NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 181   Tuesday, May 21, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Sanabel’s Promise

NCPCF Panels: “Guilty of Being Muslim” and “Preemptive Pros.: Prison w/o Crime”

Syed Hashmi: Inhumane Treatment of Six Years in Solitary Confinement

Bill Moyers Essay: The Hypocrisy of ‘Justice for All’ [Video: 3 min.]

SHC directs ministries to make efforts for Aafia repatriation

Man arrested in Idaho, accused of terrorism conspiracy

2 Minnesota women sentenced in Somali terror case

Anti-Shariah movement changes tactics and gains success

CAIR to File Complaint Against Judge in Terrorism Case

Guantánamo hunger strike tally hits 102

DOJ sought to surveil several thousand U.S. citizens in 2012

How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After ‘Gideon’

The Forever War

Eavesdropping on Internet Communications

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Action Item

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Goal: 150 Donations Urged to 150 Prisoners by June 7.

Needed: 150 generous donors for $105/each. Please consider donating today. 

Spread the word. Click Link Above. Thank You.

Prisoners Covered: 21    Remaining: 129 [As of May 21]

From one of the prisoners (Ismail Royer) to NCPCF: Greetings…I am very grateful for the money your organization sent last Ramadan. It was the first time I’d had that much money in my account for many years and it made Ramadan that much more special.

Upcoming Events

NCPCF Event: Two Panels, ”Guilty of Being a Muslim” and “Preemptive Prosecution: Prison with No Crime”

When: Saturday, May 25th @ 2:30-5:30PM 

Where: ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT

NCPCF will hold the following panels at the upcoming ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT:

Poll of the Week

Do you think the Department of Justice was justified in pursuing the Assiciated Press reporters’ phone records?

Website of the Week

DOJ Associated Press Scandal

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

Sanabel’s Promise: Click Here

Remembering Sanabel Abubaker (1987-2013), whose father Shukri Abu Baker of the HLF 5  years sentence for feeding, clothing and educating Palestinian children [Video: 7 min.]

At a 2011 MLFA event, Sanabel gave a heartfelt account of what it was like to struggle with her health as she also wrestled with the heartache of her father being locked away with severe communications restrictions in prison.

Syed Hashmi: Inhumane Treatment of Six Years in Solitary Confinement

Multimedia

A. Bill Moyers (3/29): Bill Moyers Essay: The Hypocrisy of ‘Justice for All’ [Video: 3 min.]

Bill reports on the hypocrisy of “justice for all” in a society where billions are squandered for a war born in fraud while the poor are pushed aside. Turns out true justice — not just the word we recite from the Pledge of Allegiance — is still unaffordable for those who need it most. Bill says we’ve “turned a deaf ear” to the hopeful legacy of Gideon vs. Wainwright, the 50-year-old Supreme ruling that established the constitutional right of criminal defendants to legal representation, even if they can’t pay for it. Watch Bill’s conversations with civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson and journalists Martin Clancy and Tim O’Brien for more insight and context on Gideon, as well as in-depth exploration of current inequalities in America’s criminal justice system.

B. MSNBC (5/15): New WikiLeaks film discusses government secrecy

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney stopped by NOW with Alex Wagner Wednesday to discuss his new  film “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” as well as the latest revelations about the Department of Justice’s subpoenaing of Associated Press phone records.

C. Minnesota Public Radio (5/17): 2 Minnesota women sentenced in Somali terror case [Audio: 3 min.]

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. Pakistan Press International (5/16): SHC directs ministries to make efforts for Aafia repatriation

The Sindh High Court SHC on Thursday directed Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Interior to make efforts for bilateral agreement with the US in order to repatriate Dr Aafia Siddiqui. A division bench headed by Justice Maqbool Baqar gave this direction on petition file by Dr Fowzia Siddiqui seeking repatriation of her sister Dr Aafia from USA. The petitioner represented by counsel Anwar Mansoor Khan submitted that in March 2003, Dr Aafia was on way to the airport with her children to depart for Islamabad when she was unlawfully abducted along with her children. However, she said that her sister and children remained missing for five years, adding it was later claimed that she had been arrested by the Afghani National Police ANP from Afghanistan in July 2008 and was handed over to the US military.

See also: The News International – Pakistan (5/17): Fauzia asks Nawaz to ensure Aafia’s release

Global Dr Aafia Movement convener Dr Fauzia Siddiqi has stressed upon PML-N chief Mian Nawaz Sharif that history gave him a golden opportunity to win the hearts and minds of Pakistanis by ensuring release of an enslaved daughter of Pakistan, Dr Aafia Siddiqi. If he ensured release of Aafia, it will make Nawaz Sharif a real hero of Pakistanis and establish his statesmanship all over the world, specially in the Muslim countries, she said while addressing a press conference at Lahore Press Club Thursday. Pasban chief Altaf Shakoor, Hafiz Ansar and others were also present on the occasion. Dr Fauzia reminded Nawaz Sharif about a letter he had written in November 2008 to the then Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, terming Aafia’s detention and sentence for un-proven crimes, a slur on the image of Pakistan.

B. Los Angeles Times (5/16): Man arrested in Idaho, accused of terrorism conspiracy

Federal authorities in Idaho said Thursday they had arrested an Uzbekistan national accused of conspiring with a designated terrorist organization in his home country and helping scheme to use a weapon of mass destruction. The U.S. attorney’s office said Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, was arrested at an apartment complex in south Boise on Thursday morning after a grand jury issued a three-count indictment as part of an investigation into his activities in Idaho and Utah. The Idaho grand jury’s indictment charges Kurbanov with one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

See also: CNN (5/17): Uzbek terror suspect pleads not guilty in Idaho

A 30-year-old Uzbek national who has been arrested on federal terrorism charges pleaded not guilty in an initial appearance in a Boise, Idaho, court Friday.

A hearing on bail for Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, is scheduled for Tuesday, and the trial is set for July 2.

C. Minnesota Public Radio (5/17): 2 Minnesota women sentenced in Somali terror case

Defense attorney Dan Scott said Ali, 36, was trying to help the poor and needy. He said she started the fundraising network after finding out that much of the aid sent to her homeland by international groups often got intercepted by corrupt government officials. Scott said she used members of al-Shabab to ensure the aid got to the right people. “(Ali) was worried the clothes she sent would go to the wrong people,” said Scott said. “Al-Shabab was the wrong horse, but not illegal at the time. At the time they were not recognized as a terrorist group.” Hassan was sentenced to 10 years. Defense attorney, Randy Daar, said his client was also motivated by her concern for the poor and needy. He feared that a long sentence would be a death sentence for the 66-year-old Hassan. “It’s very unlikely she’ll live past 80,” Daar said. Before issuing the punishments, Davis took time to ask each woman if they supported jihad, suicide bombings and Sharia law. “Does she understand there are some Muslim women who wear dresses or short skirts?” Davis asked Hassan’s interpreter. Davis said the questions were to determine the likelihood of the women to continue to support terrorist causes when they are released from prison. The questions often caused ripples of reaction in the courtroom gallery. “Those religious questions were inappropriate,” said Hassan Mohamud, a St. Paul imam. “Because every American — every American in America, whether you are Somali or not — has First Amendment rights.”

Profiling

A. The Huffington Post (5/19): Airport Profiling: A Familiar Story for Muslims

I have a huge issue with what happened that day. And what happens to me every single time I go to an airport. This was supposedly a random search. But it wasn’t a random search at all. It was a “you’re a Muslim” search. I’m tired of being told that it’s a random search every single time. I have fewer rights when I walk into an airport because I’m brown. I always have to feel on edge because I know I’m being looked at suspiciously, and not being I’ve done anything wrong, but because I’m one of the two million Muslims living in this country in a post 9/11 era.

B. Associated Press (5/19): Federal judge to decide whether racial profiling a part of NYPD stop-and-frisk tactic

A federal civil rights trial on the New York Police Department policy, known as stop, question and frisk, has ended after 10 weeks of testimony. U.S. District Court Judge Shira Schiendlin will now decide whether the nation’s largest police department has been making illegal stops based on race. She said she would expedite a ruling, but gave no estimate on when to expect it. Closing arguments ended Monday. The judge heard testimony from a dozen people who said they were wrongly stopped by police and believed they were targeted because of their race. She also heard from officers who made stops and their reasons for them. Police officials and experts testified about procedures and whether racial quotas existed.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. The Washington Post (5/16): Anti-Shariah movement changes tactics and gains success

When Oklahoma voters overwhelmingly approved a 2010 ballot measure that prohibits state courts from considering Islamic law, or Shariah, the Council of American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit within two days challenging the constitutionality of the measure, and won. But when Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a similar measure, one that its sponsor said would forbid Shariah, on April 19 of this year, no legal challenges were mounted.

B. UPI (5/19): Islamic law in U.S. courts

A piece written by Daniel Mach, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, and Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Human Rights program, is highly critical of the state bans. The piece appeared on the Religion News Service, and was posted on the Huffington Post website earlier this month. “A discriminatory and wholly unfounded idea is taking root in state legislatures across the country: attempts to pass laws that would explicitly and unnecessarily ban state courts from applying or even considering Islamic, or Sharia, law,” the article said. The article said the outlawed Oklahoma law and others like it contain “prohibitions on ‘international law’ and ‘foreign law,’ nonsensically conflating Sharia with foreign law. Other states, preferring not to wear their bigotry on their sleeves, don’t mention Sharia law per se, instead referring only to bans on ‘international law.’ Their intent, however, is unmistakable.” The article said “these efforts are rooted in the baseless idea that U.S. Muslims wish to impose Islamic law on American courts. Proponents of these misguided measures, which have been introduced in 25 states so far, clearly seek to ride the recent wave of anti-Muslim bias in this country.

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

A. ABC News 5 (5/17): CAIR to File Complaint Against Judge in Terrorism Case

The nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization said Friday it plans to file a complaint against a Minnesota judge who questioned defendants on their religious beliefs and equated mainstream Islamic principles with terrorism. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a press release, before sentencing two Muslim women to lengthy prison terms Thursday, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis asked each woman if she supported “jihad, suicide bombings and Sharia law.” Judge Davis also asked, “Does she understand there are some Muslim women who wear dresses or short skirts?” Davis said he was trying to decide whether the defendants would “support terrorist causes” when they are released from prison. The questions reportedly drew audible reactions in a courtroom packed with Muslim spectators.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. The Miami Herald (5/21): Guantánamo hunger strike tally hits 102

U.S. military medical providers counted 102 Guantánamo prisoners as hunger strikers on Thursday, the first increase after three weeks when the number seemed to plateau at 100. Navy medical workers were tube feeding 30 of the hunger strikers, said Army Lt. Col. Samuel House. Three were hospitalized but none had “any life-threatening conditions,” House said.

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. The Daily Caller (5/16): DOJ sought to surveil several thousand U.S. citizens in 2012

The Justice Department sought the authority to spy on several thousand “United States persons” in 2012, according to a letter the department recently sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter, which was dispatched on April 30, said the FBI made 15,229 requests in 2012 for electronic surveillance using the federal government’s National Security Letter authorities. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, commonly called the “FISA court,” handled the applications. “These sought information pertaining to 6,233 different United States persons,” wrote Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik in the letter.

B. The New York Times (5/16): Concerns Arise on U.S. Effort to Allow Internet ‘Wiretaps’

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made it clear it wants to intercept Internet audio and video chats. And that, according to a new report being released Friday by a group of technologists, could pose “serious security risks” to ordinary Internet users, giving thieves and even foreign agents a way to listen in on Americans’ conversations, undetected. The 20 computer experts and cryptographers who drafted the report say the only way that companies can meet wiretap orders is to re-engineer the way their systems are built at the endpoints, either in the software or in users’ devices, in effect creating a valuable listening station for repressive governments as well as for ordinary thieves and blackmailers.

C. The Daily Beat (5/18): When Drones Come to America, What Happens Then?

Congress started it all this year when it voted to allow drones to fly in the U.S. as soon as 2015. Now it’s fighting against its self-imposed deadline to pass legislation that limits the scope of the new technology. [...] In February, Congress voted to make the Federal Aviation Administration let drones fly in U.S. airspace by 2015. In response, four states have already passed legislation limiting the use of drones or unmanned aerial systems within their borders. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 32 states in total have active legislation that would limit the not-yet-legal technology. Yet no federal bill has passed.

D. Business Insider (5/19): AP: Sources Aren’t Talking To Us Out Of Fear The US Government Will Spy On Them

The Obama administration’s decision to seize phone records from the Associated Press was “unconstitutional” and sends a message that “if you talk to the press, we are going to go after you”, the news agency’s boss Gary Pruitt said Sunday. [...] “We don’t question their right to conduct these sort of investigations. We just think they went about it the wrong way. So sweeping, so secretly, so abusively and harassingly and over-broad that it constitutes, that it is, an unconstitutional act,” he said. ”We are already seeing some impact. Already officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they are a little reluctant to talk to us. They fear that they will be monitored by the government. We are already seeing that. It’s not hypothetical,” said Pruitt.

