*** In The Summer of Love, Circa 1967

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

This is the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe her, made me said this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a chord in her so we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many customer people were walking by this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night. And that is the way it started, I swear.

Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason, it wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those last year days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years back, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as was the fashion in those days is not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.

No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Now, right this 1967 minute, you cannot go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty, who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, Christ, plastic rose, singular rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while cheapskate embarrassing you when you sheepishly bluster out "no thanks." Or directing you, no steering you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who will, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune. But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory or should be, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.

And, let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working my charm on said girl) with no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition.

But see in 1966 (or 1967 as I am writing this) all hell has broken loose in the land. There has been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who have decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father is not in the cards. And one does not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards reading or not, to know that death street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. And then see what happens.

But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still need dough, dough to keep off the hairy, not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers (not suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend look at the hippies night roses, and certainly no plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair, and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common). And, like I said, obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. Because, after all that was a summer of love, not this year’s “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this shore to San Francisco and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired former alabaster white-skinned fairy princess is also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.

So, naturally, once I knew the score, that talking several minutes that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap coffeehouse that also served light meals, light meals in the dark so I hoped. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night, a not drunk chef must have been on duty, and then left satisfied. And headed for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.

Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. And I have been in such places before that, no problem, I am, if anything, no snob when it comes to living quarters. What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had made over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day.

So that night, that moonless Commonwealth Avenue garret summer night, Gypsy Love and I got “high,” 1966 (or 1967) high, not old-time alcohol-induced twenty college generations before Saturday night fraternity row beer-kegged, not old-time alcohol-induced whiskey, whiskey with a beer chaser like my father and his working- class cronies over at some local Dublin Pub, not rye whiskey with a water chaser like I used to like to drink and still do when there is no sweet weed, sweet tea as I like to nickname call it, not scotch neat, martini dry, manhattan on the rocks Mayfair swells high like the squares out there with the picket fences not oblivion, forget, remember to forget, raging against the day, against the night high, but mellow, insightful high. And this stuff was so strong, so laced with whatever chemist’s knowledge-laced, and with whatever nutrient rich volcanic ash grown side of some desolate latin mountain that we really couldn’t sleep. Maybe Gypsy Love couldn’t sleep because, like I noticed when I first started talking to her, she was so thin and the good non-drunken chef food earlier and then this laced-primo dope kept her up, and I because she was Gypsy Love and I was too busy drinking her in for the first time to waste time on sleep.

So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with its menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene, really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.

But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.

Sure, the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.

Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.

And sure a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years back that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboys, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.

And guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although now I hear about it more, maybe a girl-boy combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, serious intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right here on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets

But also every hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some bad ass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that last summer, for good or evil. But right then for good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. And then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures start to take distinctive shape, Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while too but that when the colds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling we would have done with our moment.

Free Lynne Stewart Now!

***The Madonna Of The Clouds

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

This is the way Peter Paul Markin heard the story one sweaty, sultry night over cerveza and tequila down in Mexico City in the old El Dorado Cantina long since torn down to make way for high-rises:    

The viejo, the old man sat in the Por Supuesto Cantina down on one of the side streets, Calle del Pueblo, off the main road through Sonora, drinking his usually lonely table shots of tequila, raw tequila not the high-shelf stuff Norte Americanos get and think they are drinking hellfire and damnation but the stuff almost right for the cactus like it should be. Like many old men, sitting alone in some stinking sink hole of a bar gathering dust, the old men and the bar, the old man was thinking long ago thoughts, thoughts of his young manhood and naturally for a mal hombre with the women thoughts of his various long lost conquers. But no matter how much tequila he drank, no matter how much dust gathered around him, no matter how many inconsequential affairs he dredged up, it always came back to the fate of Juanita, Juanita, the Madonna of the Clouds. And then he would take another shot of that raw tequila, the stuff could never drown out that last image of Juanita, and play back in his mind the details of that seemingly hundred score years ago time.     

