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Small groups of political activists across the country have been working for decades to make the United States accountable for a variety of human rights violations and to resist government repression of those who work for political change.  

Organizers defending the U.S. constitution and opposing imprisonment and mistreatment of Puerto Rican, Haitian, Palestinian, Filipino, Iraqi and U.S. dissidents came together at St. Joseph the Worker Church Friday evening and on the UC Berkeley campus Saturday, in a conference called “Attica to Abu Ghraib.”  

“Why we’re all here—it’s about saving our country,” outspoken Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) told the cheering crowd of about 200 Friday evening. The theme, she said, “is a striking juxtaposition of what America really is. Attica is an incredible story of prisoners with restricted rights, protecting their constitutional rights.”  

One doesn’t have to go back to 1971 and the Attica prison revolt to find abuse of government power, McKinney said, pointing to the early April “Operation Falcon,” a nation-wide law enforcement sweep where some 10,000 people were arrested. While the arrests were lauded by “corporate media,” most arrested were street level drug dealers, McKinney said. The CNN coverage of Operation Falcon is emblematic of the problems of today’s mass media: “They don’t quote anybody opposed to the dragnet. They don’t quote the ACLU or anybody except the government itself.”  

McKinney didn’t confine her condemnation to the Republican administration and the media, but took aim at her own Democratic Party. While she supports UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff, who has criticized the Democratic Party for lacking clarity in its message, she said she sees a more fundamental problem.  

“Suppose you’re trying to tell an organization or political party to frame its message and the political party has no message, it has no vision, it has no passion, it has no mission,” she said. Without that, you won’t make fundamental change. “That’s why we’re here in this room tonight, because we want fundamental change.”  

Activist attorney Lynne Stewart made a surprise appearance just before McKinney spoke. Stewart represented Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was sentenced to life in prison for masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. To visit him in prison after his conviction, Stewart had to promise that she wouldn’t transmit messages from him to the outside world. However in 2000, she sent out a press release on behalf of her client, who was in isolation, and two years later was indicted on charges of giving material support to terrorism. Along with a paralegal and translator, Stewart was convicted in February and faces up to 30 years in prison. She is yet to be sentenced.  

“I couldn’t see missing a conference called ‘Attica to Abu Ghraib,’ ” Stewart said. “Human rights—it’s what my whole long career has been about.” The day she was sentenced, Stewart said the wider implications of her imprisonment hit her hard: “They can’t lock up the lawyers;” the accused are “so vulnerable without defense, if the lawyers are locked up.”  

Stewart said she doesn’t regret having sent out the press release and said she would do it again: “I’m not going to be rehabilitated, so there’s no reason to send me to jail,” she said as the crowd rose in a standing ovation.  

Activists regrouped Saturday on the UC Berkeley campus to share their work and strategies for change. The United States government’s role in repressing the work of activists was a theme throughout the day. Holding her infant, Michelle Morales of Jose Solis Defense Committee talked about how Puerto Rican activist organizations had been infiltrated and how political prisoners from that movement languish in United States jails.  

Others spoke about former Black Panthers who have been imprisoned for decades, of Filipino political prisoners in jail at the behest of the U.S. government and Haitian political prisoners jailed by United States Marines, who occupied Haiti for two months after the U.S. removed the democratically-elected president from Haiti in February, 2004. (The Marines have since been replaced by United Nation forces.)  

Although attacks on the freedom to organize and the freedom of speech predates the Patriot Act, the legislation and its consequences for organizers was one of the day’s principal themes. 

“If you can make people afraid, you can get away with criminalizing activism,” said Jeff Mittman of the ACLU.  

Parts of the Patriot Act will end at the end of December unless renewed, he said. A few of the clauses include:  

• The expansion of the government’s ability to execute criminal search warrants (which need not involve terrorism) and seize property without telling the target for weeks or months;  

• Allowing the FBI to seize sensitive personal information and belongings—including medical, library and business records;  

• Lowering the standards for issuing “national security letters,” issued at the sole discretion of the Justice Department, imposing a blanket gag order on recipients without judicial review. They can be used to seize a variety of business and financial records and, in certain instances, can be used to access the membership lists of organizations that provide even limited Internet services (see www.aclu.org/sunsets).  

Activist Gene Bernardi brought the discussion of the repression of individual rights home, calling on Berkeley residents to oppose the move of the library administration to insert radio frequency identification technology, known as RFID tags, into books. “I’m worried that books can be tracked while people are carrying them,” she said.  

Mittman added that there’s a proposal to insert RFIDs into driver’s licenses and passports. “They can be read without you knowing they’re read,” he said.  

Rose Braz, director of Critical Resistance, an organization that addresses the negative role prisons play in society, said the organization wanted “to debunk the myth that prisons make it safer (for those on the outside) and that more surveillance makes the nation safer.”  

The idea that locking people promotes public safety is not new, Braz said. “It’s about social control, the removal of a segment of the population that is not wanted.” 

After Sept. 11, 2001 about 1,100 people were detained without charges, Braz said, pointing to one case where a Muslim hospital worker was arrested because a co-worker had reported that he “wore a surgical mask longer than necessary.”  

Conference participants agreed to regroup in July, according to Judith Mirkinson, an organizer with the sponsoring group, the International Human Rights Initiative.  

“If there’s going to be globalized repression, there has to be globalized resistance,” she said. “We need to build broad coalitions—that’s our job.”  

For information on future organizing efforts, see www.attica2abughraib.com/index.html.  

A conference sponsored by the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley covering many of the same issues will be held Thursday, beginning with a rally in Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus and moving to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre at 2025 Addison St. for panel discussions. For more information, go to http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~ethnicst/torture.  

For additional information on Lynne Stewart’s case, see www.LynneStewart.org; she will appear tonight (Tuesday) at 8 p.m. at a rally sponsored by the African People’s Solidarity committee at Humanist Hall at 390 27th Street, Oakland and on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at 145 Dwinelle Hall on the UC Berkeley campus at a rally sponsored by the campus chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and others. For details, call 333-7966.