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

A. The New York Times (5/16): Debating the Legal Basis for the War on Terror

A top Pentagon official said Thursday that the evolving war against Al Qaeda was likely to continue “at least 10 to 20 years” and urged Congress not to modify the statute that provides its legal basis. “As of right now, it suits us very well,” Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said, referring to the “authorization to use military force,” often referred to as the A.U.M.F., enacted by Congress in 2001. The statute authorized war against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and those who harbored them — that is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Lawmakers are considering enacting a new authorization, because the original Qaeda network has been largely decimated, while the current threat is increasingly seen as arising from terrorist groups in places like Yemen that share Al Qaeda’s ideology but have no connection to the 2001 attacks.

B. The Washington Post (5/18): Obama speech to address counterterrorism measures

President Obama will deliver a speech Thursday at the National Defense University in which he will address how he intends to bring his counterterrorism policies, including the drone program and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in line with the legal framework he promised after taking office. A White House official, speaking Saturday on the condition of anonymity to describe the speech in advance, said Obama will “discuss our broad counterterrorism policy, including our military, diplomatic, intelligence and legal efforts.”

Editorials/Opinions

A. Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic (3/13): How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After ‘Gideon’

The Gideon decision, heralded in its own time, has profoundly changed America’s criminal justice system ever since. In the past half century since the ruling, the constitutional right to counsel has ensured that millions of criminal suspects — the guilty, the innocent, and the somewhere-in-between — have been aided by earnest, capable lawyers. The mandate of Gideon has forced prosecutors to be fairer and more honest in their dealings with defendants. It has burdened trial judges with additional pretrial motions. As a result of all of that, in a justice system designed to test evidence rather than seek truth, the Gideon ruling undoubtedly has resulted in more accurate results at trial. [...] But 50 years later there is also much to mourn about Gideon and the Supreme Court standards that followed it. Today, there is a vast gulf between the broad premise of the ruling and the grim practice of legal representation for the nation’s poorest litigants. Yes, you have the right to a court-appointed lawyer today — the right to a lawyer who almost certainly is vastly underpaid and grossly overworked; a lawyer who, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report published last year, often spends less than six minutes per case at hearings where clients plead guilty and are sentenced. With this lawyer — often just a “potted plant” — by your side, you’ve earned the dubious honor of hearing the judge you will face declare that this arrangement is sufficient to secure your rights to a fair trial.

B. David Brooks in The New York Times (5/16): When Governments Go Bad

The I.R.S. scandal and Justice Department’s invasion of The Associated Press are just the most recent examples of overreach. They rest on top of the daily intrusions of the post-9/11 security apparatus and much else. It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy. [...] We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

C. Andrew Rosenthal in The New York Times (5/17): The Forever War

Twelve years ago, after the attacks, Congress responded swiftly with the A.U.M.F., but it was supposed to be an emergency measure.  Mr. Bush abused it. He used it to justify indefinite detention without charges, and spying on Americans without bothering to get a warrant. Mr. Obama abused it, too. He used it to justify killing American citizens overseas without due process. It would be folly to take this already much-abused statute and turn it into a permanent excuse for a never-ending war.

D.  The New York Times Editorial (5/19): Eavesdropping on Internet Communications

But tech companies and advocates for greater privacy and security say the threat of fines would still force companies to build complex wiretapping capabilities into their services from the start (allowing wiretapping on peer-to-peer services like Skype will be particularly difficult). And they argue that opening systems to surveillance could make them vulnerable to hackers, a serious problem. [...] The administration and Congress need to analyze carefully the F.B.I.’s proposal, details of which have not been made public. New rules will have to strike the right balance between privacy and cybersecurity and the government’s need to monitor criminal activity.

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Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

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NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

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Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

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Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 180   Friday, May 17, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

NCPCF Panels: “Guilty of Being Muslim” and “Preemptive Pros.: Prison w/o Crime”

Rochester women get 20 years, 10 years for Somali terror support

New York says breaks cigarette-smuggling ring linked to militants

Rights groups: End ‘cruel’ force-feeding

Are The Feds Unfairly Targeting Muslim Students Who Oppose Israel?

Guantánamo: 30 of the 100 hunger strikers now being tube-fed

So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman

Once a beacon, Obama under fire over civil liberties

Spying on The Associated Press

DOJ’s pursuit of AP’s phone records is both extreme and dangerous

The press fails yet again

Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent

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Action Item

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Goal: 150 Donations Urged to 150 Prisoners by June 7.

Needed: 150 generous donors for $105/each. Please consider donating today. 

Spread the word. Click Link Above. Thank You.

Prisoners Covered: 16    Remaining: 134 [As of May 17]

From one of the prisoners (Ismail Royer) to NCPCF: Greetings…I am very grateful for the money your organization sent last Ramadan. It was the first time I’d had that much money in my account for many years and it made Ramadan that much more special.

Upcoming Events

NCPCF Event: Two Panels, ”Guilty of Being a Muslim” and “Preemptive Prosecution: Prison with No Crime”

When: Saturday, May 25th @ 2:30-5:30PM 

Where: ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT

NCPCF will hold the following panels at the upcoming ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT:

Poll of the Week

Do you think the Department of Justice was justified in pursuing the Associated Press reporters’ phone records?

Website of the Week

DOJ Associated Press Scandal

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

Shukri Abu Baker, President of the Holy Land Foundation (who just lost his daughter Sanabel while serving his 65 years sentence foe feeding, clothing and educating Palestinian children

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. FightBack! News (5/8) Victory for the Cuban 5: René González returns to Cuba after 13+ years in U.S. prison system

On May 3, René González, one of the Cuban 5, finally won his freedom from the U.S. prison system when a judge ruled that he could move back to Cuba. González had already served an unjust sentence of more than 13 years in U.S. prisons. He was then was forced to stay in Miami another year and a half on parole. González was greeted as a hero on his return to Cuba, which has waged a determined campaign to win freedom for the Cuban 5.

B. Wired (5/13): Feds Won’t Say if NSA Surveilled New York Terror Suspects

Federal authorities prosecuting brothers on allegations they plotted to blow up a high-profile target in New York City are refusing to confirm publicly whether they cracked the case by employing a style of warrantless electronic eavesdropping first introduced by President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. The reason, attorneys affiliated with the defense suggest, is because such a concession would create the nation’s first eligible defendant to challenge the constitutionality of the surveillance tactics, which Congress codified into law in 2008 and then again in December. The government has never publicly conceded it has used evidence in a criminal case obtained through the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 mass surveillance program. A single acknowledgment could open the floodgates to challenge the surveillance tactic, which Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in February noted that “commonsense” tells us is being employed by federal investigators.

C. The Huffington Post (5/14): Sentences continue in Minn. Somali terror case

Two men who left Minnesota to join al-Shabab in Somalia were sentenced Tuesday to three years in federal prison, while a man they characterized as a local leader in efforts to recruit them to the terrorist group was sentenced to 12 years. [...] As part of their cooperation, Isse and Ahmed testified in the recent trial of another defendant. In that trial, they characterized Omer Abdi Mohamed as a leader in recruitment efforts, saying he used the Quran to convince them they were doing the right thing. Davis sentenced Mohamed to 12 years on Tuesday, without providing a reason.

D. The New York Times (5/15): Lawyers Press Pentagon to Abide by Detainee Deal

Lawyers for a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is scheduled to be transferred out of the prison in December under a 2011 plea deal have asked a judge to order the Pentagon to live up to its agreement, recently unsealed tribunal papers show. [...] The dispute centers on Noor Uthman Muhammed, a Sudanese man who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism in early 2011 before a military commission. Under the terms of his arrangement, he was to serve an additional 34 months on top of the nine years he had already been imprisoned as a wartime detainee, which would position him to be repatriated in December. But Mr. Noor’s lawyers said that the Pentagon official who oversees the tribunal system, known as the convening authority, had yet to officially approve the final disposition of his case, even though it essentially wrapped up two years ago.

E. The Guardian (5/15): Eric Holder hints Yemenis held at Guantánamo may be released

The US attorney general Eric Holder hinted on Wednesday that the Obama administration may be planning to act on Yemeni prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. The release of the Yemenis back to their home country would make a big dent in the overall number of Guantánamo detainees. The failure to free Guantánamo prisoners who have been cleared for release is one of the main reasons for the continuing hunger strike. [...] Of the estimated 166 detainees left at Guantánamo, an estimated 91 are Yemenis, and many of these have been cleared for release. Obama put a block on this in January 2011 after the underwear bomb plot that originated in Yemen.

F. Twin Cities Pioneer Press (5/16): Rochester women get 20 years, 10 years for Somali terror support

The woman known to some as “Mama Amina,” who collected clothing to send to the needy in Somalia, was sentenced to 20 years in prison Thursday, May 16. [...] “Everything I have done, I have done because I was trying to do good,” Ali told the judge through an interpreter. “My intention was to alleviate the suffering of the people. I was trying to make their life a little easier.”

G. Reuters (5/17): New York says breaks cigarette-smuggling ring linked to militants

Fifteen men of Palestinian origin have been arrested on charges of running a multi-million-dollar cigarette smuggling ring in New York, and New York authorities who announced the arrests on Thursday said several of the suspects have ties to Hamas and other Islamist militant groups. The men are accused of smuggling more than a million cartons of untaxed cigarettes from Virginia to be sold in grocery stores across New York, with $55 million in sales uncovered so far, Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, and Ray Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said at a press conference.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

WRAL 5 Raleigh (5/15): Anti-Sharia law heads to House floor

The latest version of a bill intended to protect the constitutional rights of North Carolinians from “foreign laws” is on its way to the House floor after a contentious hearing in the House Judiciary C Committee. House Bill 695, entitled “Foreign Laws/Protect Constitutional Rights,” is the most recent iteration of legislation intended to keep courts from recognizing Islamic Sharia law in North Carolina.  Similar measures have been filed or considered in more than 30 other states, but only a few states have voted them into law. [...] The danger of the encroachment of Sharia law is a popular topic on right-wing radio and blogs, but to date, there’s little evidence that it’s actually happening.  Muslim groups say it’s a scare tactic used by anti-Muslim activists.

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

A. The Miami Herald (5/14): Rights groups: End ‘cruel’ force-feeding

Human rights organizations are asking Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to order troops to abandon the practice of force-feeding prisoners at Guantánamo, a move that could permit them starve to death if they choose. The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Watch and 17 other groups wrote the Pentagon on Monday, hours after the Qatar-based Al Jazeera website posted the prison’s 30-page forced-feeding procedures with the headline “military document lays bare the brutality of force-feeding.”

B. OC Weekly Blogs (5/14): Are The Feds Unfairly Targeting Muslim Students Who Oppose Israel?

Closer to home, the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), joined by a coalition of other civil rights groups, has petitioned the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), asking that the agency review how it investigates allegations of anti-Semitism at three college campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine. Since 2008, the DOE has investigated the trio of schools for creating a “hostile climate” for Jewish students by allowing discussions to take place on campus that are critical of U.S. support for Israel. According to CAIR, these probes have falsely linked criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and have unfairly targeted Muslim and other students who have done nothing more than exercise their constitutionally-protected rights to freedom of speech. [...] Joining CAIR in its effort to get the DOE to cease targeting Muslim student groups are the following groups: the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, American Muslims for Palestine, the Arab American Institute, the Asian Law Caucus Center for Constitutional Rights , the California Jewish Voice for Peace, and the National Lawyers Guild.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. Politico (5/13): Guantanamo lawyers demand right to use pens, notebooks, eyeglasses

Defense lawyers for a man facing war crimes charges at Guantanamo Bay are asking a military judge to guarantee the attorneys’ right to use pens, notebooks and even eyeglasses during meetings with their client, according to a motion released Monday. The motion was precipitated by a lawyer for prisoner Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri being told he could not bring a wire-bound, spiral notebook to a meeting with his client. The attorney, Richard Kammen, said he’d brought notebooks to such meetings since 2008, without incident.

B. The Raw Story (5/13): Guantánamo hunger strikers subjected to harsh new method of force feeding

Hunger-strikers being force fed at Guantánamo Bay are shackled to a chair, fitted with a mask and have tubes inserted through their nose and into their stomachs for up to two hours at a time, according to revised guidelines in use at the camp. [...] An editorial published earlier this month in the medical journal the Lancet suggests that there is a distinct moral line between force-feeding people who are refusing meals through impaired mental capacity and those doing so as a protest. It states: “In the latter case, the individual has weighed up the facts, and come to the conclusion that they will refuse nutrition, and risk death in order to correct a perceived injustice. Whether or not one agrees with this decision, to force-feed infringes the principle of patient autonomy.”