The viejo back then like a lot of young men was restless, too restless to stay put in Tio Taco Sonora and so one day he just up and left his hump of a squatter village on the outskirts of town and hit the road, knapsack on his back, new sandals on his feet, and gone, south, east, west he hit them all but this one centers on the hills, the small villages outside Cuernavaca just south of Mexico City. Places where the fog, or smog, of Mexico City would hover for much of the day until some fair winds blew them out and the heat and humidity took over. As he headed into the center of one such dusty town, Los Cruces, (hell, they were all dusty towns just the names changes every few kilometers) looking for a cantina to curb his thirst with some cerveza he spied this senorita working away doing laundry, probably the family laundry from the look of it, in the communal brook running down one side of the street.

Just another young senorita wasting away in the drudgery of village life, and ever it would be, amen. But there was something in the way she washed those clothes, something in the way she carried herself as she went from the brook to a makeshift clothes line, something in her profile against the drifting fog that intrigued him and so he stopped. Juanita stopped. It wasn’t that she was muy bonita, although she was no plain jane either. She had the look of the map of Mexico though, female version, long black hair, brown eyes, dark from the sun skin (and maybe from long ago mixing and  matching with los indios, the conquistadores and whoever else there was to mix with), big ruby red lips, natural, dressed in the workaday peasant woman modest blouse and long skirt. Except when he looked at her, and she look back, back with those laughing brown eyes and that hint of something in the air smile he was hooked. Being young, being a man, and being not too bad looking himself especially when he found himself in the smaller villages and made comparisons he began his talk, his corazon talk.

She listened, listened quietly, listened a little coquettishly although maybe at first that was his thought and she just might have just been humoring him. He described to her that he had a great mission in the world, the nature of it still unfurled, still plagued with mystery although he had a sign that it would be big, and soon. She was, whether she believed half the stuff he said, wide-eyed, kind of entranced at what he had to say. Wondered as well since she herself had had sense signs before and at his approach whether there was more to what he had to say. Then he put his best move on, asked her to meet him later at the cantina, or some other public place in town to talk, talk man to woman he said boldly. She said no, flat out no, that she could not be seen in those places, even public places, alone with a man, and moreover a stranger no matter how handsome. Then she suggested they meet outside of town, along a broken path that she gave him the directions to, and that was that.

Later that afternoon toward dusk he walked up that broken path and she was there, there in what must have been her best dress on and smelling, oh, smelling of every kind of sweet flower. And they talked, that was all, talked about how her mother had been sent out of the town when she was five for betraying her husband with another man, a man from el cuidad, a fast-talking man, and so she had been, since her father had died a few years after that of a broken heart according to the town gossip, mainly raised by her abuela, her grandmother, and so it was. He told her of his very similar life in the back roads of Sonora although he swore, swore on seven bibles, that he was meant for some greater purpose. After a couple of hours of talk he got a sense that something would happen between them before too many days passed. They agreed to meet again the next night. He had a fitful night trying to figure out if she was the one to share his destiny, to make a big splash in the world, to make a difference. All he knew was that he had an unexplained hunger for her, an eternal hunger that would not quit him and he believed that meant that the work of the world that he was to perform involved her. He resolved to take her, to make her his.                          

Of course thinking about having sex with a village senorita out in the hills and actually doing it are two different things, especially as he sensed that whatever her mother might or might not have been Juanita was a virgin. So he decided to aid his cause by picking up some loco weed, some marijuana, that he had used before to loosen up more than one senorita. That substance practically grew out in the fields wherever you looked so he knew he would have no trouble scoring some potent stuff. The next day was cloudy, foggy all day although when the sun came blazing through it was hotter than hell. He made his connection in town and was ready when Juanita appeared at their spot just before dusk, clouds kind of hanging low.

