As the hunger strike at Guantánamo has widened to include all of the men held there, President Obama recently announced that he would renew a push on Congress to close the prison and examine his administrative options. However, the implication that Congress is preventing the closure of Guantánamo is at best disingenuous.

Obama has the power to transfer prisoners from Guantánamo right now.  The president himself has placed a uniform ban on transferring any prisoners to Yemen, a collective punishment policy that he could reverse immediately. He could also release prisoners by issuing a certification through the Department of Defense and State that the administration has steps to assure the secure release and monitoring of the prisoners.

Moreover, President Obama’s seemingly newfound rhetorical opposition to indefinite detention runs counter to the policies of his administration. While he may have tried to move the prisoners to the United States, he still wanted them indefinitely detained, in violation of the Constitution and International Law. This has left even supporters of his detention policy befuddled.

The Guantánamo hunger strike can only be ended by the administration taking meaningful steps to close the prison. Those steps can begin immediately by releasing the 86 men who have been cleared for release by the government itself. The remaining men should either be given a speedy and fair trial or released as well.

The men at Guantánamo are resolute to peacefully protest through a hunger strike until they receive justice. One of them, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi put it this way:

I do not want to kill myself. My religion prohibits suicide. But I will not eat or drink until I die, if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place. We want to get out of this place. It is as though this government wishes to smother us in this injustice, to kill us slowly here, indirectly, without trying us or executing us.

Currently, 21 of the men, including Mr. al-Alwi, are bring force-fed in violation of medical ethics. The force-feeding process is brutal, as was described by one prisoner in an New York Times op-ed and can constitute torture, if undertaken as a form of punishment.

As the hunger strike continues, people across the world are pushing for the closure of Guantánamo and an end to indefinite detention. A change.org petition started by a former Guantánamo prosecutor, calling for the prison’s closure, has gained over 100,000 signers in less that two days. From May 17-19, people of conscience will stand together to demand that President Obama close the United States’ forever prison.

The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) held a public forum on April 18 to discuss what effect “The War on Terror” has had on free expression and grassroots political organizing in Maryland and across the United States since 9/11.  The forum featured four speakers whose presentations discussed a number of demonstrations of federal, state and local surveillance and their disruption of peaceful activism.  The forum was opened by Kit Bonson, who explained the MCCRC’s desperate formation, saying:

The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) started because in the fall of 2010, 7 activists in Minneapolis and Chicago awoke one morning to find that their houses were being raided by the FBI. Boxes and boxes of their possessions were confiscated, including computers, papers, and family photos. Although they were never charged with any crime, they were called to testify in front of a Grand Jury.

In response, activists here in our area, as well as in cities around the country, came together to protest the use of the FBI and the Grand Jury process to harass and intimidate movement organizers. Basically, we wanted to stand in solidarity with activists who had not committed crimes or advocated anything other than nonviolence action. It was from these events that MCCRC was founded.

Forum Speakers

Saqib Ali, formerly a Maryland state legislator,  is now the Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Maryland chapter (CAIR-MD).  Ali spoke about the overwhelming surveillance of Muslim-American communities throughout the United States, describing the three major issues facing these communities as the “No Fly” list; the FBI’s infiltration of mosques and the growing presence of FBI informants in mosques; and the near-constant surveillance of Muslim communities.  Ali explained that the “No Fly” list prohibits many Muslim-Americans from travel back and forth between the United States and countries abroad where family members may still be located.  Ali specifically noted that the Transport Security Administration (TSA) compiles their “No Fly” list fairly arbitrarily, and lacks any legal recourse; not only  is the reason for being on a “No Fly” list murky at best, but it becomes nearly impossible to remove oneself from that list.

Ali also discussed the FBI infiltration of mosques, both as a means to surveil Muslim community worshiping therein, as well as to persuade mosque members towards terrorist action and subsequently stage their arrests.  He also discussed the more local development of an NYPD “Demographics” Unit, which singled out Muslim community centers of all kinds throughout New York and New Jersey for surveillance.  He described the “Demographics” Unit as a “wide, indiscriminate dragnet of Muslim everyday things: barber shops, bookstores…”

Sue Udry, the Executive Director of the Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF), broadened the discussion beyond the Muslim-American community to discuss the many different examples of legitimate activism being disproportionately targeted by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.  She specifically mentioned the “Ag Gag laws,” which aim at preventing whistleblowers from exposing any wrongdoing within agricultural operations.  Within these Ag Gag laws is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) which Udry and DDF describe as:

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On Saturday, March 23, 150 people filled St. Catherine of Genoa Church in Brooklyn to mourn the death of Kimani Gray.  Outside, police surveyed the scene from the street and from rooftop. On the night of March 9 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, sixteen year-old Kimani Gray was walking home from a birthday party when he was shot and killed by two plainclothes policemen.   Many witnesses say that Gray “pleaded for his life” as the police fired eleven shots, seven of which hit him.