C. The Miami Herald (5/15): Guantánamo: 30 of the 100 hunger strikers now being tube-fed

Guantánamo prison staff members were tube-feeding 30 of the 100 hunger-striking captives on Wednesday, the detention center said, reporting an all-time high last reached in 2005. [...] House disclosed the hunger strike figure a day after guards declared a medical emergency in the maximum security prison during a tour of the facilities by journalists representing Al Jazeera, CNN and Time magazine. A prisoner appeared unconscious to guards, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the prison’s public affairs officer, so soldiers declared a “Code Yellow,” Guantánamo’s term for a medical emergency.

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. The Atlantic (5/13): So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman

The First Amendment provides a right to gather information, but that right is not unbounded; it ends, Villasenor writes, “when it crosses into an invasion of privacy.” He continued, “Putting a stepladder up against someone else’s home without permission, climbing up the ladder, and then photographing into a second-floor window would be an invasion of privacy. Using a drone just outside the window to obtain those same photographs would be just as much an invasion of privacy.” New technologies may present new ways of violating people’s privacy, but that doesn’t mean they’re legal.

B. The Berkeley Daily Planet (5/13): Drones or No Drones? The Debate Drones On

Nadia Kayyali, a Legal Fellow with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, began her presentation by recalling how the Alameda and Berkeley cops (in cahoots with the UC Berkeley campus police) had been embarrassed by exposure of a secret plan to jointly purchase and share an armored personnel carrier. Kayyali called the new push for drones another “rushed implementation that is being fueled by money.”  Kayyali quickly dismissed the “rescue drone” arguments. The battery-powered drones being considered for city purchase can’t fly for more than 25 minutes at a time, they can only be flown during the day, they need to be controlled by two operators, they must be flown in “line-of-sight,” they can’t be operated more than 400 feet above the ground, they can’t be flown on windy days and, if you tried to use one to monitor a grass fire or a burning building, it would probably start to melt.  Kayyali’s conclusion? “Current drone technology is best suited for one thing: surveillance.” Because drones can “hover very quietly outside of windows,” Kayyali warned, the ability “to conduct covert surveillance with a small piece of equipment is unprecedented.”

C. The New Yorker (5/14): Wiretapping the Web

Wiretapping the Web provokes a visceral reaction for more than one reason. First and foremost, like any electronic surveillance, it’s a massive invasion of privacy by the world’s most powerful government. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, in 1928, “As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wiretapping.” A wiretapping law can incidentally create a terrible innovation policy. “Build your system this way” has rarely yielded good results, and never when Congress is involved. Finally, some technologists believe that a Web-tapping law will create new Internet security risks, because it would force firms to build backdoors into their systems, which malicious hackers could then exploit.

D. Wired (5/16): Cops Should Get Warrants to Read Your E-Mail, Attorney General Says

Attorney General Eric Holder became the White House’s highest ranking official to support sweeping privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud. “It is something that I think the Department will support,” Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee, when questioned about the Justice Department’s position. Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a package that nullifies a provision of federal law allowing the authorities to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed if the content is 180 days or older.

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

A. The Washington Post (5/14): Obama on civil liberties: Saying one thing, doing another

[Obama] has failed to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in the face of Congressional resistance, even though he recently pledged to try again. Moreover, Obama has greatly expanded the Bush-era counter-terrorism tactic of drone warfare, becoming the first president to use an unmanned aircraft to kill an American citizen abroad without formal charge or trial. The target, Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American-Yemeni cleric affiliated with al-Qaeda, helped inspire an army major at Fort Hood to fatally shoot 13 people in November 2009. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said “the IRS selective enforcement and the surveillance of reporters shows a willingness to compromise values in the Obama administration.” He called it “enormously troubling.”

B. Reuters (5/15): Analysis: Once a beacon, Obama under fire over civil liberties

He may have been the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He may have written a book extolling constitutional values in a democracy. And he may have run for president on a civil liberties banner, pledging to reverse the legacy of George W. Bush. But as U.S. president for the last 4-1/2 years, Barack Obama has faced accusation after accusation of impinging on civil liberties, disappointing his liberal Democratic base and providing fodder for rival Republicans as he deals with the realities of office.

Editorials/Opinions

A. The New York Times Editorial (5/14): Spying on The Associated Press

The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.

B. The Washington Post Editorial (5/14): Damage to press freedom likely outweighs national security gain

WHEN THE Justice Department launched its investigation of alleged leaks of national security information by the Obama administration a year ago, we were skeptical. The history of such probes is mainly a tale of dead ends and unintended negative consequences. That this effort to criminalize a leak was launched amid an election-year uproar seemed especially inauspicious. Our forebodings have been borne out with the revelation that federal prosecutors have undertaken a broad sweep of the Associated Press’s phone records. Whatever national-security enhancement this was intended to achieve seems likely to be outweighed by the damage to press freedom and governmental transparency.

C. Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian (5/14): Justice Department’s pursuit of AP’s phone records is both extreme and dangerous

Despite how stunning the breadth of this invasion is, none of it is really surprising. But it does underscore just how extreme of a climate of fear has been deliberately imposed by the Obama administration on the news gathering process. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer told whistleblower advocate Jesselyn Radack last year: “When our sources are prosecuted, the news-gathering process is criminalized, so it’s incumbent upon all journalists to speak up.” What the Obama DOJ is doing in all of these cases is not just an attack on investigative journalists and their sources, though it is that. It is, first and foremost, an attack on you: specifically on your ability to know what government officials are doing in the dark.

D. Robert Koehler in Common Wonders (5/15): Know-Nothing Security

The Palm Beach County, Fla. Sheriff’s Office has a new video out urging local citizens to call them if something smells bad or seems a little weird, like, oh, a tourist is taking a picture of a bridge but there’s no one in the foreground — no spouse, no grinning kids, just . . . a bridge. If it seems suspicious, call — because, I guess, if everyone is vigilant (“Hello, I want to report two young men carrying backpacks”) and we work with the authorities, America will be safe as pie in no time. This program is called Community Partners Against Terrorism, though I’m tempted to call it know-nothing security — the kind based on stereotypes, unexamined fears, self-righteousness, external projections and an us-vs.-them social organization. Terrorists are bad people with inscrutable motives. All we need to know is that they’re out to get us. This is the message of the terrorism “experts,” who leverage their authority from their ability to keep us scared and vigilant.

E. Sahar Aziz in CNN (5/15): Muslims to Tea Party: Welcome to our world

We saw this with the targeted surveillance used for Muslims that was also eventually applied to the surveillance of right wing groups as outlined in a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report in 2009. We also saw this when the Department of Justice inspector general reported that the FBI had been improperly spying on left wing political groups in 2006. And we witnessed the expansion of government surveillance of the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement, which was spied on by the joint terrorism task forces also used to spy on American Muslims. These troubling trends mirror the alleged methods in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeting black nationalists, communists, and anti-war groups particularly in the 1960s and 70s. It was only after white male veterans and college students were targeted that the public finally pushed back on government excesses, leading to passage of government accountability and oversight measures that were in turn reversed after 9/11.

F. Shahid Buttar in BORDC blog (5/16): The press fails yet again

Finally finding its voice after five years of relative silence, the mainstream establishment press finally woke up this week to criticize the Obama administration’s assault on the First Amendment. But, while this criticism is important and necessary, it remains days (indeed, years) late, and much more than merely a dollar short.

G. Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian (5/17): Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

___________________________________________________

Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

___________________________________________________ 

NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

___________________________________________________ 

Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

___________________________________________________ 

Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 179   Tuesday, May 14, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

NCPCF Panels: “Guilty of Being Muslim” and “Preemptive Pros.: Prison w/o Crime”

Photos from Guantanamo’s force-feeding facilities

 Double Jeopardy: New York Activist Subpoenaed for Secret Grand Jury – Again

FBI surr. house of Saudi w/ pressure cook- only to discover he was cooking RICE

Anti-Muslim group leaps to defense of American Islamic Congress after EI exposé

Death is Preferable to Life at Obama’s Guantanamo

Revised Guantanamo force-feed policy exposed

Update to Email Privacy Law Must Go Further

FBI Entrapment Harms Vulnerable Muslims

Unrecorded testimony

Jonathan Turley: Why The FBI Doesn’t Record Interrogations

_______________________________________________________

Action Item

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Goal: 150 Donations Urged to 150 Prisoners by June 7.

Needed:  150 generous donors for $105/each. Please consider donating today. 

Spread the word. Click Link Above. Thank You.

Prisoners Covered: 10    Remaining: 140 [As of May 14]

From one of the prisoners (Ismail Royer) to NCPCF: Greetings…I am very grateful for the money your organization sent last Ramadan. It was the first time I’d had that much money in my account for many years and it made Ramadan that much more special.

Upcoming Events

NCPCF Event: Two Panels, ”Guilty of Being a Muslim” and “Preemptive Prosecution: Prison with No Crime”

When: Saturday, May 25th @ 2:30-5:30PM 

Where: ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT

NCPCF will hold the following panels at the upcoming ICNA Convention in Hartford, CT:

Poll of the Week

Since the President has executive power to indefinitely hold prisoners, should he exercise the same power to close Guantanamo Bay and release its detainees?

Website of the Week

Check out photos from NCPCF’s recent protest in Washington, DC, Scapegoated and Buried Alive; “Like Us” on Facebook; and Share with Friends!

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

The Powerful Statement by Dr. Al-Al-Timimi to the Court during his Sentencing (July 13, 2005)

Multimedia

A. The Washington Post (5/10): Photos from Guantanamo’s force-feeding facilities

It’s about three months into an ongoing Guantanamo Bay hunger strike, which began with a few detainees protesting guards’ alleged mishandling of Korans and has escalated to a larger and nearly camp-wide demonstration against the Obama administration’s failure to close the facility as promised or to free detainees it has cleared for release. Now, as attention on the hunger strike mounts, a U.S. Army public affairs unit has released photos from the camp that show hints of the hunger strike as well as the guards’ regimen for force-feeding. Some of those photos, taken by Sgt. Brian Godette in early April, are posted here. They show, among other things, guards discarding meals refused by detainees, a special chair used for force-feeding and a rare glimpse of a detainee, if only his hand.

B. NPR (5/11): In Guantanamo, Have We Created Something We Can’t Close? [Audio: 12 min.]

The crisis at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp keeps growing in size and intensity. According to the military’s own count, 100 of the 166 men held in the prison there are now on hunger strike, and the 27 most in danger of dying are being force-fed. Last month, guards had to forcibly subdue a camp where even the most cooperative detainees are held. The hunger strike was triggered by a February search of inmates’ Qurans, though the details are hotly disputed. What’s remarkable, however, is that everyone — including detainees, lawyers and the military — agrees that the real reason for the unrest is simply the frustration that the camp has stayed open so long.

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. Los Angeles Times (5/9): Tunisian man charged in terrorist case

Ahmed Abassi was arrested in New York on April 22, the same day that Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier were arrested in Canada and charged with plotting to cause the derailment of a Canadian VIA passenger train. His indictment was not unsealed until Thursday. Last week, Abassi pleaded not guilty to two counts of lying on his applications for a green card and a work visa to facilitate an international act of terrorism. Each count carries up to 25 years in prison. “Mr. Abassi says he is innocent of these charges and denies them in their entirety,” his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said after he made a brief appearance in federal court Thursday.

See also: The New York Times (5/9): Tunisian Is Accused of Proposing Contamination of Water or Air in U.S.

A Tunisian man has been accused of seeking to develop a terrorist network in the United States and of proposing to poison the water or air to kill up to 100,000 people, federal prosecutors said in court papers unsealed on Thursday. The man, Ahmed Abassi, 26, who came to the United States from Canada in March and was arrested last month at Kennedy International Airport, told the authorities that he may also have “radicalized” one of two men arrested recently in Canada in an alleged Qaeda-linked plot to derail a passenger train.

