While the exact number of political prisoners in the U.S. is unknown, the National Jericho Movement, a movement that aims to gain recognition of the fact that political prisoners and prisoners of war exist within the U.S., lists 60 current political prisoners on its website... The U.S. federal government has multiple lists that designate people or organizations as terrorists or supporters of terrorism. The two most frequently cited are the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN). There are currently 59 groups on the FTO list. Created in 1997 by the State Department, it only includes foreign organizations whose terrorist activities threaten the U.S. It is unlawful for a person in the U.S. or under U.S. jurisdiction to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated FTO, and U.S. financial institutions must report any economic activity they have with an FTO to the Department of the Treasury. Meanwhile, the SDN List is maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department. There are currently thousands of people on this list, which is hundreds of pages long. It can include anybody — not only foreign nationals or organizations — that poses a potential terrorist threat to the U.S. Even Americans can be put on the SDN list, but only one person — the late Anwar al-Awlaki — has been. Al-Awlaki was an American citizen targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. He was accused of encouraging terrorism but never charged with any crime. In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights brought a lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father, challenging the government’s authority to use targeted killings. That case was dismissed in 2011... On Jan. 23, 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued an executive order titled, “Prohibiting Transactions With Terrorists Who Threaten To Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process.” The document, which preceded the creation of the FTO list, outlined the framework and the motivating factors for the FTO list. The stated reason for creating this list was that “the U.S. was spearheading the Middle East Peace Process, also known as the Oslo Process,” and that process was being threatened, said Charlotte Kates, the coordinator of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a network of organizers and activists, based in North America, working to build solidarity with Palestinian prisoners around the world in their struggle for freedom. “That’s what the FTO list was all about. It was about listing organizations that rejected Oslo,” Kates told MintPress. “It wasn’t to list all these other organizations, like al-Qaida or any of this.”... The Oslo Accords, to which Kates referred, are a set of agreements that were supposed to exchange land to Palestinians to create peace. Mark LeVine, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, explained the accords thusly: “Israel would withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza and accept a demilitarized Palestinian state with at least a part of East Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians would forgo the right of return for most of the 5 million refugees and end political and territorial claims to pre-1948 Palestine.” The problem, explained Kates, was that the Oslo process undermined fundamental Palestinian rights, Palestinian historical claims to true self-determination, independence, and the right of return. However, she said that in the 1990s, the U.S. viewed the Oslo process as part of its own national security interest — and it still does. Thus, Palestinian groups opposed to Oslo, like the PFLP, essentially became enemies of the U.S. Clinton’s 1995 executive order and the subsequent creation of the FTO list formally criminalized those groups, Kates asserted. Solidarity organizations, leftist groups and other entities in the U.S. that supported Palestinian liberation in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel were suddenly suspect and faced real dangers of violating national security laws created with the FTO and SDN lists. People who gave any type of support to groups such as the PFLP — whether through awareness campaigns or fundraising — could now be arrested for their activities. The terrorism lists and material support laws have directly affected Palestinians and solidarity groups in the U.S. — and that was the point, according to Kates. She told MintPress that the lists were meant to signal to Palestinians in the diaspora: “You should be afraid to be part of the Palestinian national movement. You should be afraid to be politically involved. You should be afraid to know about or to support or be aware of the Palestinian political parties in the national liberation movement.” These lists were created not only to give rise to a climate of surveillance and fear, she said, but to alienate Palestinians in exile from their own national liberation movement. One way in which the lists create a climate of fear is through scaring communities and organizations by implying that they might be breaking laws that criminalize material support to terrorism, including those in the Patriot Act. Indeed, in a policy brief (“Countering Religion or Terrorism: Selective Enforcement of Material Support Laws Against Muslim Charities”), Sahar Aziz, a legal fellow at the Institute for Social Policy, wrote that material support laws have “chilled religiously mandated charitable giving and hampered humanitarian aid operations, thereby eroding the independence of the American nonprofit sector and unduly politicizing humanitarian assistance.” Aziz wrote that the laws are being used against a varying number of people and institutions, including non-Muslim entities, which engage in peace work, humanitarian aid and human rights advocacy. “A combination of public apathy about the state of civil liberties, pervasive stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists, and government misinformation about the efficacy of counterterrorism policies has facilitated increased surveillance and investigative authorities commonly found in police states,” Aziz wrote. Kates told MintPress that the surveillance, harassment and arrest of Palestinians, solidarity groups that support the Palestinian cause, and similar behavior among law enforcement against groups and solidarity networks that support liberation movements in places like Colombia, are part of counter-terrorism strategies that openly suppress individuals and groups for their political affiliations. The laws are being used by governments around the world, but especially the U.S., to “disrupt so-called counter-insurgency, and to disrupt popular movements,” she said. “That’s not a conspiracy theory,” she continued. “All of these agencies speak openly about their coordination with other international security agencies in order to find people that are ‘wanted’ or to share ‘relevant security.’” Kates pointed out that the Israeli government does not need to come to the U.S. and explain which organizations to look into, or to determine who to arrest and surveil. The nexus between Israeli and American security agencies is so thick that they operate almost seamlessly, she explained. The New York Police Department – which operated a Zone Assessment Unit (better known as the Demographics Unit) in New York City designed specifically to monitor the city’s Muslim communities — has even opened a branch in Israel. Kates told MintPress that “the U.S. government has absolutely positioned itself as an enemy of the Palestinian liberation movement,” in part, to maintain its dominance in the region. The U.S.-Israeli relationship began to blossom in 1967, when the U.S. saw Israel as a tool with which to contain the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Since then, this close relationship has been maintained — partly to ensure U.S. access to oil markets, and partly to create a kind of colonial hegemon to maintain stability in the region. “That’s the reason we see cases of people, like Rasmea Odeh, or the Holy Land 5, or the Anti-War 23,” Kates said, noting that the Palestinian struggle is a struggle for liberation and justice — a struggle that is opposed to imperialism. The U.S., she said, politically suppresses Palestinians, solidarity networks, and individuals and entities from other countries involved in revolutionary struggle because it sees those struggles as a threat to its own security. Joshua Dratel, the lawyer, told MintPress that the U.S. takes sides in foreign conflicts and wants a monopoly on foreign policy with regards to how those conflicts are managed. Thus, the country will target individuals and groups within its borders to pressure forces it sees as opposed to its own stated foreign policy goals...
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 04:26:00 +0000
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