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Just a few weeks ago, an FBI task force raided a home* in Portland, Oregon very early in the morning. They broke down the front door with a battering ram and threw in a stun grenade, which is non-lethal but produces a very loud and disorienting noise and a blinding bright light. The team locked down the building and secured the sleepy, compliant occupants. The operation was one of several which also occurred in Olympia, WA and Seattle, WA, involving some 60-80 officers.

Just who were these dangerous criminals, these domestic terrorists whose threat level is so high that an FBI team with stun grenades, battering rams, and assault rifles needed to burst into their homes in the wee hours of the morning?

Why, it’s these two young folks,

Leah-Lynn Plante and Matt Duran.

Reportedly, the FBI search warrant was for black clothing, paint, sticks, computers and cell phones, and ‘anarchist materials or literature.’ According to an FBI Domestic Terrorism guide published by greenisthenewred.com, “anarchists are criminals seeking an ideology to justify their actions,” and are “not dedicated to a particular issue.” Common meeting places are “college campuses, underground clubs, coffee houses/ internet cafes.” The implication is that owning “anarchist” literature is enough to indicate to the FBI that one is a criminal – even if that person happens to be a student studying political thought. Or maybe particularly if you are a student – the FBI document states that anarchists are “educated persons of various backgrounds, often students.”

What even counts as anarchist material? Given the vitriolic US political rhetoric of anti-socialism, you might think a book by Karl Marx or about Tommy Douglas would count. What about someone like Shulamith Firestone? Hell, what about Walt Whitman?

Leah-Lynn and Matt have since been subpoenaed and ordered before a Grand Jury hearing, which is a private hearing used to determine if there is sufficient evidence to indict someone with a federal crime. During the proceedings of a Grand Jury, the defendant is not allowed an attorney to represent her or him. This means that a Grand Jury is essentially a group of twenty-four jurors, a prosecutor looking to indict someone with a felony, and Leah-Lynn Plante, vegan. A Grand Jury is also secret, so we do not know and are not allowed to know what is going on in the courtroom.

Leah was first called before a Grand Jury back on August 2. She refused to co-operate with the jury proceedings, giving them only her name and date of birth. She refused to answer any other questions and explicitly stated she would not talk about any other people. Historically, the Grand Jury process was intended to protect citizens from slanderous or malicious prosecution. However, Grand Juries have been used to isolate members of political activist groups and use the fear of imprisonment to gain information about other groups and persons. Leah was re-subpoenaed, and returned to court yesterday, where she again refused to co-operate. She has been re-re-subpoenaed without yet receiving a date for her next hearing.

All this is because someone vandalized a Seattle courthouse on May Day. Leah has publicly stated that she does not endorse what happened on May Day, and that she was not in Seattle during that time. She has made it clear that her refusal to co-operate is not a strategy to protect criminals, but is rather a protest against a legal system which is unconcerned with the civil rights of citizens. Considering that she could be held in contempt of court and sentenced to jail time, we should take what she says seriously. Matt Duran, also subpoenaed and brought before a Grand Jury, has already been held in contempt of court and is currently in U.S. Federal custody. His contempt hearing was made private by the presiding Judge, a move unprecedented since the McCarthy era.

You know, they arrested Emma Goldman a couple times. I learned that from reading about her. In a book I own.

click here for an audio interview on the history of dissent, political repression, and punk in the Pacific Northwest!

You can read Leah-Lynn’s statement here,
and you can read Matt Duran’s statement here.

For ongoing information from the source, check in with http://nopoliticalrepression.wordpress.com/

To find out more about the Grand Jury resistance, check in here http://saynothing.noblogs.org/

To find out how to support the resistors, check in at http://supportresist.net/

Updated: Write to Matt in Jail!

Writing to prisoners is an easy and important way to help ease the isolation of imprisonment. Please write letters to Matt!

* Editor’s note – for the past few days, this link was to an article about Leah-Lynn Plante and the Northwest Grand Jury on the National Lawyer’s Guild blog. The Lawyer’s Guild blog appears to no longer have any content posted on it.

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Undercover FBI agents, meanwhile, continued to lean heavily on Daoud. The agents supplied him with almost everything he needed to plan the attack and told him they were relaying messages from a foreign sheik who wanted to know if he was truly prepared to carry it out.