B. Truth out.org (5/10): Double Jeopardy: New York Activist Subpoenaed for Secret Grand Jury – Again

New York activist Gerald Koch has been subpoenaed for the second time to testify before a US grand Jury – a form of legal double jeopardy that has been used by the US government to coerce, intimidate and punish activists. [...] The concept of a grand jury is to gather sufficient evidence to indict a suspect. In the process, people like Koch can be compelled to testify by being granted immunity; thus nullifying their right to “plead the Fifth” (and the First and Fourth for that matter). When Koch refuses to testify on May 16, as he did in 2009, he could be imprisoned for the remaining length of the grand jury – up to 18 months. It is a feeling, one might imagine, as terrifying as being struck by lightning for a second time.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. Electronic Intifada (5/11): Anti-Muslim group leaps to defense of American Islamic Congress after EI exposé

But AIC did receive a vigorous defense from Ryan Mauro, the “National Security Analyst” for the Clarion Project. The Clarion Project – previously known as the Clarion Fund – is notorious for producing several wildly Islamophobic films including Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and The Third Jihad. It’s latest film, Iranium, argues for war against Iran. [...] Both AIC and the Clarion Project share many of the same anti-Muslim donors, including Sheldon Adelson, the Casino magnate who believes Palestinians are an “invented people,” and is the main bankroller of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as a massive donor to the US Republican Party.

B. Daily Mail (5/12): FBI surrounds house of Saudi student after sightings of him with pressure cooker pot – only to discover he was cooking RICE

A Saudi student living in Michigan was questioned in his home by FBI agents after neighbours saw him carrying a pressure cooker and called the police. Talal al Rouki had been cooking a traditional Saudi Arabian rice dish called kabsah and was carrying it to a friend’s house. According to reports in a Saudi newspaper on Friday, the FBI are increasingly vigilant about ‘pressure cooker’ home-made bombs after the Boston bombers used one to make an explosive.

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

Sohail Daulatzai in AlJazeera.com (5/10): Are we all Muslim now? Assata Shakur and the Terrordome

It’s seen in the black, Latino, South Asian and Arab organisers in New York and Los Angeles doing work around the NYPD “Stop and Frisk” programme and the “Stop LAPD Spying” campaigns; it’s present in the work of artists and activists struggling for migrant justice around the US-Mexico border. It’s also evidence in the beautiful work of Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Robin Kelley, Cynthia McKinney and others who recently travelled to Palestine and have spoken out against Zionism and US empire, and in favour of Palestinian self-determination; and it’s also born witness in the collective statement of solidarity signed by many black activists and scholars in 2012 called “African Americans for Justice in the Middle East & North Africa”.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. The Huffington Post (5/10): Death is Preferable to Life at Obama’s Guantanamo

More than 100 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are starving themselves to death. Twenty-three of them are being force-fed. “They strap you to a chair, tie up your wrists, your legs, your forehead and tightly around the waist,” Fayiz Al-Kandari told his lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard. Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo for 11 years, has never been charged with a crime. ”The tube makes his eyes water excessively and blood begins to trickle from the nose. Once the tube passes his throat the gag reflex kicks in. Warm liquid is poured into the body for 45 minutes to two hours. He feels like his body is going to convulse and often vomits,” Wingard added. The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that force-feeding amounts to torture. The American Medical Association says that force-feeding violates medical ethics.

B. AlJazeera.com (5/13): Revised Guantanamo force-feed policy exposed

Al Jazeera’s exclusive publishing of a key Guantanamo prison military document lays bare the brutality of force-feeding.

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. Electronic Fronteir Foundation (5/9): Update to Email Privacy Law Must Go Further

The bill should go beyond the status quo. Missing in the bill is a suppression remedy. In the current draft, if law enforcement obtained your email without a warrant, in violation of the revised law, nothing would prevent that illegally obtained evidence from being admitted in a criminal trial. A suppression remedy is a common sense addition to the bill ensuring that its impact is equal to its intent: ensuring all private virtual messages—just like any other private physical message—are available to the government only with a warrant based on probable cause.

B. Associated Press (5/13): Gov’t obtains wide AP phone records in probe

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. [...] In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

The Hill (5/10): It’s time for the truth on ‘enhanced interrogation’

We already knew that the CIA gave unusual access to the creative team behind the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.” Now we know at least some of what the agency got in return. A memo obtained earlier this week by Gawker shows that the screenwriter, Mark Boal, altered two scenes at the CIA’s request. [...] If you’re interested in the truth about torture and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, you shouldn’t look to Hollywood; you should call on President Obama to work with the Senate Intelligence Committee to release the committee’s landmark 6,000-page report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.

Editorials/Opinions

A. Peter Van Buren in TomDispatch.com (5/9): If the Government Does It, It’s “Legal”

Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way.  Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike.  That act has certainly gotten Washington’s and the media’s collective attention.  After all, could there be anything more extreme than striking against your own body to make a point?  Suicide by strike?  It’s the ultimate statement of protest and despair.  Certainly, the strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts.  That, in a word, is extraordinary.  But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight?  Here’s one thing: despite the promise he made on entering the Oval office, President Obama has obviously not made much of an effort to close the prison, which, as he said recently, “hurts us, in terms of our international standing… [and] is a recruitment tool for extremists.”

B. The New York Times Editorial (5/9): How to Generate Distrust on Drones

Mr. Koh, now a Yale law professor, pointed out that the “global war on terror” must have an end. Echoing Jeh Johnson, a former Pentagon counsel, he said Al Qaeda and its affiliates will eventually be defeated or diminished to the point where a state of war is not necessary. “Just because someone hates America or sympathizes with Al Qaeda does not make them our lawful enemy,” he said. Last month, the Obama administration refused to send anyone to a Senate hearing on targeted killings, repeating a pattern verging on arrogance. A sincere move toward transparency cannot come soon enough.

C. Rachel Roberts in CAIR blog (5/8): FBI Entrapment Harms Vulnerable Muslims

As details emerge about Matthew Aaron Llenaza, the San Jose man arrested for plotting terrorism at the behest of an undercover FBI agent, we have learned that Mr. Llenaza had a history of bipolar disorder and psychosis. This newly publicized information about Mr. Llenaza casts doubt on the portrait the FBI has drawn of its suspect, whom they characterize as a shrewd and calculating Taliban sympathizer intent on doing harm to the United States. It also raises concerns about the FBI using public resources to thwart plots that it is, in fact, concocting on its own.  But these new details about Mr. Llenaza highlight something not often talked about in the mainstream discourse about counterterrorism efforts: its effects on the mentally ill.

D. Harvey Silverglate in The Boston Globe (5/11): Unrecorded testimony

Those concerned with the survival of American civil liberties during the post-9/11 (and now post-Boston Marathon) “age of terror” most commonly fear the federal government’s technical ability to record and store virtually all telephonic and electronic communications. But a more immediate threat to liberty lies in what one particular agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, refuses to record, as Robel Phillipos is now learning the hard way. [...] The public and the media should withhold judgment not only as to what Phillipos did or did not do, but also as to what he did or did not say when questioned by FBI agents. Indeed, the public should look skeptically at the accuracy of any FBI claim regarding what transpires in the bureau’s infamous witness interviews. Here’s why.

E. Jonathan Turley (5/11): Why The FBI Doesn’t Record Interrogations

At a time when recording a conversation is as easy as whipping out a cellphone or iPod, the FBI policy on electronic recording of witness interviews is: “agents may not electronically record confessions or interviews, openly or surreptitiously, unless authorized by the SAC or his or her designee.” Instead FBI agents take notes and later type up a summary report called a form 302. The interview takes place with two FBI agents and the single interviewee. The FBI has eschewed the objective for the subjective. This policy has proved problematic in numerous cases. District court judge Charles B. Kornmann in South Dakota lamented that he was forced to hear: “another all too familiar case in which the FBI agent testifies to one version of what was said and when it was said[,] and the defendant testifies to an opposite version or versions.”

___________________________________________________

Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

___________________________________________________ 

NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

___________________________________________________ 

Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

___________________________________________________ 

Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 178   Friday, May 10, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Photos: NCPCF Families Conference in Washington, DC, Scapegoated and Buried Alive

What’s Next For Guantanamo? [Audio: 46 min.]

Gov’t Appeals  Abdella Tounisi Bail Order, Bail Order Revoked

Bradley Manning Pretrial Hearing Reaching New Level Of Secrecy

Muslims being targeted, advocacy group charges

Pew Research: After Boston, Little Change in Views of Islam and Violence

Judge backs NYPD’s refusal to detail its surveillance of Muslim comm under FOIA

“Resisting Hell on Earth”: Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

U.S. Weighs Wide Overhaul of Wiretap Laws

Noah Feldman: Obama Can Close Guantanamo. Here’s How.

Permanent imprisonment at Guantanamo betrays American values

_______________________________________________________

Action Item

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Goal: 150 Donations Urged to 150 Prisoners by June 7.

Needed:  150 generous donors for $105/each .Please consider donating today. 

Spread the word. Click Link Above. Thank You.

Prisoners Covered: 8    Remaining: 142 [As of May 10]

Poll of the Week

Since the President has executive power to indefinitely hold prisoners, should he exercise the same power to close Guantanamo Bay and release its detainees?

Website of the Week

Check out photos from NCPCF’s recent protest in Washington, DC, Scapegoated and Buried Alive; “Like Us” on Facebook; and Share with Friends!

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

Poetry by Yassin Aref

Multimedia

NPR WBUR (5/6): What’s Next For Guantanamo? [Audio: 46 min.]

The American prison at Guantanamo has come to stand for so many moral trade-offs the United States has made in the years since 9/11. George Bush filled it but did not empty it. Barack Obama promised to close it but has not followed through. Congress has made it complicated. Even prisoners cleared for exit have been going nowhere. Now, inmates at Guantanamo have turned again to hunger strike. In return, they are force-fed. Held without charges. It needs to end, to close, said the president again last week. But how?

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. Talk Left (5/3): Gov’t Appeals Tounisi Bail Order, Bail Order Revoked

Yesterday, 18 year old Abdella Tounisi, the latest terror sting victim of the FBI, was ordered released on bail by a U.S. Magistrate Court Judge. The Government immediately appealed to the District Court Judge who today reversed the Magistrate Court Judge. Tounisi will remain in custody. Pre-trial Services had recommended release on bond. The Magistrate Judge ordered Tunisi released on a $50,000 unsecured bond with conditions of home confinement and electronic monitoring. His father was appointed to serve as a third-party custodian.

B. Huffington Post (5/6): Bradley Manning Pretrial Hearing Reaching New Level Of Secrecy

An unidentified prosecution witness will testify during that closed hearing in a “dry run.” Defense attorneys say that could allow the judge to find ways to avoid closing the courtroom to the public during the presentation of classified evidence. Lind and attorneys for both sides have suggested there are a number of options to shield sensitive material, including closing parts of the trial; redacting documents; using written summaries as evidence to omit sensitive details; or even using code words for classified information. The sensitive evidence includes Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and State Department cables Manning has acknowledged leaking, along with official communications about those classified documents. The government says the leaks in 2009 and 2010 endangered lives and security. Manning’s lawyers contend there was little to no damage.

C. Salon (5/9): The government whistleblower who wouldn’t be silenced

In MacLean’s case, over a period of seven years, the legality of the TSA firing him for using an only-later-classified text was upheld. Legal actions included hearings before administrative judges, the Merit Systems Protections Board twice, that interlocutory appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The sum of these decisions amid a labyrinth of judicial bureaucracies demands the use of the term Kafkaesque.  MacLean, so the general judgment went, should have known that the text message he planned to leak was a classified document, even when it wasn’t (yet). As a result, he should also have understood that his act would not be that of a whistleblower alerting the public to possible danger, but of a criminal risking public safety by exposing government secrets. If that isn’t the definition of a whistleblower’s catch-22, what is?

D. The New York Times (5/8): Former Detainee’s Appeal Cites Long Wait for a Trial

A lawyer for the only terrorist detainee to be held at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and then tried in the civilian court system asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to overturn his conviction, on the grounds that his long detention violated his right to a speedy trial. The former detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was captured in 2004, had been held for two years in a secret overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and then later at Guantánamo.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. Boston Globe (5/7): Muslims being targeted, advocacy group charges

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advo­cacy organization, urged state and federal authorities to charge suspects with violating hate crime laws. “We urge local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to take the suspects in this case into custody and to bring appropriate charges that reflect the apparent bias motive,” said council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. Police told the council the suspects have been identified, but not yet arrested. The council said the incident was just the latest attack on Muslims since the Marathonbombings. A Muslim taxi driver was allegedly attacked in Virginia a week ago by a passenger who accused him of carrying out the Boston attack.

B. Pew Research Center (5/7): After Boston, Little Change in Views of Islam and Violence

The public’s views of whether Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence have changed little in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Currently, 42% say Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers, while 46% say Islam does not encourage violence more than other religions. These are similar to opinions about Islam and violence for most of the past decade. But in March 2002, six months after the 9/11 attacks, just 25% said Islam was more likely to encourage violence while 51% disagreed.[...] The survey also finds that Muslim Americans are seen as facing more discrimination than some other groups in society, including gays and lesbians, Hispanic Americans, African Americans and women. Overall, 45% say that Muslim Americans face a lot of discrimination, and 28% say they are subject to some discrimination.