He offered some weed to Juanita, she said no, she didn’t do such things, but he kept coaxing her and coaxing her and finally she took a hit. After the cough that almost inevitably happens the first time one smokes some weed it made her giddy, and she asked for another hit. He knew it was time to make his move. Then while she was disarmed he told his story. He said that he had received a sign during the night, his restless night, and that sign said he was to be the vehicle for the birth of a child, was to impregnate a virgin, who would still be a virgin afterward and then he said the sign kind of faded after that. She looked at him wide-eyed although she did not flee at his approach but rather just kind of anticipated what he might do. And so he did, fumbling, rumbling, and stumbling at first and then she seemed more willing. Yes, she was a virgin although she didn’t have too much trouble that night. She had asked for another hit to calm her nerves. She asked him, asked him straight up, if he thought she was her mother’s daughter, a whore. He laughed, said no, and held her tight for a while and then she left for home agreeing to meet the next night. He was sure their destinies were now welded together.       

The next night though, and the next few nights after that, were different, different in that was no coyness in her, or him. She asked him to light a joint and took big draughts of the stuff, and then she was ready, ready to do whatever he wanted. And he did. About the third night, once they had gotten used to each other (and as she told him she wasn’t as sore when he put his thing in her) they went about their routine except when they were at a point of climax there was a world eruption in their passion. Both felt it, both mentioned it, and both were happy and scared. Both knew that they had done something more than making love, they had created something. Still they persisted for a couple more days of passion and the same eruptions occurred. They might not know nada about the consequences of sex, they might know nothing about the Catholic Church-imposed monthly cycles rhythm methods of contraception but they knew she was with child, a world historic child.  

The viejo panicked , panicked not at just what he had done, about his world eruptions, but that no way in this great green earth could he take responsibility for fathering a baby, not in that village , not in his village, nowhere. He had to move on or he was finished.  And so he proposed a plan to Juanita, a hard-nosed plan but a plan. She had mentioned to him one night that a village man, an older man, Pepe, had taken an interest in her, had been around her grandmother’s house asking for permission to speak to her, had told the grandmother that he would marry her. Pepe had some money, some way of supporting her, and of getting her out of town fast and so he proposed that she feel him out, get him to marry her, and flee making up whatever excuse she had to, but flee.

And so the plan went into operation. Pepe bought her story like a lap dog, was ready to do anything, including move, to be with her. They were married a couple of weeks later and Juanita was able to get Pepe drunk enough not to notice she was not a virgin. More importantly they headed to Cuernavaca a few weeks after that. The afternoon before the day they left the viejo and Juanita had once last tryst off that broken path hideaway and as they parted he swore, swore on seven bibles that he would keep in touch, and would call for her when he got steady work, and could take care of her himself. That was the last day he saw her, although he followed her doings for about a year or so after that.                 

Juanita and Pepe tried to settle in Cuernavaca but things were tough there, they were not welcomed as there was little work and so they tried Mexico City where they found some shelter and Pepe found work as a carpenter in the booming construction trade. As time went on Juanita grew big, made Pepe happy with the prospect of fatherhood, and so it happened that a hijo, a son was born to them. A son that the viejo heard looked very much like him. He desperately tried put his life together seeking work, trying to make enough dinero to claim Juanita and the boy and what wondrous things were in store, what big event was in store, as a result of their  love-making. Alas he lost contact although a couple years later he heard talk around Sonora that a woman from the hills of Cuernavaca claimed that she was the mother of the new messiah, the mother of god. But he never could pin that down. Many years later he heard that a young man, a young man from around Cuernavaca was proclaiming himself the new messiah but again he could never quite catch up to the details. Then nothing.

The viejo lifted another tequila to his long lost youth, to his brazenness and to the woman that he had wronged, Juanita, the Madonna of the Clouds.     

Short Manning hearing: four government witnesses to testify secretly

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Judge Denise Lind. Courtroom sketch by Clark Stoeckley, Bradley Manning Support Network.

