Peace activists targeted by FBI call Minneapolis home raids harassment
Saturday, September 25, 2010 at 9:30 am
- 19 Comments
To some, Friday morning’s raids on members of the Twin Cities-area Anti-War Committee by FBI agents look like a replay of the 2008 preemptive arrests by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department of activists planning protests around the Republican National Convention.
“Fighting for peace is not a crime!” chanted members of the Anti-War Committee and their supporters at Friday afternoon’s press conference on the front lawn of a member’s house. “Stop the harassment now!”
Meredith Aby, a leader of the Anti-War Committee and one of the targets of Friday morning's raids. Photo: James Sanna for the Minnesota Independent
When asked for comment on the raids, FBI spokesman Steve Warfield declined, telling the Minnesota Independent only that the raids were part of an ongoing investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force into “material support for terrorism,” that no arrests were made, and that raids were also made in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States.
One of the search warrants, whose details were first published by Twin Cities Indymedia, sought information on the possible “US to travel to Colombia, Palestine and any other foreign location in support of foreign terrorist organizations including but not limited to FARC, PFLP and Hezbollah.” It authorized FBI agents to seize computers, and some Anti-War Committee members said their personal cell phones, personal computers, passports, videos and some documents were also taken. According to Meredith Aby, a leader in the group, agents also took a computer and checkbook belonging to the Committee.
“They’re trying to make it so the Anti-War Committee can’t function,” she told the Minnesota Independent.
In interviews with the Independent, Aby and committee members Jess Sundin and Steph Yorek disavowed connections to Lebanese Hezbollah, the Colombian revolutionary group FARC or the small Palestinian militant group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“We meet with human rights activists in other countries to get understanding of situations they face,” said Yorek.
Sundin said committee members use the trips to gather information that the group then uses in presentations to the public back in the United States.
“All trips always been very public,” Sundin said.
Aby said that in Palestine, committee members met with the Palestinian Women’s Commission and another group that advocates for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In Colombia, she said members met with representatives of Colombian unions.
“In Colombia, you’re considered to be a FARC supporter if you’re a member of a union,” Aby said. Critics of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos or former president Alvaro Uribe were also considered supporters of the FARC by Colombian authorities.
“We meet with them to bring information back to the United States to reveal the reality of Israeli apartheid and to illustrate what our taxpayer dollars are funding,” Aby told the Independent.
Peter Erlinder, a professor at St. Paul's William Mitchell College of Law and member of the Anti-War Committee. Photo: James Sanna for the Minnesota Independent
Fact-Finding Leads to Investigations?
Aby said Anti-War Committee members sometimes engage in “political accompaniment work,” where they stay with activists “to keep them from being abducted or bombed” by authorities.
On their lawyers’ advice, neither Aby nor Sundin would answer questions about whether they’d met with avowed members of the terrorist groups named in the search warrant. However, Aby told members of the media that she did not keep in contact with members of the groups they met with on their fact-finding trips.
Aby said she had traveled to Palestine in 2002 and to Colombia in 2004 and 2006.
Peter Erlinder, the controversial William Mitchell College of Law professor and a longtime Anti-War Committee member, told the media that the committee was being targeted under an expanded definition of what constitutes “material support for terrorism,” upheld by a recent US Supreme Court decision. The Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder case, he said, confirmed that a US citizen could be prosecuted for even offering legal counsel to a member of a group labeled as a terrorist organization by the State Department. He suggested that the Anti-War Committee’s fact-finding meetings with Palestinian and Colombian dissidents may have opened themselves up to these raids under the loose guidelines.
“The political effect is to attack political opposition,” Ehrlinder said. “Even though local law enforcement may not intend it, that is the effect.”
In a video produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was involved in the Humanitarian Law Project case, a lawyer for the plaintiffs argued that under current law, the definition of “material support” has too many gray areas that could trap ordinary citizens.
“The terms are too blurry. Ordinary citizens can’t determine what’s prohibited or what isn’t,” Shayana Kadidal said.
He argued that the supreme court’s 6-3 decision in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder ran counter to a previous decision, US vs. Scales, that struck down attempts to outlaw membership in the Communist Party.
“They said the government couldn’t hold people criminally liable for all the things the Communist Party did just because they chose to associate with [that Party].”
19 Comments
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 9:57 am
ROFL, Terrorists. Surely they jest. Obama has been such a disappointment, no wonder his approval rating is dropping so fast.
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 10:16 am
Isn’t “fighting for peace” like screwing for chastity?
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 11:13 am
“Peace” is in the eye of beholder. “Peace” follows “War,” “War” follows “Peace”
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 11:36 am
I didn’t know I had a “big brother” watching me. The new terror is our own country’s new laws allowing raids to actually terrorize us unsuspecting law abiding citizens who now have to FEAR the authorities dropping by during dinner, taking with them anything they want, even your checkbook! Welcome to the NWO’s United Fascist Stats of America.
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 11:52 am
Thank you James, this sort of story needs to be told in the name of eternal vigilance. Good to see the free press in action.
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 2:45 pm
You realize of course my merely typing what I am tying the pro Israel lobby and the US Attorney are trying to identify me. Never, never say anything about Israel.
Comment posted September 25, 2010 @ 9:16 pm
The Federal Bureau of Intimidation is just trying to protect us from the terrorists who sneak into our houses at night to steal our children because they hate our freedom of speech. The FBI are the good guys and I love them!
Comment posted September 26, 2010 @ 8:00 am
Yeah, why does the American left hate the Jews? The Christian right is the best friend Israel has ever had.