C. KPLR 11 St. Louis (5/7): Missouri Lawmaker’s Email Attacking Muslims Drawing Fire

An e-mail from a powerful Missouri lawmaker attacking Muslims is drawing fire from Christian pastors in the lawmakers St. Louis County hometown. [...] There aren’t a lot of Muslims in Representative Stream’s district, but there are a lot of Christians, so we decided to ask the pastors of three churches close to Stream’s campaign headquarters in Kirkwood what they think of the e-mail, starting with the pastor of the Methodist Church across the street.

“I think that kind of stuff is generally destructive and incendiary. I want to look at Muslim brothers and sisters, especially the ones who are American citizens as just that,” stated Associate Pastor Rocky Marlowe of United Methodist Church of Kirkwood.

D. NY Daily News (5/8): Judge backs NYPD’s refusal to detail its surveillance of Muslim community under Freedom of Information Law

Reports detailing the NYPD’s infiltration and surveillance of the Muslim community are not subject to public scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Law, a Manhattan judge ruled Wednesday. Supreme Court Justice Alexander Hunter said the NYPD acted reasonably when it rejected a FOIL request on those activities by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Muslim Advocates. [...] Hunter upheld the NYPD’s decision to give the groups very little on the grounds that such information could jeopardize the safety of confidential informants, undercut pending investigations and jeopardize public safety.

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

Written Statement of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) On The Boston Bombings (5/9): Submitted to the United States House Committee on Homeland Security

CAIR recommends that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies reassess their use of stings to radicalize and enable disaffected Muslim community members. CAIR believes that stings should be executed to prevent crime, not create criminals. CAIR also believes that this method of law enforcement is having a serious chilling effect on the Muslim community’s ability to trust and form relationships with law enforcement. Time and again, American Muslims have proven themselves to be vigilant and reliable with community policing and reporting crimes. Nevertheless, elaborate government stings that have radicalized or enabled individuals within the Muslim community to attempt horrible acts  of violence have eroded a great deal of community trust.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. Reuters (5/4): Guantanamo camp burns through $900,000 a year per inmate

It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually. The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.

B. Times Union (5/7): “Resisting Hell on Earth”: Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

Right now when 130 of the 166 remaining detainees are engaged in a hunger strike that began on February 6, 2013 [not the first, but the longest and most extensive hunger strike in its history] the U.S. detention facility located in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is once again in the public spotlight. The first captives arrived at the detention camp on January 11, 2002  after former President George W. Bush began the so-called “war on terror.” After he took office in 2008 President Obama briefly created hope that the facility would be closed and the remaining prisoners released, tried in legitimate courts, or sent to other countries.  That has not happened.

C. CNN (5/8): Terror threat from Gitmo prisoners is exaggerated

Closing Guantanamo was one of Obama’s key 2008 campaign promises. Five years later, the prison complex is populated with 166 detainees, 86 of whom have been approved for transfer to other countries, and is being considered for a $200 million renovation. Nearly 70% of the almost 800 detainees who have been held at Guantanamo were released by the Bush administration. Since then, some U.S. officials have become increasingly worried about former detainees joining militant groups.

D. Miami Herald (5/8): Guantánamo medical providers face dilemma

It is time to stop placing our dedicated military healthcare providers who serve in Guantánamo in the middle of a national security dilemma. It is not possible for the military healthcare professional to ethically serve both detainee patients and the state in the unique circumstances presented by Guantánamo. The individual human-rights of a rational detainee, including the right to die if he so chooses, should not be subordinated to the interests of the state.

E. Truthout (5/8): Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison

In 1998, Illinois opened a prison without a yard, cafeteria, classrooms or chapel. Tamms Supermax was designed for just one purpose: sensory deprivation. No phone calls, communal activities or contact visits were allowed. Men could only leave their cells to shower or exercise alone in a concrete pen. Food was pushed through a slot in the door. The consequences of isolation were predictable: many men fell into severe depression, experienced hallucinations, compulsively cut their bodies or attempted suicide. The first men at Tamms were transferred there from other prisons around the state for a one-year shock treatment intended to break down disruptive prisoners and make them more compliant. But the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) left them there indefinitely. A decade later, more than a third of the men at Tamms had been there since it opened, and for no apparent reason.

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. Politico (5/6): Drone wars hit the states

Lawmakers have introduced 85 pieces of legislation in 39 states this year relating to drones, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Most aim to protect citizens from intrusive “spying” from the skies. Many would do that by requiring police agencies to get a warrant before deploying a drone, while allowing exceptions for life-endangering situations. Other legislation is more specific — a Minnesota measure would protect farmers from agricultural officials with an eye in the sky, while another would ban attaching weapons to drones.

B. The New York Times (5/7): U.S. Weighs Wide Overhaul of Wiretap Laws

The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

C. Bangor Daily News (5/8): Bill to allow police to use drones without search warrant heads to Maine Senate

In a narrow decision, lawmakers accepted an amendment to a bill offered by Sen. John Patrick, D-Rumford, that could allow police to use a drone without a search warrant. In a 7-6 vote on May 1, the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee sided with Maine Attorney General Janet Mills on the issue of how police can employ unmanned aerial vehicles in criminal investigations. The bill, as approved by the committee, sets a one-year moratorium on the use of drones by law enforcement in Maine, except in emergencies, while the state’s Criminal Justice Academy studies drone use and issues a report to the Legislature in 2014, including suggested protocols for police use.

D. Salon (5/9): Boston police commissioner: We need more cameras

Boston’s police commissioner told lawmakers conducting the first congressional hearing on the Marathon bombings that government should tighten security around celebratory public events and consider using more undercover officers, special police units and technology, including surveillance cameras — but only in ways that don’t run afoul of civil liberties.

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

A. Salon (5/6): Why is Obama withholding secret torture report from Americans?

It’s not just Bush’s NSC that has taken extraordinary measures to keep the torture program secret. While Barack Obama’s administration has already permitted the declassification of a great deal of information on the torture program, in fall 2009 Obama took the almost unprecedented step of having his National Security Advisor — at the time, retired Gen. Jim Jones — submit a declaration in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking release of documents pertaining to the torture program. It did so to hide the role of the White House in torture.

B. The New York Times (5/8): Ex-Lawyer in State Department Criticizes Drone Secrecy

In a speech Tuesday at Oxford University, Harold H. Koh, a Yale law professor who as the State Department’s top lawyer in 2010 gave the first public speech explaining the targeted killing program, said the administration “has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to the Congress and to our allies.” The result is “a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control,” said Mr. Koh, who served during President Obama’s entire first term. “The administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late.”

Editorials/Opinions

A. John Knefel in Rolling Stone (5/6): Everything You’ve Been Told About Radicalization Is Wrong

According to Horgan, though, that’s just not how it works. “The idea that radicalization causes terrorism is perhaps the greatest myth alive today in terrorism research,” he says. “[First], the overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in violence. And second, there is increasing evidence that people who engage in terrorism don’t necessarily hold radical beliefs.” [...] Despite all this, law enforcement organizations have used the flawed logic of “radicalization” to justify investigating innocent Muslims in almost every part of their daily lives. Under “preventive policing,” critics say cops and FBI agents aren’t focusing on actual crime, but on protected first amendment activities – like the NYPD’s surveillance of student and political groups, or reports “that the FBI has infiltrated mosques simply to learn about what was being said by the imam leading prayers and by those attending”  – without a clear reason to suspect criminality.

B. Bloomberg (5/7): Obama Can Close Guantanamo. Here’s How.

It’s easy to blame Congress for standing in the way of a rational solution. But if the Obama administration would take some of the legal ingenuity that it has applied in justifying indefinite detention and apply it instead to closing the island prison, maybe something could actually be done, despite the organized madness that is our constitutional separation of powers. Start with the most fundamental reason that Obama should be able to act unilaterally. The president is commander in chief, and the Guantanamo detainees were all held pursuant to the executive power to wage war. The Obama administration says the detainees are being held as, in effect, prisoners of war pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, until the end of hostilities with al-Qaeda — whenever that may be. So why doesn’t the president, who has the absolute power to hold and release the detainees, have the authority to move them around according to his sound judgment?

C. David Horsey in Los Angeles Times (5/7): Permanent imprisonment at Guantanamo betrays American values

It is no secret, however, that hapless fringe characters and many completely innocent men were also swept up in the fog of the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror” and sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo. A Kabul taxi driver who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time spent a year of his life in detention. One British citizen spent five years imprisoned because he looked like somebody else who was an authentic bad guy. An Afghan who had fought alongside American troops at Tora Bora was accused falsely by someone with a grudge against him and ended up with a one-way trip to Cuba.

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Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

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NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

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Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

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Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 177   Tuesday, May 7, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Judicial Ignorance and Bias Doom Ahmed Abu Ali to Decades in Isolation

Former Detainee Talks Of Desperation In Guantanamo Bay [Audio: 7 min.]

Federal judge orders terror suspect released to home confinement

Mayoral Candidates Spar Over NYPD’s Surveillance Of Muslims

A Hundred Hungry Men At Guantánamo

Inside Gitmo: An unprecedented rebellion leaves a notorious deten. ctr in crisis

Detainee alleges guards searched Qurans in prison

Secretive Spy Court Approved Nearly 2,000 Surveillance Requests in 2012

NCPCF Legal Director Kathy Manley: I Was One of the Radicals at the Mosque

Dr. Agha Saeed (Former NCPCF Chair):Islamophobia in USA
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Action Item

NCPCF Second Annual Ramadan Gifts Program

Goal: 150 Donations Urged to 150 Prisoners by June 7.

Needed:  150 generous donors for $105/each. Please consider donating today. 

Spread the word. Click Link Above. Thank You.

Upcoming Events

Free Lynne Stewart Support Rally

When: May 9, 7-10 PM

Where: New York City, St. Mark’s Thearter, in Manhattan.

Poll of the Week

Do you think President Obama will fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to close Guantánamo Bay Prison once and for all?

Website of the Week

Written Statement of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Drone Wars (5/2): The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing - Submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

Our nation’s use of and growing reliance on armed drones in remote areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia has raised serious questions. Has the administration established a viable legal framework and procedures to oversee the use of targeted drone strikes inside and outside of designated zones of hostility? How is due process upheld for American citizens targeted by lethal drone strikes? What steps has the U.S. government taken to avoid civilian deaths and injuries, and has it compensated victims, their families, or communities when wrongful drone strikes occur?

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

The Dissenter (4/13): Judicial Ignorance and Bias Doom Ahmed Abu Ali to Decades in Isolation in Key “War on Terror” Case

Even as a desperate hunger strike by detainees at Guantanamo prison camp continues, with dozens in medical peril, preferring death to the lawless existence of indefinite detention and ongoing planned (or some might say, capricious) abuse, human rights and civil liberties activists often point to the Article III courts as an alternative in the prosecution of “war on terror” crimes. But an examination of actual cases prosecuted in the criminal courts shows that use of accepted rules and appeal procedures merely produce their own version of unfairness and arbitrary injustice. Ahmed Abu Ali is a young man in his early 30s, who at this point in his life should be coming into his career prime, consolidating his family, and making his mark upon the world. Instead, he is held in the extremely onerous conditions of government-imposed Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) at the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, held “in 23-hour lockdown, in a 7×12 cell“, out of all practical reach to anyone, essentially buried alive.

Multimedia

NPR (5/4): Former Detainee Talks Of Desperation In Guantanamo Bay [Audio: 7 min.]

Omar Deghayes is one of hundreds of former detainees who have been released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay over the past several years. Arrested in Pakistan in 2002, Deghayes, a Libyan citizen, was held as an enemy combatant until his release in December 2007. No charges were ever filed against him. There are 166 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, about 100 of whom are said to be participating in a hunger strike. Some are now even being force-fed to keep them alive. In his years as a detainee, Deghayes went on three hunger strikes. He tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin that the strikes were often prompted by something drastic that happened in the prison. “If you’re so angry and depressed, you just can’t feel you want to eat food,” he says. “That’s how it starts.”

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. Los Angeles Times (5/3): Terror database too vague to flag Boston suspect

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, known as TIDE, was the government’s attempt after the Sept. 11 attacks to consolidate a hodgepodge of watch lists, and ensure that every law enforcement agency would be alerted when it came into contact with a possible terrorist. But TIDE has ballooned to 875,000 records, and critics say it is so all-encompassing that its value has been diminished. The database includes the names of young children of suspected terrorists and of people who have been cleared of suspected links to terrorism, officials say. A single credible tip raising “reasonable suspicion” is enough to add someone to the list.

