a video testimonial from Vince Peppard, another San Diegoan who faced trouble from border agents. Peppard said he was stopped at least 20 miles inside the border on a return trip from Mexico. He refused to open his trunk "on a matter of principle" and was detained for about 30 minutes.

"I didn't feel like I was in the United States," he says. "I felt like I was in some kind of police state."

The ACLU posted a video of Peppard on YouTube:

WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Diane Abbott's 42-day speech

Diane Abbott's 42-days speech

The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP's speech last night was hailed by the Tory who followed her, David Davies, as 'one of the finest speeches I have heard since being elected to the House of Commons'. Here is what she said.

Diane Abbott 
guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 12 2008 
 
 
Diane Abbott protesting against the increase in the length of time terrorism suspects can be detained without charge on June 10. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

As has been said throughout this debate, the first duty of parliament is the safety of the realm. It is because I believe that the proposals on 42-day detention will make us less safe, not more safe, that I oppose them. I do not take terrorism lightly. 

I am a Londoner and I heard the last major IRA bomb, at Canary Wharf, from my kitchen in east London. Like thousands of Londoners, I waited for the early-morning call that assured me that friends and family on their way to work and school had not been caught up in those bombings. I will not take lectures from ministers about not taking terrorism seriously.

I do not believe, as ministers continue to insist, that there is some trade-off between our liberties and the safety of the realm. What makes us free is what makes us safe, and what makes us safe is what will make us free. 

I ask the house to reflect on how we got here. Two years ago, this house emphatically rejected the proposal for 90-day detention. I do not talk very much about custom and practice in parliament, but it is custom and practice that when the government lose a vote on a proposal, they do not bring back a similar proposal in the same parliament.

 

My hon friends in the whips office now know why that is so: it is because losing the vote is a clue that the government do not have the votes. The government machinery has devoted 10 days to bone-crunching pressure on potential rebels, again because they do not have the votes. Ministers have appeared in the media saying that they have won the argument. They may win the vote, but they have emphatically not won the argument.

Two years ago, the house rejected the 90-day proposal. The issue should never have come back, and all this high drama has been caused by bringing back something that the house has already rejected. I voted for 28 days, but I remind the house that I and others did so only under duress. 

We believed that by voting for 28 days the debate would be finished for this parliament and an upper limit would be established. Some of us were unwilling to go as far as 28 days. That is why we are so upset that the government have come back with this proposal, reneging—as far as we are concerned—on a tacit understanding that voting for 28 days would finish the debate on this issue for this parliament.

Why have the government come back with this proposal? Speculation has raged on the Labour benches as to what has moved the prime minister to take this dangerous course. Some people say that he wants to try to do something that Tony Blair could not do. Some people say that he is driven by the polls. Some people say that last year he saw an article in the Sun that said that he was soft on terrorism and he has been heading down this path ever since.

In reality and despite everything that ministers say, nothing has changed since two years ago. The arguments that they used then about computers and complications are the arguments that they are using now. I ask ministers to spare the house those arguments about decrypting computers. The law exists to deal with people who wilfully refuse to decrypt computer evidence.

The government came back with a proposal that the house rejected two years ago. Interestingly, when they did so it then took them several months to come up with a time limit. Was it to be 29 days, or 30, or 40? At one point, some of us offered to put our hands in a hat and to draw out a number for the home secretary. 

They did not have a number of days because this is not an objective, evidence-driven bill. It is the purest politics. It is about the polls and about positioning. It is about putting the Conservative party in the wrong place on terrorism. 

I put it to colleagues that we should not play ducks and drakes with our civil liberties in order to get a few months' advantage in the opinion polls. We have got here through a process that involved the wrong practical politics and was wrongly motivated.

Let me remind the house of what is problematic about the proposal. The security services have unusually gone public and said that they are not calling for the change. The director of public prosecutions, unusually, has gone public and said that he is not calling for it. I remind the House that he is the prosecuting authority. 

