>>He is NOT a leftist, and NEITHER is he a friend of the left.
>
>Glad we agree on this.
The test of civil liberties is how we respond to the prosecution of those whose politics is repugnant to not only us but to the majority of the populace. That is why trials of alleged terrorists are extremely useful to the government. The government first gets to a person who is regarded as, and probably is, "a pretty bad guy who belongs in jail" -- so bad that we don't closely scrutinize exactly how the government puts him in jail. But how it does so matters a great deal.
>>However, the precedent concerning "seditious conspiracy" set by his
>>prosecution and conviction can very well be used
>>against leftists.
>
>Any conspiracy charges can be used in the same way. The CP
>defendants in the Debs case were charged with conspiracy to advocate
>the overthrow of the governmet by force.
Yes, and that adds to, rather than subtracts from, my concern. Marie E. Siesseger's article on the use of conspiracy doctrine, in which she discusses the Communist cases in the era of the Red Purge, is instructive. She finds that the courts, not surprisingly, respond to external political pressures (e.g., McCarthyism) to loosen the existing constraints of the conspiracy doctrine, in order to fit the understanding of what a conspiracy is to the objective of achieving convictions of those who are politically targeted by the government:
<blockquote>Recognizing the potential for abuse of discretion by factfinders charged with determining the scope of a conspiracy, Alvin H. Goldstein cautions that "unbridled expansion of the scope may result in a prosecution based on guilt by association." n34 Goldstein offers a rather optimistic appraisal of the ability of the doctrine to constrain the scope of the charge, however, stating that "the substantive requirement, that each conspirator know the essentials of and specifically intend the purpose of the common design, limits the defendant's involvement in the conspiracy." n35 In contrast, the contention of this Note is that the link between the knowledge of coconspirators and the objective of a conspiracy is so loose as to be essentially unbounded, particularly when external pressures are operative.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Both of these [temporal and geographical] factors and the subject matter component find their origin in the criminal agreement, which, because its parameters are not necessarily delineated with any degree of specificity, n43 remains an essentially blank slate upon which the prosecution may write its theory. The court in United States v. Andolschek n44 summarized this peculiar phenomenon of conspiracy law well:
A party to a conspiracy need not know the identity, or even the number, of his confederates; when he embarks upon a criminal venture of indefinite outline, he takes his chances as to its content and membership, so be it that they fall within the common purposes as he understands them. n45
The indeterminacy of the standard for defining the scope of a conspiracy creates a terrific opportunity for exploitation by the prosecution. (Marie E. Siesseger, "Conspiracy Theory: The Use of the Conspiracy Doctrine in Times of National Crisis," 46 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 1177, December, 2004)</blockquote>
Concerning the Rahman case, Siesseger asks us to "consider that, in the prosecution of United States v. Rahman, the government made no attempt to distinguish between the actual events that had occurred, particularly with respect to the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, and the charged conspiracy" (Siesseger, December, 2004) -- an example of elasticity of construction of a conspiracy that strengthens the hands of the government at the expense of defendants and defense attorneys.
According to John Alan Cohan, "The constitutionality of this statute [18 U.S.C. 2384 (1994), <http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002384----000-.html>] has been upheld against attacks of vagueness. Most recently, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the terms of the statute are 'far more precise,' than the common law crime of sedition, and that the language of the statute refers to conspiracy to levy war against the United States, or to oppose by force the authority or laws of the United States, and its elements are sufficiently clear as to inform society as to what makes up the offense" ("Seditious Conspiracy, the Smith Act, and Prosecution of Religious Speech Advocating the Violent Overthrow of Government," 17 St. John's J.L. Comm. 199, Winter/Spring 2003). But are the terms of the statute really clear and precise? Cohan, for instance, notes that "[a]ccording to this ruling [by the Court of Appeals on the Rahman case], conviction of seditious conspiracy does not require a plot designed to put down government buildings per se, but may apply to a conspiracy that aspires to disable commercial activity" (Cohan, Winter/Spring 2003). Mutatis mutandis, the interpretation of what it means to "disable commercial activity" may be further expanded to implicate, for instance, anti-capitalist activists in the global justice movement.