The documents allege Dauod’s friend, listed only as “Individual C,” was closely involved in the plan for months. Daoud had allegedly originally considered targeting military recruiting centers, malls and tourist attractions until the friend came up with a “really good plan” for attacking a concert. They eventually scuttled that idea, however, and settled on the bar.

At some point, though, the documents show Daoud’s friend became nervous. He thought the undercover FBI agent was a spy. But the agent tried to reassure them, telling Daoud “anybody who spies must be killed.”

While the friend seemed have some reservations, it wasn’t until both he and Daoud were yelled at by a local sheik, who had heard them discussing jihad, that he reportedly decided he wanted out. The documents don’t name the sheik or say which mosque he was from.

On Aug. 18, the affidavit says, Daoud talked to the undercover FBI agent, who “explained that, as a result of this intervention, Individual C no longer wanted to be involved in the attack because he had reservations about killing ‘random americans,’ as opposed to those involved with the United States military.”

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Tasca instinctively did what any legitimate peace officer would do: She intervened to protect the victim, pulling Rella off the helpless and battered young man. Tasca’s act was one of instinctive decency, genuine principle, and no small amount of courage. It was also the action dictated by her department’s use-of-force policy, the first page of which specifies that it is “the responsibility of law enforcement to take steps possible to prevent or stop the illegal or inappropriate use of force by other officers.”

In his report on the case, Judge Donohue acknowledged that Tasca acted in compliance with the use-of-force policy – but he dismissed that fact on the preposterous grounds that “no evidence was presented to establish that Officer Tasca even knew about the document.”

Only an uncommonly inventive sophist would pretend that the important question is whether Tasca was aware of the document stating the policy, rather than whether her actions were in accord with that policy.

Earlier in the same month, Tasca had prompted criticism for failing to rush to the aid of her partner, Officer Jay Fowler, during a brief confrontation with a tiny, drunken woman at a hospital. The woman, who was not a criminal suspect, was taken to the hospital for medical attention. She decided to leave, and when Fowler – who had already surrendered custody to the hospital – tried to stop her, the young woman “flailed” her arms, inflicting a small scratch on one of Fowler’s hands that tore open an old scab.

As a result of this “altercation” with a woman whom he outweighed by about 100 pounds, Fowler spent a week on paid medical leave, according to Donohue’s report.

“Nobody had said anything to me about the earlier case until after the incident with the Ridgefield officers,” Tasca pointed out to me. Her refusal to gang-tackle a tiny, confused woman in a hospital, coupled with her active intervention to stop a criminal assault on an unarmed, mentally unbalanced man who was not a criminal suspect, supposedly established a “pattern” of behavior that made Tasca a danger to her fellow officers.

After being put on suspension, Tasca was subjected to a psychological evaluation by Dr. Matthew Geller, a psychiatrist who does contact work for New Jersey law enforcement agencies. Geller’s assessment reads like something compiled by a State-employed psychiatrist in the Brezhnev-era Soviet psihuska. Geller claims that Tasca suffers from something called a “mixed personality disorder,” displaying “a personality type characterized by a long-standing pattern of grandiose self-importance and exaggerated sense of talent and achievement.”

This purported dysfunction, once again, wasn’t noticed until after Tasca displayed the character and integrity to take the morally appropriate action – one dictated by the official guidelines of her department – in defiance of pressure from her peers and superiors to conform.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

Meet the new scam, same as the old scam...
Fuckin Palmer Raids all over again, is what it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917

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Intercepting thousands of phone calls is easy for government agencies. But quickly analyzing the calls and identifying the callers can prove a difficult task. Now one company believes it has solved the problem—with a countrywide biometric database designed to store millions of people’s “voice-prints.”
Russia’s Speech Technology Center, which operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States, has invented what it calls “VoiceGrid Nation,” a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. The idea is that it enables authorities to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices—of known criminals, persons of interest, or people on a watch list...

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When iris scans and facial recognition fail to identify individuals from a distance, then it is time to add on gait recognition, a system that identifies an individual based on a “signature” walk.

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If you thought that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping was limited to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, think again. While these household names of the telecom industry almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry.

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The federal government has drawn up plans for a huge data center in Utah. The facility is coming up at a cost of $2 billion and is meant to help the government eavesdrop on communications within and outside the country

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U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, otherwise known as "Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device," was granted in late-August, and would allow phone policies to be set to "chang[e] one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device [...] upon the occurrence of a certain event.

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