"We will hear from ministers about the police, but the police are split on the subject. We have heard about Sir Ian Blair—whose days might be numbered under the former Member for Henley; hey, that's life—but the most senior Muslim policeman in the Metropolitan police force, Tarique Ghaffur, has said privately and emphatically that he believes that the risk to community cohesion of the proposal is not worth any operational advantage. 

It is alleged—I use that word because I do not want to abuse parliamentary privilege—that he was called in by Sir Ian Blair and asked to consider his position. The police are split on this subject. Let us hear no more about the police as a whole being behind the proposal.

More on the parliamentary debate to be found here.

ACTIVISM: No war, No Warming ! Stop the RNC !

No War, No Warming - No Mas, No More - Stop the RNC!

Come to the Twin Cities, Minnesota To Take Action at the Republican National Convention

Sept. 1-4, 2008. Come Early!

With the occupation of and war in Iraq continuing and escalating--with more Iraqis and US soldiers dying--with the suicide rate of vets hitting record numbers--and with the costs of war spiraling out of control with hundreds of millions being spent in Iraq every day that is badly needed here at home for housing, jobs, schools, health care and clean energy--we must resist!

We are also experiencing climate disruption on a major scale as carbon emissions keep going up and up. People all over the world, especially low-income people and people of color, are feeling the global warming impacts in the form of super-destructive tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes and drought. Our climate is spiraling out of control because of the power of the oil, coal and automobile companies who have put their profits before human lives and our threatened ecosystem.

The US drive toward empire and global domination of all people in order to control and exploit the earth's resources is being led by the violent neoconservatives who dominate the Republican Party.

This drive toward death must stop! We must let the country know that large numbers of us reject their plans to keep wrecking our ecosystem, wage wars for oil and make a mockery of democracy. We must rise up and put our bodies in their way.

No War, No Warming is calling for people to join in nonviolent direct action to disrupt the opening proceedings of the RNC.

We will be working in coordination with Twin Cities activists and progressive groups who are organizing RNC actions to successfully implement a diverse action strategy. No War, No Warming's plan is to establish public assembly sites to help facilitate mass participation in marches to the Xcel convention center where the RNC is meeting in order to reclaim strategic areas around it. Our intention is to occupy that space--to swarm, sieze and stay--using creative acts of direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience.

This is an open cluster and we encourage people to start organizing affinity groups now. We will be participating in spokescouncil meetings in the days before the convention and hold cluster meetings and trainings as well!

There are many action camps this summer and NWNW will be hosting one in Washington DC July 20-25. The camp -an Urban Action Training - will focus on mobile tactics including marches, blockades, swarms and more!

We urge support of the actions at the RNC. We must stop the RNC's drive for permanent war and deeper and deeper climate disruption!

For information contact: info@nowarnowarming.org, or go to www.nowarnowarming.org.

Activism: ILWU to strike May 1 2008

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

by Internationalist Group - League for the Fourth International Saturday, Mar 1 2008, 5:49pm
internationalistgroup@msn.com address: Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008 phone: 212-460-0983

national / war and peace / news report

For Workers Strikes Against the War!

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

For Workers Strikes Against the War!
ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism – Democrats and Republicans – and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force – that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked “if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events.” Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding “yes!”

There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of “national security,” just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the “war effort,” and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!

The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington’s broader “war on terror” which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers’ power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people “at home.”

ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War

Workers strike action against imperialist war isn’t new – it just hasn’t happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to “hot cargo” (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they also did during France’s war in Indochina in the 1950s.

In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the “slave labor” Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about “reds” in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as “military” to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a “mechanization and modernization” contract that slashed union jobs.

As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of “anti-terrorist” government repression, as police fired supposedly “less than lethal” munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.

Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators’ orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see “Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper,” The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would “plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war.” The Call to Action stated:

“ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called ‘war on terror’ is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor’s muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.”

As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.

The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the “war on terror.” Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.

This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour “No Peace, No Work Holiday” against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.

At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, “are you sure you want to do this action.” The delegates overwhelmingly said “yes.” Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we’ve had it with this war, we’ve got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a “stop-work” meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.