By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. May 7, 2013.
PFC Bradley Manning’s pretrial proceedings continued today with a very brief open session, including two short rulings from Judge Denise Lind and more information about tomorrow’s closed session, which will provide a ‘dry run’ for a government witness to divulge classified information in secret.
In the first ruling, Judge Lind granted the government’s request to have ‘John Doe’ – presumed to be a Navy SEAL – testify in an entirely closed session, in an undisclosed location, to protect his identity, which is classified at the Secret level and which the government claims could cause harm to national security if made public. This witness will allegedly testify about documents he retrieved at Osama bin Laden’s compound following the May 1, 2011, raid.
The second ruling mirrored the first, except that it allowed for the secret testimony of three other classified witnesses.
The defense didn’t object to any of these four testifying in closed sessions. They’ll each testify in “light disguise,” which could include facial hair, wigs, and/or prosthetics to obscure their identities but to still allow the defense to observe their facial reactions.
These witnesses, the government says, will largely divulge classified information, but that some portion of their testimony will be unclassified. The court will provide a redacted transcript of these closed sessions for the press and public to document these portions.
Tomorrow, Don Yamamoto, former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and current acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, will be the ‘dry run’ witness, testifying in secret to determine if his type of testimony could be summarized, redacted, or referred to with code words so as to keep the courtroom open during those portions of the trial.
We’ll return to open-court sessions at the next pretrial hearing, still scheduled for May 21-24. The May 21 session begins at 9:30 AM ET. Bradley’s court-martial trial is scheduled to begin on June 3, 2013, and run for 12 weeks. By the time it starts, he’ll have been in jail awaiting trial for more than three years.

SF Pride board denies public access to public hearing

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Rainey Reitman attended and spoke at the SF Pride Meeting in San Francisco, which was supposed to allow for community members to explain why they believed Bradley Manning should be a grand marshal in the 2013 SF Pride Parade. The meeting closed abruptly after the first set of speakers and after protesters chanted against the refusal to allow a cameraperson into the event. The meeting has been rescheduled at an as-yet undisclosed location, date, and time.
By Rainey Reitman. May 8, 2013.

Protesters outside the SF Pride meeting. Photo via the Petrelis Files .

On May 7, 2013, more than 100 supporters of Bradley Manning gathered at the SF Pride Board meeting to protest the Board’s recent decision to rescind Bradley Manning as a grand marshal from the upcoming parade. The hearing was held in a building across the street from the main LGBT center on Market Street.
There were numerous obstacles to public participation in this ostensibly public meeting. The meeting was held in a small room that could only hold around 20 members of the public at a time. Cameras were banned from entering the space. Individuals who were in attendance were told to limit their comments to one minute each, and would be interrupted if they spoke longer. The Pride Board initially said that it would allow small groups to come in shifts to express concerns, but the proceedings were abruptly ended after the first group of speakers.
The majority of those who came to the event were prevented from entering the meeting room or speaking to the Board during the public comment section.
Members of the public who were in the room asked repeatedly for cameras to be allowed in to record the discussion, raising particular concerns about a camera person from Channel 2 who was denied entrance. The Pride Board’s general counsel, participating remotely via speakerphone, stated that the Board was not legally obligated to allow cameras into the room. One of the attendees requested that the Board vote to allow cameras into the room, but the Pride Board refused to respond.
After the first group of public attendees was brought in and seated, the SF Pride Board read a statement explaining that it would not allow Manning to be a marshal at this year’s event. In the statement, the Pride Board noted that “taking sides in the controversy concerning Mr. Manning’s conduct is not appropriate for the organization and falls outside its core mission.” The Board apologized for “any harsh words that may have been said about [Bradley Manning].” The statement also claimed that SF Pride could not make Manning a grand marshal because he is not a local community member and thus had received his award in the wrong grand marshal category. The Board reiterated that “SF Pride stands by his disqualifications on those unequivocal policy grounds.”
After the statement was read, members of the public were given a limited opportunity to speak. A member of the Pride Board read aloud a series of rules governing this public commentary section, noting that each individual would be allotted only one minute to speak and that personal attacks would not be tolerated. In one particularly surreal moment, the entire board said in unison that “indecorous speech” would not be tolerated.
Throughout the meeting, protesters were visible through the windows on the street below, many carrying signs in support of Bradley Manning. The protesters shouted chants including “They say court martial, we say grand marshal.” These chants were so loud that at times the SF Pride Board members had to raise their voices to be heard.
Among those who spoke during the public commentary section was famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. He began by noting that he would not have enough time to explain his position in the one-minute time slot he had been allotted. He praised the SF Pride Board for its apology about the earlier statement in which it had accused Manning of endangering the lives of American soldiers. Ellsberg stated that the implication of the first statement was “not merely defamatory but false” and that “not one member of the armed services was put in harm’s way by Bradley Manning, nor was harmed.”
Carol Queen, community grand marshal in 2001 and honorary grand marshal in 2008, began by saying that she had been confused by the discussion around grand marshals. She herself had not been consulted during the election process, though she is a former grand marshal. She praised the experience of serving as a grand marshal for Pride, calling it “one of the most honored experiences in my life.” She also cautioned the Pride board about the troublesome conservative streak now prevalent in the larger queer community, stating: “I came out in 1973 and I just want to say on an historical level that this is a more conservative community than it was when I came out.”
Another speaker was Lisa Geduldig, who organized the protests at the Pride buildings. Like many of those in attendance, Geduldig raised concerns about Pride moving away from social justice roots, observing, “The pride parade used to be more political. It was more about gay politics, gay freedom, and I think we should stay true to that… Bradley Manning represents me more than someone from the L Word does.”
Gary Virginia, who has previously served as the community grand marshal in SF Pride, said that he was “deeply embarrassed by [Pride’s] actions.” He stated that the process for electing marshals has been beset by procedural and transparency issues, and that the policies being cited to strip Manning of his position were not published anywhere and not available online.
As soon as the first group of speakers had finished their statements, they were escorted out and the SF Pride Board began a lengthy closed session. After some time behind closed doors, the Board announced it would allow more members of the press into the room. However, the meeting was then adjourned before the press could arrive. A member of the SF Pride board stated that the meeting would be rescheduled for a larger space. No timeline was provided for when that meeting would take place.