While Gray was simply returning from a birthday party with friends, the police no doubt “saw a gang,” rashly taking stock of the age, gender and race of the boys before them.  Some reports have argued that Gray allegedly pulled a .38 revolver on the officers (without firing), but at least one witness has denied that Gray drew any weapon.  Gray’s possible weapon possession has raised questions about his potential gang affiliation.  Any possession of firearms or gang affiliation on Gray’s part is irrelevant, though, and only detracts from the conversation—The tragedy of Gray’s murder, above all else, speaks to the unnecessary and dangerous militarization and surveillance of American ghettos.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk programs, communities of color like East Flatbush have been subject to near-constant surveillance.  Rosa Squillacote of the Police Reform Organizing Project in New York City commented in the wake of Gray’s death, saying that as young men of color, they fear that “if [they] go outside, [they're] being watched.”  Her comment was specifically in response to stop-and-frisk programs, which operate on a racial bias (87% of those stopped by the NYPD in 2011 were black or Latino and weapons were found in less than 0.02% of those cases), but it applies to a broader state of living in New York City as well.

There exists a long history of police surveillance and profiling in lower-income, majority non-white neighborhoods in New York City.  This was evidenced in the nights following Gray’s death, when reporters noted scores of police surveilling his East Flatbush home.  Mere days after his death, the neighborhood was overrun: “Walking east along Church Avenue from Nostrand last Thursday afternoon, The Observer counted two police officers on every corner.”  Those police were allegedly there to manage the protests after Gray’s murder, but a similar scene would likely have greeted any passerby before Gray’s death.

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Last week, a historic trial challenging the NYPD’s practice of stopping and frisking almost exclusively people of color in New York City got underway.  Allies of Communities United for Police Reform packed the courtroom and hundreds filled overflow rooms to watch the realities of life under the NYPD in their neighborhoods and city be brought to light in federal court.

The trial was, as described by plaintiff’s attorney Darius Charney, 14 years in the making, with its roots in challenges to the police department’s policies after the shooting of Amadou Diallo.

On Monday March 18, both sides presented their opening arguments, with the plaintiffs laying out the evidence to come showing that the NYPD has engaged in a longstanding pattern and practice of unconstitutional and race-based stops.

The central legal claims of the plaintiffs are (1) that the NYPD has a policy or practice of stopping people without the reasonable suspicion that the Fourth Amendment requires and (2) that the NYPD stops people on the basis of race in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI.

The evidence supporting these claims is too voluminous to cover here, but several particular pieces stood out. In a meeting with NY State Senator Eric Adams, NYPD Police Chief Ray Kelly said the stop and frisk policy was designed to make young black and latino men afraid that they would be stopped wherever they left their buildings, so that “they would leave their guns at home.”

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In Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent contentious appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he hinted that President Obama would soon make a speech on the topic of drone usage for targeted killing. Holder alluded to President Obama’s promise for more openness on the issue in his State of the Union address:

“We have talked about a need for greater transparency in what we share, what we talk about,” said Holder, who added that with the release of more information, “there would be a greater degree of comfort that this government does these things reluctantly but also in conformity with international law, with domestic law and with our values.”

Transparency

The executive’s track record on this has been dismal. The administration first denied the existence of any sort of drone or targeted killing program, continued to use the denial as a shield against liability for its killings in court, while beginning to announce its reasoning informally in speeches by various executive officials.

Any actual documentation of the administration’s logic for assassinating  both citizens and non-citizens was unseen until a “white paper“ summarizing a portion of the goverment’s logic was leaked to the press.

Finally, the administration has begun to show some of the actual (still classified legal) memos outlining the criteria for extra judicial killing to selected members of congress.  However, the public still doesn’t know under what circumstances the President and his lawyers think would justify their murder from the sky.

Transparency would be a good first step. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) staked out a courageous position on in his recent filibuster, finally forcing Eric Holder to declare:

Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

However, this representation (which begs the question: how does Holder define combat?), disclosure of all of the legal memos around drones, and a clear speech from President Obama explaining his necessity for keeping a “kill list” (or “disposition matrix,” if you prefer the administration’s sanitized euphemism) are only the beginning.