The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks “labor peace” with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to “express support for the troops by bringing them home safely,” although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the “support our troops” game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what’s needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor’s muscle to put an end to the war.

Mobilize Labor’s Power to Defeat the Bosses’ War!

For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front “peace” coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had “no resonance” among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, “Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the Opportunists Don’t]”). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war “at home” by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.

That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into “the enemy within.” Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.

At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver’s licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with “background checks,” warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for “trials” in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the “evidence” or even the charges against them – all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let’s not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.

Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.

Write to the Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com. Visit us on the Internet at: www.internationalist.org

http://www.internationalist.org/

Looking at HR 1528, Sensenbrenner's FASCISM

You've Been Drafted: Uncle Sam Wants You for the War on Drugs

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

I want to thank the over 4,400 people who have sent emails to their Representatives opposing Congressman Sensenbrenner's draconian mandatory minimum sentencing bill. This bill is now garnering national attention.

This bill would have serious consequences for our democracy, requiring you to spy on all your neighbors, including going undercover and wearing a wire if needed. Refusing to become a spy for the government would be punishable by a mandatory prison sentence of at least two years.

We need your help to fight this bill, including your ideas.

We alerted you last week to the bill, entitled "Defending America's Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005" (H.R. 1528). Thousands of you have faxed Congress in opposition to the bill and we've already raised $2,000 online to fight it. Thank you!

We already told you about many of the terrible provisions in this legislation, but we are especially concerned about a section of the bill that turns every American into an agent of the state. Here's how it works:

If you "witness" certain drug offenses taking place or "learn" that they took place you would have to report the offense to law enforcement within 24 hours and provide "full assistance" in the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution of the people involved. Failure to do so would be a crime punishable by a mandatory two year prison sentence.

Here are some examples of offenses you would have to report to the police within 24 hours:

• You see someone you know pass a joint to a 20-year old college student.
• Your cousin mentions that he bought Ecstasy for some of his college friends.
• You find out that your brother, who has kids, recently bought a small amount of marijuana to share with his wife.
• Your substance-abusing daughter recently begged her boyfriend to find her some drugs even though they're both in drug treatment.

In each of these cases you face jail time if you don't call the police within 24 hours. It doesn't matter if the offender is your friend or relative. It also doesn't matter if you need 48 hours to think about it. You have to report the person to the government within 24 hours or go to jail. You also have to assist the government in every way, including wearing a wire if needed. Refusing to cooperate would cost you at least two years in prison (possibly up to ten). In addition to turning family member against family member, the legislation could also put many Americans into dangerous situations by forcing them to go undercover to gain evidence against strangers.

This is what we're up against in Congress and, as I told you last week, it's not going to be easy. Sensenbrenner, the chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, usually gets what he wants. Lots of people are afraid to challenge him. But we have a duty to our children to stop our country from turning into a police state. I'm sure you feel this duty, as well.

Here's what you can do:

• If you haven't already, please e-mail your member of Congress.
• Send us your creative ideas. How can we galvanize the American people against this bill? Email actionfeedback@drugpolicy.org .
• If you didn't give money last week, please give today. Even $25 goes a long way (for instance, $25 will allow 100 voters to fax their members of Congress in opposition to this bill.)
• Submit a letter-to-the-editor to your local paper urging your member of Congress to oppose the bill.
• Send this email to everyone you know. Unless tens of thousands of Americans speak up this bill could become law. It's already passed out of subcommittee. The sponsor is now trying to line up the votes he needs to get it out of the full committee. From there it goes to the floor for a full House vote.

The provision that would turn Americans into spies is not the only thing wrong with this bill. Read the full text of HR 1528 and learn more.

Sincerely,

Bill Piper
Director of National Affairs
Drug Policy Alliance

Naomi Wolf

A "Paper Coup," and Blackwater Eyes Midtown Manhattan

Posted November 4, 2007 | 04:58 PM (EST)

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Read More: Blackwater, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Presidential Politics, Breaking Politics News

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I have argued that in the closing stages of a `fascist shift', events cascade. I am hearing about them, even across the globe. Here in Australia I hear from the nation's best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer', she told TSA agents. `Ma'am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,' they replied. `You have not entered the United States.'