Imperialism: Monopoly Capitalism-From Lenin

Workers Vanguard No. 1022 19 April 2013 TROTSKY LENIN Imperialism: Monopoly Capitalism (Quote of the Week) Writing during World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin defined imperialism as the most advanced stage of capitalist development, with the industrial powers oppressing weaker states in their drive to reap ever more profit. The ongoing crisis in the European Union and the rest of the capitalist world demonstrates yet again that the only way out for the working class and the oppressed is through socialist revolutions that expropriate the bourgeoisie’s capital and establish an internationally planned socialist economy. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts.... Without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. —V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell

Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell

Leonard Peltier is known throughout the world as one of the most prominent political prisoners in the United States. His 37 years of incarceration due to his courageous activism in the American Indian Movement (AIM) has come to symbolize the U.S. rulers’ racist repression of the country’s indigenous people, survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression.

Peltier emerged as a Native American leader in the late 1960s. In response to the hideous oppression he experienced and saw all around him, he became involved in struggles for Native American rights and joined AIM. It was in his capacity as a trusted AIM activist that he came to assist the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the mid 1970s. AIM came into the government’s crosshairs because it was attempting to combat the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the Feds and the energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in western South Dakota. The hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI turned Pine Ridge into a war zone as they trained and armed thugs to terrorize and crush Indian activists. Between 1973 and 1976, these forces carried out more than 300 attacks, killing at least 69 people.

In June 1975, 250 FBI and BIA agents, SWAT police and local vigilantes descended on Pine Ridge and precipitated a shootout. Two FBI agents were killed, and Peltier and three others were charged. All charges were dropped against one AIM activist, and two others were acquitted as jurors stated that they did not believe “much of anything” said by government witnesses and that it seemed “pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense” against the murderous FBI-led assault.

The government then went into overdrive to assure a conviction against Peltier. His trial was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, a city with strong bias against Native Americans. The prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that Peltier’s gun could not have been used in the shootings while the trial judge ruled out any possibility of another acquittal on grounds of self-defense by refusing to allow any evidence of government terror against Pine Ridge activists. In April 1977, Peltier was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Successive court proceedings have laid bare the evidence of Peltier’s innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents.” In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury could have acquitted Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had been made available. In 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, “Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.” Nevertheless, in August 2009 the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s request for parole, declaring that Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For Peltier, who is now 68 years old, this in effect was a declaration by the state that this courageous man will die in prison.