Accountability

Ultimately, the people of the United States and their all too often cowed representatives in Washington need to demand a stop to murder, killing and assassination by drones in contravention of the Constitution, international law and human rights law. The broad claims staked out in the leaked white paper make clear that the administration is currently operating under a rubric that violates all three.

While some constitutional issues are esoteric, the protections of due process under the Fifth Amendment are not.  The government does not have the right to deprive you of your life, after review of your perceived sins by government officials on “Terror Tuesdays.”

Some in Congress and the punditocracy have suggested that the due process problem be solved by so called “drone courts” where the government would secretly present the evidence against you to a judge who would then sign a death warrant. While paying some lip service to the idea that an independent judiciary can constrain executive power, a secret court authorizing murder is not a check or balance in any meaningful way.

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In just two months, in April, 2013, Yale University will officially open its doors to the United States Special Forces as the University debuts its first ever training center for military interrogators.  Yale and the U.S. Department of Defense see New Haven’s large immigrant community as a perfect test population for the lie detection and interrogation techniques they will be developing at the center.

In 2006, the New York Times called New Haven, Connecticut one of the poorest cities in the United States, where almost 25% of the population lives below the poverty line and the per capita income hovered at $16,393 in 2011.  The large majority of New Haven’s population is non-white; non-Hispanic whites made up 31.8% of the city’s population in 2010.  New Haven’s stark racial and economic divide is further emphasized by the presence of Yale University, a symbol of economic and racial privilege, which is now using these privileges to coerce its immigrant population into the role of guinea pig in the new center for “warrior academics.”

Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and head of the University’s new interrogation training program, euphemistically referred to “warrior academics” as fostering “people skills.”  He will specifically require the center’s test subjects to be brown-skinned immigrants, specifically naming “Moroccans, Colombians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others” as possible participants.  These individuals will be financially compensated for their participation, but far from being benevolent, this compensation stands as proof that the Military Industrial Complex (now inextricably linked with academic institutions) preys upon the economic vulnerability of marginalized populations to advance its own agenda.

The use of brown faces (which Professor Morgan hopes signifies “someone [soldiers] can’t necessarily identify with”) will only continue to disadvantage global and local non-white populations.  Here on  U.S. soil, New Haven’s non-white populations will be postured as unfamiliar racial “others.”  Abroad, it is likely that American soldiers will enter interrogation settings being predisposed to mistrust brown faces and with the supposition that all brown people “must belong to the same ‘category’ of liar” (which the center naturally assumes is a different category than white liars) as Guest Columnists for the Yale Daily News Nathalie Batraville and Alex Law argue.

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On the heels of a Charlottesville, Virginia city council resolution banning the use of drones by the city, Virginia State legislators sent a bill to the governor’s desk which would place a two year moratorium on the use of drones. While the state resolution would only place a temporary ban on domestic drone usage, it provides a space from continued activism and education around the dangers that unchecked drones present to constitutional rights.

The Charlottesville resolution specifically prohibits the use of criminal evidence obtained by drone surveillance.

“To me, it’s Big Brother in the sky,” said Dave Norris, a city councilman in Charlottesville, Va., which this month became the first city in the country to restrict the use of drones. “I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial about it, but these drones are coming, and we need to put some safeguards in place so they are not abused.”

The bill, spearheaded by The Rutherford Institute and activist David Swanson, found support from a packed room of a supporters at the city council hearing.  The pro-drone lobby did not make an appearance, failing to raise some of the orwellian arguments or language that can be found on one of their websites, IncreasingHumanPotential.org. The Charlottesville resolution marks the first success of a number of local and national movements to ban or regulate the use of domestic drones.

In addition to Virgina, states and localities from California to Massachusetts have introduced anti-drone bills.  Draft legislation in congress would ban the weaponization of domestic drones, require warrants for drone surveillance and make it a misermeanor to photograph a person without their permission.  While the legislation makes an exception for US border areas, it defines these regions as within 25 miles of a land border, rather than the large nebulous zones that have proved to be black holes for constitutional rights. Even without legislation, public pressure in Seattle, Washington caused the police department to forgo the use of a drone for surveillance of crime scenes. Activists across the country are also preparing for a campaign against the use of drones, both domestically and internationally.

Police consultants such as William Bratton and Robert Wasserman are warping policing nationwide, and even globally, to a disturbing uniformity. Cash-strapped cities are paying their consulting firms thousands, even millions, of dollars for advice on how to implement “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” style policing. These policies are springing up across the country, as advocates and communities scramble to respond.  The most recent place is Oakland.