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States' -- though it is squarely inside the airport -- so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States' - is a legal no-man's land -- so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?' `Lady, this is not detention,' the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.'

Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared' for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.

A friend emails me a story from USA Today about a 24-year-old college graduate who testified before Congress about her family of immigrants and the difficulties they face; shortly afterward, the entire family was arrested by immigration agents. Another online piece reports that Blackwater is setting up operations along the US/Mexico border and an insightful post on Daily Kos describes how the TSA list will revert from the airlines to the management of the Department of Homeland Security shortly and that by February we may well face the need to apply to the State for permission to travel. If this proposed regulation goes through, we will move from 1931 to about 1934--when the borders started to close-- with the stroke of a pen. Jews in America have hardwired into their DNA a sense of the distinction between those who got out before the borders closed and those who waited a moment too long.

Why should Congress impeach and prosecute this instant, not waiting till February? Why should this impeachment and prosecution be solidly bipartisan? After February it is the leaders on both sides of the aisle -- and the people writing these essays -- who are at most risk of being turned back at the border. People who can't leave in a police state are effectively silenced. And history shows that Republicans are at the exact same risk as Democrats of being violently silenced once liberties are lost. I am reading about IBM's close, profitable involvement with Nazi Germany -- much akin to Prescott Bush's well-documented close and profitable involvement with Nazi Germany through German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen. Right up to the top of the solidly Nazi hierarchy of the IBM affiliate, corporate executives were terrified of taking a wrong step in the eyes of the Party: `There are concentration camps', they would whisper to their US backers. The teenage son of one solid Nazi ally was taken hostage when he resisted Party orders. So alignment with the regime in a police state offers no ultimate protection.

Let us think like business consultants analyzing the decisions of a business that claims it is going to close its door in just a year. What kinds of decisions is it making? Here is a quiz, if you still doubt that we need to shift our thinking and recognize what appears to be 'a paper coup.':

- Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

- These walls would crumble if the next legitimate president independently ends the war. How about defending and expanding the basis for FISA violations at this late stage -- after all, these folks will be gone in a year?

- How about the decision to fight so hard for a US attorney who will defend the view that the President is above the law?

- Why would that matter so much in an administration folding its tents?

- Why the rush to establish Guantanamo as a permanent part of the landscape and even seek money at one point to double its size -- if the next President, a truly independent Republican or Democrat, might just close it down?

- Why the push to expand a war that makes no military or popular sense, rush through military tribunals that the next President might just disband, and, by the way, drum up a fresh new World War III?

- Do the neo-cons advising Giuliani look like a fresh page for an independent, transparent election or an ideological continuity of government in themselves?

- Do these look like the short-term tactics of a fading administration -- or the institutional strategic bases for some kind of new long-term beginning?

- Why work so hard to make sure that the man who defended the infamous "enemy combatant" concept will be the new Attorney General?

Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.' Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, "Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?," that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.) Daniel Ellsberg's much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup' has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency -- noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal. Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN'T say that `waterboarding is torture' -- the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes. They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.

This is the "Blackwater Tactical Weekly." (Yes, Blackwater has its own weekly e-newsletter.) Look at "Islamist protest in N.Y. - 'Mushroom cloud on way'" -- it is reasonable to speculate that Blackwater is focusing on becoming more active domestically in managing domestic protests and rallies. (Regarding this particular rally, note the repetition of the White House `Mushroom Cloud' sound-bite and other signs bearing current White House talking points, that are attributed to alleged Muslim protesters in New York City. The US has a long history of using agents provocateurs -- people dressed as those they are targeting, who pose as conveying a more violent or threatening message than that of the real group itself or who commit acts of violence to stigmatize the group. The Cointelpro program of the 1970's discredited many rallies in this way. An alleged or infiltrated violent, threatening Muslim rally would be the perfect defensible trigger for a Blackwater response.)