The long trail of injustice against Leonard Peltier has been documented in the film Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, and in Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Decades of unjust imprisonment have not only robbed him of the prime years of his life. They have also taken a devastating toll on his physical well-being as he suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition. We join millions around the world in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier now! 

Waco Massacre: We Will Not Forget

Workers Vanguard No. 1022	19 April 2013

Waco Massacre: We Will Not Forget

April 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the government’s massacre of over 80 men, women and children of the integrated Branch Davidian religious sect outside Waco, Texas. For more than seven weeks, an array of police forces had laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound following a raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms aimed at arresting the group’s leader, David Koresh, on false charges of illegal weapons possession. The government was out for blood—and lots of it—after four Feds were killed in the initial assault, which took the life of a two-year-old girl and a number of church members. Finally, the state got its revenge through a massive attack that burned the compound to the ground, with the trapped members of the sect perishing in the inferno.

From the outset of the siege, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the SL—protested the government vendetta against the Branch Davidians. On 8 March 1993, as tanks rolled into Waco, the PDC sent a protest to Democratic president Bill Clinton demanding that “all troops, tanks, police and federal agents be removed from the area.” The letter pointed out, “We think you would do well to take the advice of the newly elected President Lincoln, who when asked what he proposed to do about the polygamous Mormons replied, ‘I propose to let them alone’.”

Attorney General Janet Reno justified the assault by raising the spectre of “child abuse.” This was forcefully answered by Bob Buck, a West Virginia steel worker who had been railroaded to prison for defending his union on the picket line during a bitter 1991-92 strike. In a letter to the PDC, Buck wrote: “They were so damned concerned for the children they unleashed an armed assault on the house they lived in and filled it full of bullet holes;…gassed them, and ultimately burned them to death. Ain’t America great. I’m glad Mrs. Reno isn’t concerned about me.”

The SL and PDC protested the Waco holocaust outside federal offices in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Shamefully, the reformist left turned a blind eye to the atrocity or joined in blaming the victims, just as almost every one of them did when Philadelphia’s black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode ordered the bombing of the predominantly black MOVE commune in 1985. Our intention was, and is, to sear the memory of these acts of government mass murder into the consciousness of the working class, whose historic interest lies in revolutionary struggle to sweep away the murderous capitalist state.

We print below the bulk of the press release issued by the SL announcing the protest demonstrations, which began in Manhattan the day of the massacre.

*   *   *

The charred corpses of 87 men, women and children who perished in the firestorm resulting from the FBI’s barrage of CS gas, flash-grenades and battering rams are the direct responsibility of the White House. President Clinton gave the green light, Attorney General Janet Reno personally supervised the plan, and the FBI’s storm troopers moved in to carry out the government’s “final solution” against the small, integrated Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas. After a murderous raid by federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents armed to the teeth and a 51-day siege, almost a hundred people have now been subjected to a flaming apocalypse for the sole “crime” of being a non-conformist religious sect which dared to defend itself against government assault.

An SL spokesman, in condemning this outrage, noted that the Branch Davidians received the same death sentence meted out to the black MOVE commune in Philadelphia, bombed by the Philadelphia police on Mother’s Day (May 13) 1985, using C-4 plastic explosives donated by the FBI. Eleven black people were murdered there, including five children, and an entire black neighborhood was laid to waste. “Like the racist cop beating of L.A. black motorist Rodney King,” said Spartacist spokesman Marjorie Stamberg, “the Waco holocaust is the domestic image of America’s ‘New World Order.’ This is U.S. imperialism’s ‘Desert Slaughter’ in Iraq brought home.”

A banner outside the compound of the racially integrated Branch Davidian religious sect said, “Rodney King—We Understand.” It is no accident that the feds’ onslaught in Waco came two days after the slap-on-the-wrist verdict for two racist cops in L.A. With troops poised to occupy the inner cities coast to coast, amid a massive police-state mobilization, the racist rulers breathed a collective sigh of relief that the urban ghettos and barrios did not explode in outrage over another outright racist acquittal. They seized the moment to incinerate the Waco commune.