Comment posted September 26, 2010 @ 10:44 pm
I think the left hates Israel even more than they hate Jews. Dennis raises a great question, one I can’t come close to answering without invoking religion. Israel has dined on socialism as much as Europe and America, which makes the left’s anti-Semitism even more inexplicable.
The right wingers IMO are devoted to Israel for more than just religious alliances. Many I’ll bet see Israel as a microscopic civilization surrounded by savages, reputations well earned over the centuries.
To me, the so-called peace activists aren’t pacifists at all: they’re just covert leftists, attacking the flank left open by the Marxists. Not that pacifists are any better. You’re either for us OR against us. Pacifists are always against us. They’re the first to take friendly fire I’ll bet.
Comment posted September 27, 2010 @ 10:28 am
I’m waiting for our governor candidates to speak up…no, not expecting anything but a buffoon’s response from Emmer…and generic Horner in the corner; won’t touch the issue either.
So, Dayton, will you have the courage -if one wants to call it that – to recognize the real terror here; such unacceptable attacks on our most precious of freedoms; the right to speak, the right of privacy and so much more?
Now it is to be for the this nation… ‘et tu’, here too?…what nations become as they turn on the very freedoms they constitutionally supported with pride and promise?
Silence by those who represent us as governor, legislative race runners etc…their silence is deafening and most unacceptable, and defines the greater terror; terror of a kind most dangerous in a free society…it did happen here just yesterday, and in the word of the late, great poet, Tom McGrath who was victimized during the McCarthy era…
“Only a part of the
coil
is required when the rope
hangs
the one they’ve agreed to call
outlaw.”
Note too the article from the New York Times recently on the privatization of libraries in California, Texas etc.
Words spoken, words written from how many diverse points of view have always been received with little restraint more often than not in most public libraries…that too is slowly eroding.; words and the right to speak and read freely …are we not at a most dangerous crossroads?
Comment posted September 27, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
oh, what a happy day. Some of us have been watching this poisonous little nest of FARC supporters for quite some time.
Comment posted September 27, 2010 @ 4:36 pm
Apparently Dennis is uneducated as to the difference
between religious Jews and Zionist. How funny the FBI is investigating a trip
to “Palestine” The Palestinians would love to have a state to be visited. How one
be charged for going to a state that doesn’t exist?
Comment posted September 28, 2010 @ 8:34 pm
Sure Jerry, sure. “We don’t hate ALL jews, just those Jews in Israel.”
Comment posted September 30, 2010 @ 4:30 pm
“The Federal Bureau of Intimidation is just trying to protect us from the terrorists who sneak into our houses at night to steal our children”
I’m pretty sure the alien UFO people are laughing their asses off at the incompetence of the FBI.
Pingback posted October 2, 2010 @ 10:35 am
[...] Here’s a report from Dan Burns of the Minnesota Progressive Project: Last Friday morning, FBI agents raided the homes, and an office, of some Twin Cities peace activists. Nobody was arrested, but grand [...]
Comment posted October 9, 2010 @ 7:45 am
Good job MN Ind.
Please keep following this issue. I am very interested in it. If my hunch is correct, it will fade from main-stream media. I will need someplace I can keep up-to-date on the horrible abuse of rights here. I’m sure MN Ind. will be one of my few sources.
Comment posted March 6, 2011 @ 9:41 pm
Why does the political right love Israel no matter what it does, no matter that it violates treaties that were made with the assistance of the US, international law, and it’s own laws? Why does the US veto sanctions against Israel that a majority of other countries believe are justified? Why is it OK for Israel to perform human rights violations that we would despise in other countries? Why is it considered anti-Semitism to note when that happens? Why does Israel get more of our foreign aide dollars than any other country on earth? Why do we spend additional foreign aide dollars on neighboring countries to bribe them to leave Israel alone?
Comment posted March 30, 2011 @ 4:02 pm
Betty,
I’m Israeli.
In answer to your questions
Q. Why does the political right love Israel no matter what it does,
A. The political right “Goyim” believe in the Rapture, Armegedon and the like. Israel’s current policies play into the whole Relevation prophecy. They have no great love for us jews here in Israel any more than they have for disenfranchised Palestinians.
American Jews as do most of us share a collective memory of the Holocaust. It’s sort of a big deal with us. We have “issues”.
Why does the US veto sanctions against Israel that a majority of other countries believe are justified?
Q. Why is it OK for Israel to perform human rights violations that we would despise in other countries?
A. It’s not okay and it’s out of control. We need an intervention.
Q. Why is it considered anti-Semitism to note when that happens?
A. We don’t entirely trust you not to be anti-Semitic.
Q. Why does Israel get more of our foreign aide dollars than any other country on earth?
A. Errr that’s not quite right. We are sort of at the bottom of the list there on foreign aid South Korea gets the most and we rate about eighth on that list. It’s still a lot though.
It would save your public Libraries and still make a dent in the health care department.
Q. Why do we spend additional foreign aide dollars on neighboring countries to bribe them to leave Israel alone?
YOU ANTI SEMITE!!!!! just kidding. but seriously you worry me. Leaving Israel alone is a real good idea. We have holocaust issues and a history of violence and we have zero tolerance for anything that threatens our security. Paying people not to make war.
Investing in our enemies’ education and infrastructure rather than well,bombing them into the stone age sort of gives them something to lose. I’m all for helping these people grow intellectually and find other values that conflict with submission to fundamentalism and superstition. What do you say? Or are you still pissed at me for killing your savior? Still kidding. I’m not funny am I?
Pingback posted May 19, 2011 @ 12:38 pm
[...] a quote worth keeping in mind from an article following the initial raids: In interviews with the Independent, Aby and committee [...]
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