See also that Blackwater may be exploring the management of private flights in US airports because of a threat or `threat' to private aircraft. ("Extremists may target private US planes: TSA.") This entry point to the air travel system would seem defensible -- after all Blackwater personnel do in fact guard airports around the world, for example in Bosnia. The danger is that a bleeding of Blackwater into US airport security in general would affect a coup in essence -- quite quickly and serenely -- even as a coup in fact need not be declared. It is a short step from managing private plane and private airport security to aiding the TSA -- which is a branch of Homeland Security -- and Homeland Security and Blackwater have already worked in alliance with one another in New Orleans. A TSA agent blogged about having signed up for Blackwater -- at ten thousand a month, which is a lot more than TSA agents make now and a real incentive -- but I have no evidence of reverse movement. The White House recently announced that the Watch List and No-Fly List together have 775,000 citizens and that they are adding 20,000 A MONTH. This trend on both sides, if not confronted, points to an easy slide to a paramilitarized domestic flight experience in the US and a routine aggressive searching of hundreds of thousands of citizens, the growth being exponential enough so that being aggressively searched could easily soon become a common experience at airports. Nothing at present prevents Blackwater agents from being deployed to help or replace the TSA domestically. Or from being deployed at the next New York City rally such as the one that is being featured on their website. And airports being the lifeline of freedom, if you are scared to fly or can be bullied, interrogated, tasered or worse when flying, you are no longer free. History shows that there is no easy retroactive movement toward a free society once travel is truly restricted.

The Mukasey hesitation on torture is our cue to call a halt to these crimes. (By the way, strapping victims to boards to prepare them for torture was common at Buchenwald.)

Congress must ask:

- What is torture?
- Has it happened?
- Who ordered it?
- How high up the chain of command does this go?
- And what does our system of laws say about such crimes and those who commit them?

If it takes hearings and possible prosecutions to restore the rule of law and maintain a free society, then it is past time for the hearings to begin.

Naomi Wolf Schools Stephen Colbert on The Rise of Fascism in America [VIDEO]

The author of "The End of America" points out disturbing parallels between the Bush administration and fascist dictatorships throughout history.
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The clip to your right features writer Naomi Wolf on The Colbert Report talking about her book, The End of America, A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, which outlines ten steps that "fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders [employ to] seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies.” The ten steps are:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

2. Create a gulag

3. Develop a thug caste

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

5. Harass citizens' groups

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

7. Target key individuals

8. Control the press

9. Dissent equals treason

10. Suspend the rule of law

Naturally an in-character Colbert tries to challenge Wolf's points, shouting "USA number one!" Check out the video to your right for more.

No, I don't use or smoke dope, BUT

Law Enforcement Maintains Marijuana Focus Despite Rise in Violent Crime

Thursday, September 27, 2007

According to recently released statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), marijuana arrests reached an all-time high last year. This news comes despite a rise in violent crime for the second consecutive year. Yet, last year alone, 829,625 Americans were charged with marijuana offenses according to the recently released FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. Eighty-nine percent of those charges were merely for simple possession.

This begs the question: shouldn’t law enforcement focus on the rising violent crime rate instead of wasting precious resources and manpower going after people for marijuana?

Close to 100 million Americans—including more than half of those between the ages of 18 and 50—have tried marijuana at least once. Military and police recruiters often have no choice but to ignore past marijuana use by job seekers. In fact, the FBI recently announced it is changing its policy of not hiring people with a history of marijuana or other illegal drug use because the policy disqualifies so many people the agency cannot fill needed positions.

Marijuana prohibition is unique among American criminal laws. No other law is both enforced so widely and harshly and yet deemed unnecessary by such a substantial portion of the populace. Millions of Americans have never been arrested or convicted of any criminal offense except this. Enforcing marijuana laws costs an estimated $10-15 billion in direct costs alone.