>>All the government has to do is to identify leftists (. . . who
>>find themselves in social milieus (not even organizations, strictly
>>speaking) that include persons who are linked to terrorism (whose
>>definition can be very elastic in the government's hands, far more
>>elastic than in the Rahman case) unbeknownst to the leftists, have
>>informers and provocateurs infiltrate the milieus, seek to entrap
>>the leftists into SAYING (rather than DOING) things that can be
>>grounds for prosecution,
>
>Well, the government's case will be a lot stronger if some of those
>people in that milieu actually go out and kill and bomb. Probably it
>is a good idea for all of us to attempt to avoid people who are
>serious about committing physical violence against persons. That is
>a good idea anyway -- avoiding people like that. And to make clear
>to our comrades kers that we reject such tactivs, especially if the
>comrades suggest it. I have said for 25 years that anyone who
>advocates violence in a practical context is a provocateur or a cop.
Since the end of the 70s, we have not seen prominent organizations whose provocative words and deeds resemble those of the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, etc. on the left side of the political spectrum in the United States. However, it is practically up to the government to define the geographic scope of a conspiracy, given "[t]he indeterminacy of the standard for defining the scope of a conspiracy [that] creates a terrific opportunity for exploitation by the prosecution" (Siesseger, December, 2004). Also, it is up to the State Department to decide which foreign organizations are terrorist organizations: "Current List of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations," <http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/fs/2004/37191.htm>. The hallmark of immigrant politics across the political spectrum is mutual aid. Immigrant communities are often tight-knit. All these legal and social facts, in my view, make leftists who are immigrants especially vulnerable. Already, many immigrants have been imprisoned, deported, or even kidnapped for "extraordinary rendition," even without recourse to the conspiracy doctrine.
Then again, all leftists, including US citizens, who have anything to do with solidarity movements are vulnerable. E.g.,:
<blockquote>Some 1300 pages of additional FBI files released in 1988 by New York's Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), on behalf of CISPES, reveal in sharp detail the extent and nature of the FBI probe into CISPES. More importantly, the files show that the FBI, to justify its actions, accepted as fact a right-wing conspiratorial world-view which sees dissent as treason and resistance to oppression as terrorism.
The first FBI investigation of CISPES was launched in September of 1981 to determine if CISPES should be forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Among the documents used by the FBI to justify this CISPES probe, according to Congressional testimony by FBI official Oliver "Buck" Revell, was a 1981 article by a former FBI informant and ongoing right-wing private spy-John Rees. The Rees article appeared in Review of the News a magazine published by the paranoid ultra-right John Birch Society. This FBI investigation was terminated without indictments in December of 1981.
A second FBI investigation of CISPES began in March of 1983. It was premised on the right-wing conspiracy theory that CISPES was a cover for "terrorist" activity. To justify this view, the FBI relied not only on reports from its informant Varelli, but also in part on a conspiratorial analysis contained in a report written by Michael Boos, a staffer at the right-wing Young Americas Foundation. This FBI "counter-terrorism" investigation was terminated without indictments in 1985. (Chip Berlet, _The Hunt for Red Menace_, <http://www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace-12.html>)</blockquote>
Who is to say that the prosecution won't stretch "seditious conspiracy" to include activities like CISPES', the sanctuary movement's, etc. if performed in the current climate?
>Your saying/doing things here slips back into your earlier misguided
>defense of the Sheik's solicitation of terrorist acts and murder.
I don't defend solicitation of murder and terrorist acts. I am questioning whether the sheik really did solicit them. The difference between defending solicitation of murder and terrorist acts and questioning whether a defendant or convict in a particular case really did solicit them should be clear, but you conflate them. A temptation to that sort of conflation is obviously one of the problems of our time. If you are tempted to conflate two different positions in the interest of scoring a point in an online debate, don't you think that those who find _our_ politics repugnant might be tempted to conflate the positions that are even further apart than them in other contexts (including the criminal justice system)? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>