B. Chicago Tribune (5/3): Federal judge orders terror suspect released to home confinement

In a highly unusual decision, a federal judge Thursday ordered a terrorism suspect released to home confinement while the Aurora teen awaits trial on charges that he signed up to fight in war-torn Syria for a terror group with ties to al-Qaida. But the U.S. attorney’s office quickly moved to appeal the decision, putting a hold on the release of Abdella Ahmad Tounisi. Another judge will reconsider Tounisi’s bail Friday morning.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. CBS Miami (5/3): Anti-Foreign Law Bill Can’t Pass Senate

A bill that would have banned Islamic, or Sharia Law, along with other foreign laws from being applied in state courts died in the legislature Friday. [...] The bill is similar in scope to bills in a handful of other states. The push for the bills began a few years ago when extremist wings of political parties began to spread the word that Sharia Law could be creeping into the United States.

B. NY Daily News (5/5): Mayoral Candidates Spar Over NYPD’s Surveillance Of Muslims

City Controller John Liu called the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims unconstitutional at a forum dedicated to Muslim and Arab American issues Sunday. Asked whether the NYPD’s surveillance program was unconstitutional, Liu was the only major candidate to say it is. “No offense to you guys here – how can anybody think that it’s OK to surveil or spy on people just because they’re Muslim?” Liu said. The NYPD’s program has involved monitoring mosques, cafes and bookstores in Muslim neighborhoods, and Muslim student association.

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

US News and World Report (4/30): Domestic Drone Arrest Database Being Built by Defense Lawyers Group

More drone arrests are coming to the United States, and a prominent group of defense lawyers wants their clients to be prepared. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has set up a database of information to help lawyers defend clients who are arrested with the help of domestic drones, citing the lack of clear laws governing the use of unmanned aircraft. The information center will include state-by-state laws, court decisions relating to domestic drones and aerial surveillance and general updates about drone use in the United States. “We’re concerned there aren’t adequate safeguards [against drone use by law enforcement],” says Norman Reimer, executive director of the group. “At the moment, law enforcement is basically going to be making up the rules as they go along, and that’s very troubling from a constitutional perspective.”

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. The New Yorker (5/1): A Hundred Hungry Men At Guantánamo

A hundred prisoners are taking part in the hunger strike at Guantánamo now—a hundred angry men, or ones who are in a state of despair. There may be more, since that is the military’s count, and the lawyers for the prisoners have been saying for some time that the number is higher. There are not, it should be said, a hundred prisoners at Guantánamo who even the United States government considers dangerous enemy combatants; that means it’s a mathematical necessity that there are hunger-strikers who shouldn’t be there, either. Eighty-six prisoners have been cleared for release, one way or the other, many of them years ago now, but have not been released. (For many, the problem is that they are from Yemen.) That leaves just eighty. They are roughly divided between those the Administration says it might bestir itself to bring a case against someday, and those it acknowledges it doesn’t have enough evidence against, but finds somehow unsettling, and so is locking up anyway. There are only six prisoners who are now facing military commissions. A month ago, there were only thirty-one hunger strikers by the military’s count, or five times as many as those being tried. Now the ratio is more than sixteen to one.

B. The Independent (5/3): Inside Guantánamo: An unprecedented rebellion leaves a notorious detention centre in crisis

Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death. Stripped of all possessions, even basics such as a sleeping mat or soap, they lie listlessly as guards periodically bang on the steel doors and shout at them to move an arm or leg to prove they are still conscious. The notorious detention centre is in crisis, suffering a rebellion of unprecedented scale, with most of the camp on lockdown and around two-thirds of the 166 detainees on hunger strike.

C. The Miami Herald (5/5): Detainee alleges guards searched Qurans in prison

An Afghan captive at Guantánamo said in a just-released sworn statement that guards rifled through Qurans to trigger the ongoing 100-captive hunger strike at the prison camps in Cuba. The four-page affidavit by an Afghan captive in his 30s, Obaidullah, is the first detainee court document to attest to what lawyers have said for months: Something went terribly wrong in a shakedown at the showcase, communal prison, called Camp 6, in February. “While the soldiers conducted their searches, I and other detainees saw U.S. soldiers rifling through the pages of many Qurans and handling them roughly,” Obaidullah said in the March 27 statement that defense lawyers were allowed to release on Friday. “This constitutes desecration. It has not been searched in five years.”

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. The Atlantic (4/30): Do You Want the Government Buying Your Data From Corporations?

It’s no secret that we’re monitored continuously on the Internet. Some of the company names you know, such as Google and Facebook. Others hide in the background as you move about the Internet. There are browser plugins that show you who is tracking you. One Atlantic editor found 105 companies tracking him during one 36-hour period. Add data from your cell phone (who you talk to, your location), your credit cards (what you buy, from whom you buy it), and the dozens of other times you interact with a computer daily, we live in a surveillance state beyond the dreams of Orwell. It’s all corporate data, compiled and correlated, bought and sold. And increasingly, the government is doing the buying. Some of this is collected using National Security Letters (NSLs). These give the government the ability to demand an enormous amount of personal data about people for very speculative reasons, with neither probable cause nor judicial oversight. Data on these secretive orders is obviously scant, but we know that the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of them in the past decade — for reasons that go far beyond terrorism.

B. Wired (5/2): Secretive Spy Court Approved Nearly 2,000 Surveillance Requests in 2012

A secretive federal court last year approved all of the 1,856 requests to search or electronically surveil people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” the Justice Department reported this week. The report (.pdf), released Tuesday to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, provides a brief glimpse into the caseload of what is known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. None of its decisions are public. The 2012 figures represent a 5 percent bump from the prior year, when no requests were denied either. The act allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request to the secret court, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the spy court rejects the surveillance application.

Editorials/Opinions

A. Cornelius Chapman in Boston Herald (5/1): Double standard on Patriot Act

Back then the Patriot Act was associated with a Republican president running for a second term, a man who spoke with a Texas drawl. George W. Bush was the bogeyman, and at town meetings across Massachusetts supporters of “curbing” the Patriot Act (the non-binding ballot question actually called for repeal) spoke of a police state about to descend upon the nation. Today the Patriot Act, like the economy, belongs to a different president from a different party, and the voices who were once heard to say that we need less, not more security against terrorism, are curiously silent.

B. Kathy Manley in CounterPunch (5/3): I Was One of the Radicals at the Mosque

After the Boston Marathon bombing some media outlets have suggested that the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) was an incubator of radicalism because the Tsarnaev brothers occasionally worshipped there, and because they had permitted “radicals” who “defended terrorism suspects” to speak there. See, i.e. (link). I have spoken there and defended the rights of “terrorism suspects.” I was one of those radicals: I spoke at the ISBCC, along with several others, in September 2011 at an event called “Reclaiming Power and Defending Our Communities: How You Can Protect Yourself from Profiling and Preemptive Prosecution.” The event was sponsored by the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), a civil rights coalition composed of 20 Muslim and non-Muslim organizations, and was co-sponsored by many other groups, including the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) and the ACLU’s Massachusetts chapter.

-Kathy Manley is a criminal defense attorney and legal director of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms.

C. Dr. Agha Saeed in The Nation (Pakistan) (3/6): Islamophobia in USA

The decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, was characterised by a somewhat frenzied effort to find a replacement ideology. 1n 1993, Anthony Lake, yet another scholar-administrator, had “officially” postulated the need for a new policy: “Clearly, the Soviet Union’s collapse enhances our security. But it also requires us to think anew because the world is new.” This more-than-two-decades-long debate leading up to the present justificatory frameworks for carrying out direct US-led Nato invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and covert wars against Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Syria, can be effectively summed up in terms of seven major theoretical formulations…

D. Steve Coll in The New Yorker (5/6): Our Drone Delusion 

America’s drone campaign is also creating an ominous global precedent. Ten years or less from now, China will likely be able to field armed drones. How might its Politburo apply Obama’s doctrines to Tibetan activists holding meetings in Nepal? Mazzetti closes his narrative with an interview with Richard Blee, a retired C.I.A. operations officer who worked aggressively against Al Qaeda at the Counterterrorist Center before and after September 11th, and who, like the Shin Bet directors in “The Gatekeepers,” has since developed doubts about tactics he once embraced. “In the early days, for our consciences we wanted to know who we were killing before anyone pulled the trigger,” Blee told the author. He continued: “Now, we’re lighting these people up all over the place. Every drone strike is an execution. And if we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing. . . . And it should be a debate that Americans can understand.”

___________________________________________________

Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

___________________________________________________ 

NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

___________________________________________________ 

Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

___________________________________________________ 

Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 176   Friday, May 3, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

Protest at DOJ: Scapegoated and Buried Alive - The NCPCF Campaign To Free Political Prisoners

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Hunger-Striking Detainees At Guantanamo Are Force-Fed [Audio: 5 min.]

A young Yemeni writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his country

CAIR Seeks Hate Crime Charges for Attack on Va. Muslim Taxi Driver

American Medical Association questions Guantanamo force-feedings

Government preparing to fine tech firms that don’t comply with wiretaps

Drones coming to a neighborhood near you! Column

I could justify fighting in Afghanistan — until the Boston bombing

A Fighter by His Trade: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Sports and the American Dream

The President’s Guantanamo Comments

Erasing the stain of Guantanamo

_______________________________________________________

Upcoming Events

NCPCF Event: Scapegoated and Buried Alive - The NCPCF Campaign To Free Political Prisoners

Support our Muslim sisters as they protest how the Justice Department turned their relatives into political prisoners and buried them alive in federal prisons.

When: Friday, May 3 at 3:30PM – 5:30PM

Where: In front of the U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW , Washington, DC

Hear their stories. Demand accountability. Insist that all political prisoners be released.

For more information: Call (202) 246-9608; Email lynnejackson@mac.com; 

Visit www.civilfreedoms.org

Free Lynne Stewart Support Rally

When: May 9, 7-10 PM

Where: New York City, St. Mark’s Thearter, in Manhattan.

Action Items

Petition: President Obama: Close Detention Facility at Guantanamo Bay

It is probably no surprise that human rights and activist groups like the Center For Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture and Amnesty International have been outspoken critics of Guantanamo.  It may surprise you that a former military prosecutor and many other retired senior military officers and members of the intelligence community agree with them.

Poll of the Week

Do you think President Obama will fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to close Guantánamo Bay Prison once and for all?

Website of the Week

Written Statement of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Drone Wars (5/2): The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing - Submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

Our nation’s use of and growing reliance on armed drones in remote areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia has raised serious questions. Has the administration established a viable legal framework and procedures to oversee the use of targeted drone strikes inside and outside of designated zones of hostility? How is due process upheld for American citizens targeted by lethal drone strikes? What steps has the U.S. government taken to avoid civilian deaths and injuries, and has it compensated victims, their families, or communities when wrongful drone strikes occur?

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression

Slate (4/30): The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

For nearly 11 years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been a prisoner in Guantánamo. In 2005, he began to write his memoirs of his time in captivity. His handwritten 466-page manuscript is a harrowing account of his detention, interrogation, and abuse. Although his abuse has been corroborated by U.S. government officials, declassified documents, and independent investigators, Slahi tells his story with the detail and perspective that could only be known by himself and the people who have kept him captive. It is impossible for us to meet with him or independently verify his account. Until now, it has been impossible for him to tell his story.

See also: ACLU Blog (4/30): Guantánamo Prisoner’s Memoirs Offer Rare First-Person Account of Torture

A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner’s experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi’s memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.

Multimedia 

A. CAIRtv, NBC News Channel 8 (5/2): Va. Man Accused of Attacking Muslim Cabbie Turns Himself in to Police [Video: 40 sec.]

CAIR said the alleged attacker has been charged with misdemeanor assault, but the Washington-based civil rights group is asking prosecutors to instead bring felony charges based on Virginia’s hate crime law. In a cell-phone video taken by the driver, 39-year-old Mohamed A. Salim of Great Falls, Va., the alleged attacker is heard asking the victim if he is Muslim and claiming that most Muslims are terrorists.

B. NPR Morning Edition (5/2): Hunger-Striking Detainees At Guantanamo Are Force-Fed [Audio: 5 min.]

Almost two-thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are on a hunger strike. The Navy sent dozens of extra medics this week to care for them, and to force-feed some of them. Reporter Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald recently returned from Guantanamo. She describes to Renee Montagne the force-feeding procedure at the prison.

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

A. Reuters (4/30): Death penalty expert Clarke joins defense of Boston bomb suspect

Prominent criminal defense lawyer Judy Clarke, who has represented defendants in some of the most high-profile death penalty cases in recent years, has joined the legal defense team for accused Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, according to court documents.