Punishments range widely across the country, from modest fines to a few days in jail to many years in prison. Prosecutors often contend that no one goes to prison for simple possession—but tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people on probation and parole are locked up each year because their urine tested positive for marijuana or because they were picked up in possession of a joint. Alabama currently locks up people convicted three times of marijuana possession for 15 years to life. There are probably— no firm estimates exist—100,000 Americans behind bars tonight for one marijuana offense or another. And even for those who don’t lose their freedom, simply being arrested can be traumatic and costly. A parent’s marijuana use can be the basis for taking away her children and putting them in foster care. Foreign-born residents of the U.S. can be deported for a marijuana offense no matter how long they have lived in this country, no matter if their children are U.S. citizens, and no matter how long they have been legally employed. More than half the states revoke or suspend driver’s licenses of people arrested for marijuana possession even though they were not driving at the time of arrest.

With violent crime on the rise, arresting marijuana users at such alarming rates does nothing to make Americans feel safer.

Testimony by Bill Piper on a New Bottom Line for U.S. Drug Policy

As you know, it is impossible to talk about federal crime policy without talking about the war on drugs. More than half of all people incarcerated in federal prison are there for drug law violations; and through various law enforcement grant programs the federal government encourages the mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders at the local and state level as well. Police make more than 1.8 million drug arrests in the U.S. every year (nearly 700,000 for nothing more than marijuana possession). Those arrested are separated from their loved ones, branded criminals, denied jobs, and in many cases prohibited from accessing public assistance for life. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens for drug violations than all of Western Europe incarcerates for all crimes (and Western Europe has 100 million more people).

Yet, despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars and arresting millions of Americans, illegal drugs remain cheap, potent and widely available in every community; and the harms associated with them continue to mount. Meanwhile, the war on drugs is creating problems of its own - broken families, racial disparities, and the erosion of civil liberties. Congress’s 30 year social experiment in trying to solve a health problem through the criminal justice system is a clear failure. It’s time for a change.

And he goes on to say (and this is REAL, this happened to me although I had never dealt a drug in my life, had run a chemical dependency centre for five years and hadn't taken a drug or drink in ten years!! -- but there was a QUOTA to meet, so what the hell, why not frame me? I didn't have money to fight back. And thus I continue ot live in EXILE.)

Congress should also institutionalize a new bottom line in drug law enforcement. One that moves beyond grading agencies, taskforces, and individual officers on such Vietnam-like “body count” statistics as the number of people arrested and the amount of drugs seized. There is ample evidence that arrests and seizures have little if any impact on drug availability or the problems associated with substance abuse. And the pressure to meet arrest and seizure quotas is spurring civil rights abuses as some officers fabricate informants, raid homes on false evidence, lie to judges, and plant evidence. Anything to increase the “body count”. This pressure to boost the numbers is at the heart of drug war tragedies, including the Tulia, Texas scandal, the Dallas sheetrock scandal and the recent shooting death of Katheryn Johnston in Atlanta.

Recent list of URLS re the SPP and the North American Union

Despite the deafening silence in the US and Canadian media (Have they put ANY reporters on this in the lamestream media? one wonders .. hard to find them!!) the purpose of the upcoming conference is to ratify the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which was initiated by Bush, Martin and Fox in 2005. This so-called ‘partnership’ will result in what the politicians refer to as ‘continental integration’-newspeak for a North American Union- and basically a harmonization of 100’s of regulations, policies and laws.

Once this ‘partnership’ has been ratified a fait accompli; we will be following in the footsteps of the European Union. It will mean that Canada will become part of the North American Union by 2010, and resources, agricultural, health and environment issues, to name a few, will be controlled not by Canada or Mexico, but by the government of the North American Union.

Only there is a BIG difference: you see thesde two member countries are DWARFED by superpower the US! not the same as the European Union at ALL. Europe wasnt' boogged down in an era of genocide and endless way either at the start of the EU .. comparisons are not apt.