In the gray light of dawn, the FBI moved in the heavy artillery—M-60 Combat Engineering Vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles and heat-seeking reconnaissance planes—in a bid to drive out or exterminate the 70 adults and 25 children still inside the wooden structure. The whole area had already been ringed with razor-sharp concertina wire. Electricity and water were cut off. The intent was to create a firetrap with no escape. Naturally there were no firefighting vehicles present to put out the flames. Now the government wants to blame the victims, but the Waco assault was deliberate mass murder, decided at the White House.

On Sunday, Vice President Al Gore wept tears for those who died 50 years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But the methodical burning down of the Waco commune, carried “live” on television, recalled nothing so much as the Nazis’ razing of the Warsaw ghetto. Clinton/Gore have carried out their own holocaust against another religious minority who evidently have “no right to exist” in this racist capitalist society. The Clinton administration has carried out its own Operation Prairie Slaughter, igniting a massive firestorm against its perceived domestic “enemies,” a small group who did no harm to anyone.

The Spartacist League spokesman noted, “From Republican Bush to Democrat Clinton, the racist rulers show what they have in store for anyone who dares to defy the state. The murder of these innocent people, burned at the stake by this bloodthirsty government, cries out for vengeance. It will take a socialist revolution to mete out real justice to the police torturers of Rodney King, to the FBI arsonists in Waco, to the U.S. military bombers of Baghdad.”

Free Tinley Park Anti-Fascists!

Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

Free Tinley Park Anti-Fascists!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

Last May, some 18 anti-racist militants broke up a gathering of fascists in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, five of the anti-fascist fighters were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three-and-a-half to six years on charges of “armed violence.” (See “Freedom Now for Tinley Park 5!” WV No. 1018, 22 February.)

The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee stand by these militants and call on workers, leftists and anti-racist fighters to demand freedom for the Tinley Park Five. The fascists are a deadly threat to the integrated labor movement, which should be in the forefront of efforts to crush them in the egg. Four of the five who were sentenced—Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin and Alex Stuck—have agreed to receive $25 monthly stipends the PDC sends to class-war prisoners. The PDC program, which includes additional gifts during the holiday season, serves not merely to alleviate some of the harshness of incarceration but also as a message of solidarity from those outside prison walls.

The courage of the Tinley Park defendants was seen in their principled response to the government vendetta. Each of the five was initially charged with 37 felony counts, including armed violence, property damage and mob action. The cops and prosecutors applied continuous pressure to try to get them to give up names of those involved in sending the fascists scattering, which the five steadfastly refused to do. Unable to meet the exorbitant bonds, which ranged up to $250,000, they spent seven months in Cook County Jail. Facing the prospect of up to another year behind bars awaiting trial, they accepted a non-cooperating agreement in which each pleaded guilty to three counts of armed violence in return for guarantees of time off for good behavior.

In their letters agreeing to receive PDC stipends, the four expressed appreciation for the contributions and also for the issues of Class-Struggle Defense Notes and Workers Vanguard that they have received. One noted that his fellow inmates lined up to read the WV article about their case.

Initiated in 1986, the stipend program takes as its model that of the International Labor Defense (ILD), affiliated to the early Communist Party, which provided stipends to over 100 prisoners of the class war. As James P. Cannon, founder and first secretary of the ILD, wrote, “The class conscious worker accords to the class war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem” (“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender [September 1926]). Past PDC recipients worldwide include an Irish Republican Socialist Party militant, members of the British National Union of Mineworkers and members of the U.S. miners, Teamsters and Steelworkers unions. Now, the Tinley Park anti-fascists are joined in the program with America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, former Black Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter and imprisoned members of the Philadelphia MOVE commune.

We urge WV readers to contribute to the stipend program by sending checks payable to the PDC and earmarked “prisoners stipends fund” to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Station, New York, NY 10013-0099. Letters to the Tinley Park Five can be sent to: Alex Stuck M34020, 2600 N. Brinton Avenue, Dixon, IL 61021; Cody Sutherlin M34021, 13423 E. 1150th Avenue, Robinson, IL 62454; Dylan Sutherlin M34022, P.O. Box 7711, Centralia, IL 62801; Jason Sutherlin M34023, 100 Hillcrest Rd., East Moline, IL 61244; John Tucker M34024, P.O. Box 900, Taylorville, IL 62568. 