B. The New York Times (5/1): Court Papers Offer Details in Terror Case

Some personal information also emerged about them: Madhi Hashi is a British citizen, and Mohamed Yusuf is a Swedish citizen. The nationality of the third man, Ali Yasin Ahmed, was not revealed, but he was assisted by Swedish counsel at a previous hearing. A defense lawyer for Mr. Yusuf, Ephraim Savitt, said that the men were freedom fighters in a cause that had nothing to do with the United States and that the men would offer that defense at trial. All three, who were arrested in Africa while traveling to Yemen, have pleaded not guilty.

Featured Stories

A. Associated Press (5/1): Ex-lawyer convicted in terror case seeks release

Stewart has been imprisoned since late 2009 when a federal appeals court in Manhattan called a judge’s two-year, four-month prison sentence too lenient. She was resentenced to 10 years for a 2005 conviction on conspiracy charges for providing support to terrorist organizations by letting an Egyptian terrorism defendant serving a life sentence communicate with followers. At her first sentencing, U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl cited her more than three decades of dedication to poor, disadvantaged and unpopular clients, calling the work that left her destitute a public service “not only to her clients but to the nation.”

B. The Guardian (5/1):  A young Yemeni writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his country

We Yemenis got our first experience with targeted killings under the Obama administration on December 17, 2009, with a cruise missile strike in al-Majala, a hamlet in a remote area of southern Yemen. This attack killed 44 people including 21 women and 14 children, according to Yemeni and international rights groups including Amnesty International. The lethal impact of that strike on innocents lasted long after it took place. On August 9, 2010, two locals were killed and 15 were injured from an explosion of one remaining cluster bomb from that strike.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. The Washington Post (4/30): Muslim cabdriver alleges assault by passenger who cited Boston Marathon bombing

An Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a cabdriver says a passenger he picked up early Friday at a Northern Virginia country club accused him of being a terrorist because he is Muslim, then fractured his jaw in an attack being described by Islamic activists as a hate crime. Mohamed A. Salim says the passenger compared him to the men accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing 11 days earlier and threatened to kill him.“Because I’m a Muslim, he treated me like a piece of trash,” Salim said. “I love this country. I didn’t deserve this.”

See also: Council on American-Islamic Relations Press Release (5/1): CAIR Seeks Hate Crime Charges for Attack on Va. Muslim Taxi Driver

Medical records show that Salim was treated for a fractured jaw and a head injury. “With the sharp spike in anti-Muslim rhetoric we have witnessed since the tragedy in Boston, it was inevitable that a tiny minority of bigoted individuals would turn hate speech into acts of violence,” said CAIR Staff Attorney Gadeir Abbas, who is representing Salim. “We urge prosecutors to look at the clear evidence of hatred based on religion, race and national origin, and then bring appropriate felony charges in the case.”

See also: CAIRtv, NBC News Channel 8 (5/2): Va. Man Accused of Attacking Muslim Cabbie Turns Himself in to Police [Video: 40 sec.]

CAIR said the alleged attacker has been charged with misdemeanor assault, but the Washington-based civil rights group is asking prosecutors to instead bring felony charges based on Virginia’s hate crime law. In a cell-phone video taken by the driver, 39-year-old Mohamed A. Salim of Great Falls, Va., the alleged attacker is heard asking the victim if he is Muslim and claiming that most Muslims are terrorists.

B. NBC 5 Chicago (5/1): Muslim Woman Says Her Faith Was Attacked in Court

A Hammond, Ind., woman says she felt she and her Islamic faith were under attack Tuesday night when she declined a request to remove her head scarf during a visit to traffic court.

Yolanda Gray says she has been a Muslim her whole life and began wearing head scarves to signify her devotion to the Islamic religion. Gray said she was confronted about her head scarf once by a security guard at the entrance of City Hall and again by a court officer.

The security guard gave her no problem, she said, but a court officer threatened to make her leave the courtroom if she didn’t either show proof of her religion or remove the head scarf.

C. River Front Times (5/2): Rep. Rick Stream Sends Bizarre E-Mail About the Dangers of Islam…Citing Winston Churchill?

Missouri State Representative Rick Stream fired off a bizarre e-mail to his House GOP colleagues this week that discusses the dangers of Islam…citing an 1899 quote from former British prime minister Winston Churchill. ”Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world,” writes Stream, quoting Churchill in a widely distributed e-mail that was forwarded to Daily RFT by way of a displeased recipient. “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.” It appears that the e-mail was sent out from Rick.Stream@house.mo.gov at 11:21 p.m. on Tuesday night to an e-mail listserve that includes Republican representatives and possibly other staff in the Missouri House. Not everyone was pleased.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. The Guardian (5/1): Former Guantánamo chief prosecutor petitions Obama to close prison camp

A former chief prosecutor for the controversial American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay has called for the prison to be closed, launching an online petition that has gathered some 60,000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Col Morris Davis served for two years as the chief prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantánamo. He decided to campaign for the closure of the camp in the wake of a hunger strike that now involves more than 100 prisoners, including some 21 who are being force fed to keep them from starving to death. [...] Davis told The Guardian that he had been appalled at the concept of the prisoners going on hunger strike, in the light of the fact that so many of them have been kept in jail without trial for more than a decade. “As illogical as suicide seems, sitting there for the rest of their lives probably makes it look like a rational choice,” he said.

B. Reuters (4/29): American Medical Association questions Guantanamo force-feedings

The Navy sent extra medical personnel to the Guantanamo detention camp because of a growing hunger strike, and the American Medical Association questioned whether doctors were being asked to violate their ethics by force-feeding prisoners.

C. The New York Times (4/29): The Detainees’ Dilemma

Like most Guantánamo detainees, Hentif spent years in solitary confinement. He was subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques” as it was euphemistically called. He watched the Bush administration release more than 500 of the 779 detainees who have passed through Guantánamo. He learned about lawyers arguing in court that the detainees had the legal right to a habeas corpus hearing — that is, to try to prove that they were not enemy combatants and had been detained illegally.

Civil Freedoms Under Threat

A. Wired (4/29): Government Seeks to Fine Companies for Not Complying With Wiretap Orders

It isn’t often that communications companies push back against government requests to monitor customers and hand over information about them, but a government task force is seeking to make it even harder for companies to say no. The task force is pushing for legislation that would penalize companies like Google, Facebook and Skype that fail to comply with court orders for wiretapping, according to the Washington Post. The cost of non-complying would be an escalating series of fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars. Fines that remained unpaid after 90 days would double daily.

See also: Salon (4/30): Government preparing to fine tech firms that don’t comply with wiretaps

The government has for many years sought the means, through tech giants like Google and Facebook, to wiretap communications with the use of built-in backdoors. According to the Washington Post, a Justice Department task force, prompted by FBI efforts, is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Face­book and Google to comply with law enforcement wiretaps.

B. Foreign Policy (4/30): The White House responds to the “Stop CISPA” petition

Just in case there was any question, the White House says that the now dead-in-the-water Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA, does not do enough to protect privacy rights. “Even though a bill [CISPA] went on to pass the House of Representatives and includes some important improvements over previous versions, this legislation still doesn’t adequately address our fundamental concerns,” Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer, and Michael Daniel, the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator, said today in the Obama administration’s official reaction to a petition on whitehouse.gov titled, Stop CISPA.

C. USA Today (4/30): Drones coming to a neighborhood near you! Column

For Americans concerned about personal privacy, it’s time to wake up. They are far too blasé at a time when we’re being bombarded by an ever-growing array of high-tech surveillance techniques. I’m neither a black-helicopter conspiracist nor a member of the ACLU, but anyone who’s not a little paranoid is not keeping up. [...] The prospect of drones over neighborhoods across the country is very real, and only a few local jurisdictions are taking it seriously. The Seattle police department recently nixed the use of two drones after a public outcry. The City Council in Charlottesville, Va., voted to restrict police use of drones in criminal investigations while permitting them for search-and-rescue operations.

D. NPR (4/30): Poll: Most Americans Are OK With Surveillance Cameras

A few polls following the twin bombings during the Boston Marathon paint a mixed picture of where the American public stands on privacy and security. Today, a poll released by The New York Times and CBS News finds that 78 percent of “people said surveillance cameras were a good idea.”

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

A. Roll Call (4/27): Biden Backs Public Disclosure of Torture Report

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Friday night that he supports making a classified Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and enhanced interrogation more available to the public. [...] Speaking about the classified Senate Intelligence report on the use of torture or enhanced interrogation by the United States, Biden suggested that his personal view is that he agrees with McCain that more information should be made public [...] “Now this voluminous study has been done,” Biden said. “And the internal debate that goes on in the Congress and in the White House is, do we go back and do we expose it? Do we lay out who was responsible and how we got to where we are?” “It offends the fundamentals of what kind of country we are, and the practical side of it is, don’t think it didn’t damage the United States’ image in the world in ways that we’ll be paying for for years to come,” McCain said, noting his support for disclosing more details of what happened.

B. USA Today (4/30): Obama: We need to close Guantanamo Bay

President Obama said Tuesday that his administration would re-engage Congress on closing the U.S. military-run detention center at Guantanamo Bay, calling the facility a “recruitment tool for extremists” and suggesting it is undermining U.S. security.  ”It needs to be closed,” Obama said at a White House news conference marking the first 100 days of his second term. “I’m going to go back at this.”

See also: The Guardian (4/30): Guantánamo ‘not in the best interests of the American people’, says Obama

Barack Obama vowed to take action to close the controversial prison camp at Guantánamo Bay on Tuesday, declaring that he did not want any of its hunger-striking inmates to die of starvation. At a press conference in Washington, Obama said it was not sustainable to keep Guantánamo open, warning its continued existence was a “recruitment tool” for extremists. The president promised to take the issue back to Congress, which blocked his earlier attempts to fulfill a 2008 campaign promise to close the camp.

Editorials/Opinions

A. John W. Whitehead in The Rutherford Institute blog (4/22): ‘Boston Strong’: Marching in Lockstep with the Police State [SHORT]

Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s rumored weapons of mass destruction, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice. [...] Particularly disheartening is the fact that Americans, consumed with the need for vengeance, seem even less concerned about protecting the rights of others, especially if those “others” happen to be of a different skin color or nationality. There has been little outcry over the Obama administration’s decision to deny 19-year-old U.S. citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his due process rights and treat him as an enemy combatant, first off by interrogating him without reading him his Miranda rights.

B. Thomas Gibbons-Neff in The Washtington Post (4/26): I could justify fighting in Afghanistan — until the Boston bombing

I deployed to Afghanistan believing my presence in that country would help stop attacks such as Boston’s from happening. But instead, my war has spilled over, striking the city where my 22-year-old brother goes to school and where my mom, until recently, felt perfectly safe eating lunch outdoors. The Tsarnaev brothers aren’t the first alleged terrorists to cite U.S. military intervention in other countries as a reason for targeting civilians, and they won’t be the last. Despite our best efforts and valor, I wonder, have America’s wars made the homeland less safe? Sure, we’ve killed and captured thousands of radicals who wanted to harm Americans. But in doing so, have we created more?

C. Ghazala Salam in The Orlando Sun-Sentinel (4/29): Judge Muslims on actions, don’t demonize them all

In order to understand the why behind the mindset of violent criminals causing fear and terror, we must first stop demonizing Islam and marginalizing the Muslim people. As hard as it may be we must stop branding Islam as a religion of hate and violence simply because a minority group of mentally insane people choose the lame excuse of religion as a defense for their crimes.

D. Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post (4/29): Why did Eric Holder drop the ball on Miranda reform?

Why are we still operating under the same flawed legal framework for questioning of suspected terrorists that Holder pledged to fix three years ago? Why didn’t the Obama administration follow through on Holder’s promise to work with Congress to change the law? Why are we once again reading a suspected terrorist his Miranda rights before intelligence officials are done questioning him for national security purposes? [...] Cases like this are precisely why we need Miranda reform. If Holder is insistent that we use the criminal justice system to deal with terrorists captured here in the United States, then it is his responsibility to fix the flaws in that system. He promised to do so, and he failed to deliver. Now, because of that failure, another suspect has stopped talking.

E. Dave Zirin in The Nation (4/29): A Fighter by His Trade: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Sports and the American Dream

Alienation, poverty and despair drive people—overwhelmingly young men—to awful acts of violence. That’s as true for the strung-out soldier who commits war crimes in Kandahar as it is for the gang member who kills a child on the South Side of Chicago. It’s also true in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead—and deadly—elder bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon. The recognition of the roots of his rage rings clearly in a brilliant, harrowing profile that appeared Sunday in The New York Times. It’s less a story than an autopsy that explores what killed Tsarnaev’s hope that he could make a life in the United States. Given the unconscionable arguments by Representative Peter King and countless others that the Tsarnaev’s crimes should be a clarion call for intensified profiling and surveillance of Muslim families in the United States, understanding Tsarnaev’s motivations is critical. Just as we shouldn’t accept the racist argument that “culture” is the root cause of gun deaths in Chicago, we should reject the idea that Islam bears any sort of collective responsibility for Tsarnaev’s crimes.

