“I ask myself how do the tactics differ?”

Weapons of mass destruction, taking hostages, murder… that's just a start. Oh, and that minor difference called September 11th. Give me a break.

In a rare move, a juror actually filed a declaration to the court calling the FBI and prosecutors an “embarrassment”:

“…specifically by allowing this case to develop the way it did using Anna and providing all of the essential tools for the group; the cabin, the money, the idea, the books, everything, and by letting Anna “string Eric along” when she should have terminated the relationship clearly with him.”

If that’s not being “railroaded,” what is?

More on the details of this are here:
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/2008/05/09/mcdavid-sentenced/

dt: I think pacifists know perfectly well that we have never lived in a time of peace. Pacifism is not a load of crap, the load of crap is when people assume that they can treat other people poorly – wrongly imprison activists or abuse women or children or engage in religious or racial wars – and that somehow at then end of all that bad behavior as we pull ourselves out of the pools of blood we’ll join hands and walk away as brothers. That is the load of crap. It will never happen THAT way.

If I want people to walk with me as my brother or sister I have to extend the hand of friendship – nothing else will work.

I also have to correct something that I wrote earlier. I get disappointed with myself when I don’t think through what I post before I hit the submit button (but that button is so tempting… it beckons me still.)

When I wrote “I also agree with Cerulean that Marie should be sentenced for what she did not the politics behind why she did it (of course, that holds true for the Al-Qaeda guy as well).” I was wrong.

In my defense I have to say that I got caught up in the spirit of what Cerulean was writing and I just did not spend enough time thinking about the consequences. The truth of course is that the politics is important to what motivates each of us to act. It sucks when the politics of our actions are used to further vilify us and the people who think like us. But we don’t want a politically blind court system because as I wrote very early on “burning something for a social good is not the same as arson for fun or arson for profit or arson just to terrorize the neighbors.” We always want the courts to make that distinction. What motivates us to act should be an important consideration in how we are treated in the legal system. Someone who breaks down a door to save a puppy from a burning house should never be charged with breaking and entering.

The difficulty is that once we accept that what motivates us to act needs to be considered how does the legal system then work around the problem of “guilt by association.” So, Will, I have now once again gotten back to the topic of your blog.

As to your second point, I am not “unquestioningly” citing the FBI. The difference between this case and Eric McDavid’s is that Abdul Malek admitted his guilty, and McDavid was railroaded in trial.

John: I think that pacifism is a load of crap, and you say that “peace will be restored” but in this racist world I’ve yet to know peace and in my history books I hear nothing of peace. Restored? What exactly are you planning on restoring? I firmly believe there cannot be peace until there is justice.

Will, others: There is something to be said about the “al-Qaeda scare.” Middle Eastern (especially Arab), South Asian, and Muslim people are all facing repression far, far worse than white green activists, at the hands of the US government. Not just the war, they’re experiencing it domestically: trumped up charges, interrogations, immigration holds, extraordinary rendition, enemy combatant status… Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago on just the idea he was “conspiring” to do something. People from all around the world have been held at Guantanamo on questionable evidence, and in some cases the government admits they weren’t doing anything wrong but still refuses to release them. And far, far more people languish in ICE detention facilities.

The whole “war on terror” is a joke, not just the war on “green terror.”

You unquestioningly cite the FBI as your source that Abdul Malek / Christopher Paul has *conspired to do* all sorts of bad things. Then you’re critical of what the FBI is claiming Eric McDavid was conspiring to do. You’re right to be critical in the McDavid case, and that’s because the FBI is full of shit – but you also need to be critical about Abdul Malek. Just because the FBI says he’s a “bad guy,” that doesn’t make it so.

But none of this, as correct as these points are, justifies acts of political arson. I’m sorry, arson is still violence. And I am not saying this because I am devoted to property or believe that property should be protected. Personally I believe in the destruction of Capitalism and the elimination of private property. I agree completely with Ryan Remains’ early post that property is a construct and that none of us owns anything.

But lack of property and lack of ownership does not mean that destroying things is not violent. Native Americans did not have the same sense of ownership and property that Europeans brought to this country but they still felt remorse and loss when their villages were destroyed and they were kicked off their lands. Their culture may not call their artifacts “property” but native people’s continue to struggle for the repatriation of pre-historic native artifacts. Not because they feel like they “own” these things but because they place a value for their culture and their heritage in these things. Humans form attachments to things, whether or not they consider these things to be owned.

So, one could argue that destruction of property is not an act of violence but I think all you have to do is look into the face of someone who just lost their stuff to see how wrong that argument is. And, of course, when big corporations run bulldozers through low income neighborhoods we shout about the violence being done. When the Israelis level a Palestinian settlement the violence being done is obvious. When the American government launches a cruise missile and takes out a bridge it is violent – even if no body dies.

Is prison the right solution to handle Marie and the guy from Al-Qeade, of course not! Right now, however, we don’t have a reformed society and prison is what society will demand of them. As activists we know that when we risk arrest we risk prison. So while we can have prison reform or prison elimination discussions those discussions won’t help our situation if one of us is arrested tomorrow. We have to live in the world we have and struggle for the world we want. We have to act in ways that we believe are right and true to our cause and the world we want to create. As I said in my initial post, arson won’t produce the desired results.