On January 15, hundreds of concerned Oakland residents attended a public safety committee meeting of the Oakland City Council to express their concern over Oakland’s plan to extend a $250,000 contract to Bratton, best known for stop-and-frisk and other zero tolerance policies in New York city.  After a rally, hundreds of people squeezed inside the Council chambers; so many people, in fact, that police blocked off doors and started to turn stragglers away, until an overflow room was hastily set up. The tensions in the room were clear, as catcalling and booing started nearly immediately.

For nearly five hours, speaker after speaker stood at the podium to say that Oakland needs funds for services, not consultants, and that the root of the crime problem is the policies that criminalize black and brown people. One African-american elder stated the feelings of many in the crowd poignantly, as he discussed the targeting of young black men by the police:

If you want to kill a tree, kill the roots. If you want to kill a race, kill the children.

Members of the Justice for Alan Blueford Coalition  reminded the council that Oakland’s policies, even without the aid of Bratton’s tough style of policing, have resulted in killings like that of Mr. Blueford, an unarmed young black man who was shot to death by the police. At the end of the meeting, however, the committee voted to move forward with the contract, sending it to a vote before the full Oakland City Council, where one week later, the scene was repeated. After a nearly 8 hour long meeting, with over 250 speakers, the the full city council voted, 7-1 , to approve the contract, regardless of the fact that the majority of speakers were against the contract.

What happened in Oakland is unsurprising, to those who have watched as policing models have shifted towards “zero tolerance” models. Much like the shift towards militarization in protest policing, models like stop-and-frisk have become the norm. Across the country, elected officials seem to have given up on addressing the root causes of crime, instead looking for an easy answer.

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BORDC has continued raising awareness of domestic surveillance and military detention laws recently extended by Congress and the Obama administration, informing radio hosts and their audiences in cities from coast-to-coast about how FISA and the NDAA abuse the rights of all Americans.

On January 17th, BORDC’S Shahid Buttar spoke with Ernest Hancock, host of ”Declare Your Independence” radio on LRN.FM, about the extension of FISA over the holiday season, while the public was focused on the so-called fiscal cliff. He explained that the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping scheme “is not limited to persons of interest,” and instead monitors all Americans.

In addition to emphasizing the secrecy of the program’s operation and the threat it poses to dissent, Buttar also noted that the program’s budget is entirely secret, consuming at least dozens of billions of dollars in a reportedly unsustainable federal budget.

Buttar also shared analysis with Air Cascadia (KBOO 90.7FM in Portland, OR) with host Chris Andrae on January 22, before an hour long interview on Lockwood Phillips’ “Viewpoints” on the Talk Station, (WTKF 107.1FM in North Carolina). He also spoke at length on January 23 with hosts Ron Pinchback and Kymone Freeman on Speak Easy, their program on We Act Radio (WPWC 1480AM in Dumfries, VA).

On January 24, Buttar spoke at length with host Kim Dobson on “Parallel University” (KAOS 89.3 FM in Olympia, WA). Buttar suggested that criticism of President Obama’s inauguration address largely missed the mark, blaming the President for articulating progressive values even though his speech also referenced shared constitutional norms that his administration has abused in practice.

As he explained in a Huffington Post article on January 28 (cross-posting a post originally published on this blog):

Critics of Mr. Obama have described his inaugural address as radical.  But insisting on values as fundamental as “equality before the law” and the “enduring strength of our Constitution” are hardly radical. Indeed, they are simply restatements of principles that have long united America.

If observers want to criticize the president, they should instead challenge his derogation in practice of the same values he professes in lofty speeches. Rhetoric is no substitute for reality, and given the president’s unfortunate extension of the Bush-Cheney assault on civil liberties, his administration deserves criticism.

Buttar’s comments were also recently featured by the Kansas City InfoZine, as well as UPI.com.

For a comprehensive view of BORDC’s latest news coverage, and to find out how to reach staff for comment, and more, view our online press resources.

In addition to President Obama’s second inauguration (on which the People’s Blog for the Constitution will soon post a comment), yesterday was also a national holiday celebrating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2008, American Radio Works produced King’s Last March, an insightful documentary by Kate Ellis and Stephen Smith that NPR re-broadcast yesterday.

The program reminds listeners about the life of Dr. King, including not only his inspiring civil rights work, but also the disturbing examples of state surveillance and “neutralization” to which he was subjected for years preceding his untimely death.

With the FBI’s ressurrection of its war on the Constitution, BORDC’s 2011 video, COINTELPRO 2.0, offers a timely reminder of this unfortunate history:

According to American Radio Works, the “FBI’s War on King” included “an extensive program of surveillance and harassment…[u]nder the guidance of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – and with the permission of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy….”

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