F. The Washington Post Editorial (4/30): President Obama must make closing Guantanamo a priority

President Obama was eloquent Tuesday in describing why the situation at the Guantanamo Bay prison is “unsustainable.” He was justified in blaming Congress for frustrating his effort to close the facility. But he was disingenuous in failing to acknowledge that his own actions — or his own inaction — have substantially contributed to an impasse that has prompted more than half of Guantanamo’s inmates to undertake a hunger strike. One hundred and sixty-six terrorism suspects remain at Guantanamo, of whom 86 have been cleared for transfer to their home nations.

G. The New York Times Editorial (4/30): The President and the Hunger Strike

If he is serious about moving toward closure, there are two steps proposed by the American Civil Liberties Union that could get the ball rolling. He could appoint a senior official “so that the administration’s Guantánamo closure policy is directed by the White House and not by Pentagon bureaucrats,” the A.C.L.U. said, and he could order Mr. Hagel to start providing legally required waivers to transfer detainees who have been cleared. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has urged Mr. Obama to urgently review the status of those prisoners — a primary issue for the hunger strikers. The hunger strike is an act of desperation over policies even Mr. Obama says cannot be defended. It is his responsibility to deal with it — and close the prison.

H. Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare Blog (4/30): The President’s Guantanamo Comments

The President’s comments are bewildering because his own policies give rise to the vast majority of the concerns about which he so earnestly delivered  himself in these remarks. Remember that Obama himself has imposed a moratorium on repatriating people to Yemen. And Obama himself has insisted that nearly 50 detainees cannot either be tried or transferred. True, he would hold such people in a domestic facility, rather than at Guantanamo Bay. But so what? does the President not understand when he frets about “the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity” that if Congress let him do exactly as he wished, he would still be doing exactly that—except that the number might not reach 100 and the location would not be at Guantanamo?

I. LA Times Editorial (5/1): Erasing the stain of Guantanamo

Guantanamo is a stain on this nation’s reputation, not because of where it is located but because the men held captive there are languishing in a legal limbo that would be just as hopeless if they were transplanted to American soil. Notwithstanding Obama’s comments about the un-American nature of indefinite detention, more than 40 inmates are being held without the prospect of even a military trial. As he “re-engages” with Congress, Obama should also reconsider his own decision to deny those detainees their day in court.

J. Bloomberg Editorial (5/1): Is Obama Appalled by His Own Anti-Terrorism Policies?

Yet even if Congress magically overcame its misguided objections to transferring those prisoners to the U.S. mainland, closing Gitmo would resolve few of the questions that have made it such a vexing problem to begin with. These include what rights are owed to detainees under the Constitution, and whether indefinite detention is appropriate in what looks to be a long and open-ended war. A change of geography, moreover, is unlikely to end the hunger strike by 100 or so detainees. They are not refusing food because they are in Cuba. They are refusing food because they are behind bars — even though many have been cleared for release on grounds that they don’t pose a threat to the U.S.

___________________________________________________

Please help NCPCF fulfill its mission.

___________________________________________________ 

NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

___________________________________________________ 

Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

___________________________________________________ 

Opting Out or In

If you’d like to opt out of this service, please send an email to ncpcf.list@gmail.com requesting that your email is removed from the distribution list. If there are other people that you’d like to add to the list, kindly send their emails to the same email address above. Thank you.

   NCPCF NEWS DIGEST    Vol. III – Issue No. 175  Tuesday, April 30, 2013

‘Civil Freedoms for All’

“It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.”      Archbishop Desmond Tutu  

In this issue

Protest at DOJ: Scapegoated and Buried Alive - The NCPCF Campaign To Free Political Prisoners

 Yemeni Testifies at Senate Drone Hearing on Human Cost of US Drone Wars

Former Guantanamo prisoner, now in Canada, to appeal US terror convictions

30 arrested in NY during rally against drones

Muslim Congressman Slams GOP’s Call For Religious Profiling [Video: 5 min.]

Panel seeks to fine tech companies for noncompliance with wiretap orders

100 prisoners now on hunger strike at Guantanamo

Jailed Journalist Reports Inhumane Conditions for Pre-Trial Detainees

Jonathan Turley: More cameras won’t stop terror

More surveillance is not the answer

_______________________________________________________

Upcoming Events

NCPCF Event: Scapegoated and Buried Alive - The NCPCF Campaign To Free Political Prisoners

Support our Muslim sisters as they protest how the Justice Department turned their relatives into political prisoners and buried them alive in federal prisons.

When: Friday, May 3 at 3:30PM – 5:30PM

Where: In front of the U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW , Washington, DC

Hear their stories. Demand accountability. Insist that all political prisoners be released.

For more information: Call (202) 246-9608; Email lynnejackson@mac.com;

Visit www.civilfreedoms.org

Free Lynne Stewart Support Rally

When: May 9, 7-10 PM

Where: New York City, St. Mark’s Thearter, in Manhattan.

Poll of the Week

In light of the Boston Marathon bombing, should the government be given more surveillance authority as demanded by some officials?

Website of the Week

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR): Floyd v. New York City Trial Updates

Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. is a federal class action lawsuit filed against the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the City of New York that challenges the NYPD’s practices of racial profiling and unconstitutional stop-and frisks. These NYPD practices have led to a dramatic increase in the number of suspicion-less stop-and-frisks per year in the city, with the majority of stops in communities of color.

Portraits of Injustice/Voices of Victims of Repression 

The Dissenter in Firedoglake.com (4/23): Yemeni Testifies at Senate Drone Hearing on Human Cost of US Drone Wars

His village would have preferred to see Al-Radmi captured so he could be questioned and whatever he was doing wrong could be ended. But, they still do not know what he was doing that led to him being targeted and killed.”Instead, all they have is the psychological fear and terror that now occupies their souls. They fear that their home or a neighbor’s home could be bombed at any time by a US drone,” Al-Muslimi declares.

See also: Wired (4/23): Yemeni Tells Senators About ‘Fear and Terror’ Caused by U.S. Drones

Farea al-Muslimi, who was born in the mountain village of Wessab and educated at a California high school, described a drone strike in the village that took place a week ago. His voice occasionally catching, al-Muslimi told a Senate judiciary subcommittee today that the target of the strike, Hameed Meftah, was well known to villagers, and could have been captured. A “psychological fear and terror” has now taken ahold of his old neighbors, al-Muslimi said. “The drone strikes are the face of America to many.”

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News Digest

Pre-Crime Reports/Pre-emptive Prosecutions/Thought Crimes/Entrapment/Material Support

Associated Press (4/28): Former Guantanamo prisoner, now in Canada, to appeal US terror convictions

A Canadian man who spent 10 years at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay plans to appeal his U.S. terrorism convictions. Omar Khadr, 26, has decided to go ahead with the appeal. Khadr, the last Western detainee at Guantanamo, was transferred last September to a maximum security facility in Ontario to serve out the remaining six years of his eight-year sentence for war crimes. The Toronto-born son of an alleged al-Qaida financier, Khadr pleaded guilty in 2010 to several charges, including killing a U.S. solider in Afghanistan when he was 15.

Islamophobia and Civil Rights

A. KOCO.com (4/27): Oklahoma City mosque vandalized for 2nd time [Video 2 min]

FBI officials said they were looking into the incident as a possible hate crime. Investigators said they are reviewing the footage, which caught two men defacing the building.

B. Think Progress (4/28): Muslim Congressman Slams GOP’s Call For Religious Profiling After Boston [Video: 5 min.]

Keith Ellison detailed the shortcomings of Peter King’s approach, stressing that individual behavior and actionable evidence should form the basis of terrorism investigations. He also compared King’s strategy to the similarly misguided policies that the American government adopted towards Japanese Americans during World War II.

C. Radio Liberty (4/30): Following Boston Attacks, Uptick In Islamophobia, Gestures Of Tolerance

“Ever since [9/11], yes, there has been a pattern,” Weddady says. “Whenever events [occur] involving terrorism, there is a backlash and there’s a rise [in Islamophobia]. It’s not ad hoc or spontaneous, because there are some quarters that have been clearly trying to paint all Muslims as potential terrorists — and it’s generally these quarters that contribute to the rise of that feeling.”

Community Action/Building Our Coalition

Seattle PI (4/29): 30 arrested in NY during rally against drones

Thirty people protesting against unmanned aerial drones outside Hancock Field Air Force National Guard Base have been arrested. The Post-Standard reports (bit.ly/12aGsae) that the arrests Sunday came after a series of rallies and workshops held in Syracuse over the weekend by the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars.

Prison Conditions and Abuse/CMUs

A. USA Today (4/27): 100 prisoners now on hunger strike at Guantanamo

A hunger strike among prisoners at Guantanamo Bay keeps growing. Lt. Col. Samuel House said Saturday that 100 of 166 prisoners at the U.S. base in Cuba have now joined the strike. He says 19 are receiving liquid nutrients through a nasal tube to prevent dangerous weight loss. Lawyers for the detainees say the military is undercounting the number of hunger strikers. Prisoners began the hunger strike in February to protest conditions and indefinite confinement.

B. Indypendent Reader (4/28): Court Date: Jailed Journalist Reports Inhumane Conditions for Pre-Trial Detainees

James MacArthur, the “Baltimore Spectator”, gives a firsthand account of how the City’s detention system moves inmates from Central Bookings to the courtroom. His handwritten letter describes the overnight ritual of sleep deprivation and degrading treatment that precedes a detainee’s appearance in court.

C. Miami Herald (4/29): Guantanamo prisoners live under constant lockdown

With nearly every one of the 166 Guantanamo prisoners now under lockdown — back in solitary existence after years of communal living — the military has reverted to a battle rhythm reminiscent of the Bush administration. Pre-cleared captives awaiting political change are confined for long stretches to 8-by-12 cells, each man praying behind his own steel door, deciding for himself whether to eat a solitary meal. Meanwhile, troops are back to managing the most intimate aspects of a detainee’s daily life — when he will be shackled and taken to a shower, when he’ll be shackled and taken to a recreation yard, when he’ll get to hear the call to prayer through a slot in the door rather than muffled through the prison’s walls. And, for 100 hunger strikers, the military decides when to shackle each man into a restraint chair for tube feedings — an austere, exacting control of the lives of these men that the prison’s Muslim adviser warns will not stop the next suicide.

Government Policies Under Scrutiny

Washington Post (4/28): Panel seeks to fine tech companies for noncompliance with wiretap orders

Instead of setting rules that dictate how the wiretap capability must be built, the proposal would let companies develop the solutions as long as those solutions yielded the needed data.

Editorials/Opinions

A. Alex Mathews Warrantless.org (4/26): Drowning in Data, Starved for Wisdom: The surveillance statecannot meaningfully assess terrorism risks

We don’t need a terrorism database with 750,000 names on it. There are not 750,000 people out there who pose any sort of realistic threat to America. If the “terrorism watch list” were limited by law to a thousand records, then law enforcement would have to focus only on the thousand most serious threats. Given the real and likely manpower of the federal government, and the rarity of actual terrorism, that’s more than enough. If law enforcement used the power of the Fourth Amendment, instead of trying to find ways round it, it could focus more on the highest-probability threats. Yes, they would miss stuff. That’s inevitable under both a tight and a loose system. But a tight system has the added advantages that it protects more people’s liberties, and costs a lot less.

B. Jonathan Turley in USA Today (4/28): More cameras won’t stop terror

Two brothers built homemade bombs with common pressure cookers. They placed the devices in one of the most surveilled areas of Boston with an abundance of police present and just walked away. However, as a thousand papercuts from countless new laws and surveillance systems slowly kill our privacy, we might want to ask whether a fishbowl society will actually make us safer or just make us feel that way.

C. Ryan Gallagher in Silive.com (4/28): More surveillance is not the answer

As of 2007 the government had amassed a list of more than 700,000 names of suspected and known terrorists — with records being added at an astonishing rate of 20,000 every month on average. Surveillance powers allow the National Security Agency to intercept communications passing between the United States and foreign countries and pick out key words and phrases automatically.

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NCPCF Mission

Established in October 2010, the NCPCF is a coalition of national and local organizations as well as prominent individuals, whose mission is: To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the U.S. criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.

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Member Organizations

American Muslim Alliance (AMA) – Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) – Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) – Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) – Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) – Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) – Desis, Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – Friends of Human Rights (FHR) – International Action Center (IAC) – Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ) -Muslim Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) – Muslim Justice Initiative (MJI) – Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) – National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – National Liberty Fund (NLF) – The Peace Thru Justice Foundation (PTJF) – Project Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM) – United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) – Universal Justice Foundation (UJF).

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