by Andy Worthington 

What is the government doing? Last year, when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with its contentious passages endorsing the mandatory military detention of terror suspects, there was uproar across the political spectrum from Americans who believed that it would be used on US citizens.

by Kevin Gosztola 

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against an Islamic charity that claimed it was the target of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency when the Bush administration was in power. The ruling overturned the awarding of damages and attorneys’ fees to the charity, and found the government is immune to claims of warrantless wiretapping.

The now-defunct charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, was investigated by the FBI in 2004 as the agency sought to determine whether it was a “terrorist organization.” In the process, the FBI engaged in warrantless wiretapping and listened in to telephone conversations the agency did not have a Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order to authorize electronic surveillance. This eventually led to the FBI allegations that the charity was tied to Osama bin Laden.

World Can't Wait, along with 160 organizations, has signed on to protest the raids and subpoenas last week and the sitting grand jury in Portland, all part of a wave of political repression.  

Stand with Portlanders Resisting Political Repression

Last week, Dennison Williams and Leah-Lynne Plante were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury investigating anarchists in the Pacific Northwest. The subpoenas were accompanied by a set of FBI raids, in which black clothing, flags, and anarchist literature was seized. They have been ordered to appear in closed-door hearings on August 2.

The Committee Against Political Repression urges everyone to support Dennison and Leah in their resistance.

Here are five ways you can show your solidarity:

Sometime late Monday night July 23 or in the early hours of Tuesday July 24, 2012 ANSWER Coalition’s Los Angeles office was broken into and thoroughly ransacked. All ten of their computers, large sized sound systems and all of their bullhorns were stolen.  Files were ransacked, and their office was generally trashed.  A quantity of cash that was out in the open, however, was left unmolested. 

ANSWER’s office is on the second floor of an office building in LA’s Koreatown.  Despite the fact that other offices in the same building had much higher value equipment, no other office had their equipment stolen.  So much was taken from ANSWER’s office, in fact, that a truck must have been needed to haul it all away.

from the New York Chapter of World Can't Wait 

The synergy created by the Fathers Day Silent March against "Stop and Frisk," the Center for Constitutional Rights' class action lawsuit against the NYPD, and advocacy by other groups who challenge the NYPD policy is powerful. Indeed the Bloomberg administration and Ray Kelly have been very much on the political defensive because of all the protest, but so far they've gotten away without changing anything substantial on the policy of "stop and frisk."

No action can substitute for people directly confronting an abuse that is immoral and illegal. The stopmassincarceration network called for non-violent actions at police precincts in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens where people directly confronted the NYPD. This led to arrests of 83 people who demanded an end to Stop and Frisk policies.

From Salvador Option

Police Interrogation and American Justice by Richard A. Leo is a detailed analysis of modern police interrogation methodology in the United States. Although the book primarily addresses the constitutional implications of domestic law enforcement interrogation practices, the chapter on the origin and development of police torture in the US, entitled “The Third Degree,” provides important information about the evolution of American attitudes toward torture and sheds light on some of the salient characteristics of the interrogation system that would later be exported around the world by US military and police advisors during the first three decades of the Cold War.

from Defending Dissent 

The attempt to stifle the voices of dissent started months before the May 20-21 NATO summit. Federal and local officials aggressively raised alarms about the people planning to travel to Chicago to protest NATO.

To those of us who have been around awhile, it's an all too familiar story: vilification of protesters, which serves to drive down turnout and set the stage for heavy-handed police tactics. Bull Connor did it in Birmingham in the 1950’s and 60’s, labeling civil rights protesters “communists,” then turning the fire hoses and dogs on them. 

by Ramzi Kassem 

On February 8, 2006, the imam at a Bronx mosque advised congregants to boycott Danish products in response to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper. In November 2006, a member of the Muslim Students Association at the state university in Buffalo forwarded an e-mail to a Yahoo chat group advertising a conference featuring various Muslim scholars. And in April 2008, college students on a rafting trip discussed religion and prayed “at least four times a day.”

What the iman and students didn't know was that members of the New York Police Department Intelligence Division were spying on them and recording their names and actions in secret reports forwarded to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. None of these people had done anything wrong or even suspect: they were simply Muslims practicing their constitutionally protected freedoms of religious belief and specch. But for today's police, that was enough to earn them a place in the department's secret counterterrorism database.

by Andy Worthington  

Yesterday, I made my way to a TV studio opposite the Houses of Parliament to take part in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! — my first since last April, when the classified military files released by WikiLeaks, on which I worked as a media partner, were first published.

I was joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I was delighted that the story was the main feature on yesterday’s show, and that so much time was devoted to it, and to analyzing the sweeping failures, across the entire US administration, that have led to a situation in which, although 87 of the remaining 169 prisoners have been cleared for release, only two prisoners have been freed in the last 18 months, and there are no signs of when — if ever — any of these 87 men will be released.

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