The coming megolithic‘NAFTA’ highway, one quarter of a mile wide, is already being built in Texas, where private land is being expropriated, and will eventually reach the Manitoba border and go on from there ... it allows the west coast shipping ports to be circumvented, instead relying on Mexican ports, in the name of facilitating "free trade" . but free trade of what ..? Asian drugs ..?

Water (the new gold) will be the ‘issue’ of this century, as more than 25 states in the U.S. are currently in desperate need. Where do you think they will get the water they need? Canada claims 20% of the world's fresh water "reserves"!! and plans to get it out where developed IN SECRET by the Center for Strategic and International Affairs in Washington DC; they very people who brought you the shock and awe technique used in bombing Iraq into submission.

The United States is already guaranteed 60% of Canadian natural gas resources from NAFTA, which mean that even during emergencies when we need energy which is somewhat perplexing since Canada only has 9 years of PROVABLE gas supplies for itself. Canada is asked to import it! in case of shortage ... This is just one example of how Canada is being shortchanged, and it’s only going to get worse. Even people in Harper's own Conservative party are aghast at this, which was only revealed in Parliament by Gordon Laxer - and the committee Chairman walked out in protest of his testimony!! -- a first in Canadian history. So much for government transparency.

People who are "in the know" in Canada are are perplexed and asking an obvious question these days: Why has there been absolutely NO public consultation on the biggest issue (North American Union) facing Canadians since Confederation?

What has happened to democracy ... or maybe more accurately .. why have we devolved into demo-craaaazee?

Government claims to be democratic, but in fact, does it act like one, or does it prefer to make the big decisions at committee level behind closed doors, while masking its real intentions?

The ratification of the SPP, and the emergence of the North American Union have been organized entirely by government committees and private enterprise for THEIR benefits which simply "won't do"! if we are to live through the 21st century.

Privatization of our resources, transnationals holding ALL the cards, and Canadian and Mexican governments with less and less authority will be a lasting legacy of DIS integration for all our chldren.

http://noworldsystem.com/2007/08/02/unrest-in-canada-over-nau/

Military To Crackdown On North American Union Protesters
http://www.infowars.net/articles/july2007/250707NAU.htm

10,000 To Protest North American Summit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56703

Bush to Attend SPP Meeting in Canada (Aug. 20-21)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56264

John Whitehead on the North American Union
Cheney Denies Plans To Build NAFTA Highway
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Confronted about SPP/
NAU Montebello Quebec Free Speech Ban
Oxycontin, Rudy Giuliani & the Sellout of America
Global Backlash Against Globalization?
No “Conspiracy Theory”: OKC Mayor Signed North American Union Document
Canadians Unaware Of Looming NAU
No Security or Prosperity for Canada in NAU
Opponents of U.S. sovereignty plan to sneak their agenda around Congress
Canadians Completely Unaware of North American Union
The Militarization and Annexation of North America
Protests As U.S. City Gives Aliens ID Cards
Illegal immigrants to get ID cards in Connecticut
DHS Warns States Not to Reject Real ID

What is the ‘North American Union’?

www. care2.com/news/member/956805373/441990

Here's a link to a YouTube video on the North American Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxCeWQ9Ge38 http://www.care2.com/news/member/956805373/441972 http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/backgrounders/guide/index.html Citizen's Guide to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) In March 2005, as a result of intense lobbying from North America’s richest corporations, the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States met in Waco, Texas to shake hands on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The SPP was a pledge to speed up the corporate goal of continental economic integration by linking it to U.S. government security demands... For more information about the Council of Canadians, or its campaign against the SPP, please sign up to receive updates below or call us at 1-800-387-7177. http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/backgrounders/guide/index.html check this out: President Bush Declares State of National Emergency - Martial Law is Next Step http://www.care2.com/news/member/367830772/442943 http://www.care2.com/c2c/groups/disc.html?gpp=6415&pst=809487&archival=&posts=66 Red & White Ribbon Campaign - http://www.vivelecanada.ca/index.php http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php/20030129013604271 Canadian Action Party http://www.canadianactionparty.ca/ Plus: http://www.care2.com/news/member/956805373/443155