Defend the NATO 3!

Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

Defend the NATO 3!

Chicago

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

For nearly a year, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase, and Brian Jacob Church have been locked away in Cook County Jail, facing possible 40-year prison stretches on an array of “terrorism” and other trumped-up charges, with bail set at $1.5 million each. Last spring, these Occupy activists traveled from Florida to Chicago in the lead-up to protests against a May 20 summit of the U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. The city was under a virtual state of siege orchestrated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with thousands of National Guardsmen, troops and cops mobilized to shield the summit from over 10,000 protesters. On May 16, Betterly, Chase and Church—now known as the NATO 3—were arrested for a supposed plot to make four Molotov cocktails and hurl them at police stations and other targets. The highly publicized arrests were part of a campaign to brand the protests as violent, in order to chill opposition to the NATO war criminals who have the blood of untold thousands in Afghanistan and elsewhere on their hands.

As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a 21 May 2012 protest letter to the Cook County State’s Attorney (printed in WV No. 1003, 25 May 2012), “The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a classic case of police entrapment and provocation.” The arrests came less than a week after the defendants had posted a video on YouTube of a Chicago cop who had pulled their car over, threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you.”

In January, the NATO 3’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the “terrorism” charges on constitutional grounds. The defense motion paints a chilling picture of how undercover cops known as Mo and Gloves tried every trick in the book to set the activists up:

“Despite a more than two-week continuing effort by the undercover Chicago police officers posing as fellow members of Occupy to entice and encourage the defendants to carry out some criminal act, the defendants never did anything.... It was only in desperation, after two weeks of nothing to show for their undercover infiltration of the defendants, and the untold resources expended to facilitate those efforts, that the police suggested at least some bottles of gasoline [Molotov cocktails] be put together. The defendants never discussed a specific plan of what to do with these bottles, let alone a plan to use them to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian population. In fact, the bottles were always in possession of the under-cover police who suggested their own provocative ideas for how to use the bottles.”

Just moments after the bottles were filled with gasoline, the undercover cops sent a prearranged signal, and the police then raided the apartment with guns drawn. They proceeded to ransack the place, confiscating computers, cellphones and political literature.

The NATO 3 were not the only activists set up and slapped with felony charges prior to the military summit. Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark Neiweem were charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat” and “attempted possession of an incendiary device” respectively. Both took non-cooperating plea deals and remain imprisoned. In all, over 100 anti-NATO protesters were arrested, from pacifist liberals to anarchoid activists. Also arrested during the weekend of the May 20 protest were the Tinley Park 5, anti-fascists who have been convicted for helping break up a white-supremacist gathering in a Chicago suburb (see accompanying article).

On March 27, Judge Thaddeus Wilson denied the NATO 3’s defense motion to dismiss, in a court hearing that was clearly designed to intimidate the defendants and everyone who came out on their behalf. Observers noted that while the judge announced his ruling, the defendants were held in a separate room, sealed off by soundproof glass and away from their supporters, with an armed, uniformed cop for each of them. Meanwhile, four armed cops sat in the audience. “It’s what a lot of scholars and people who pay attention to national security call the ‘new normal’,” said Thomas Durkin, a lawyer for Chase. In simple terms, the “new normal” is a creeping police state.

As the NATO 3’s motion pointed out, the Illinois statutory definition of terrorism is so vague and broad that it could include “labor strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.” Ever since the inception of the “war on terror” in 2001, we have warned that while the first targets were mainly immigrants, particularly Muslims and those from the Near East, the ultimate targets would be the labor movement, black people, the left and anyone who would dare to protest the depredations of U.S. imperialism, at home or abroad. And indeed, leftist political activity of many stripes has increasingly become a focal point of “anti-terror” repression.

In 2008, a host of undercover agents wormed their way into the organizing of protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, entrapping activists on “terrorism” charges. One agent later infiltrated the Minneapolis branch of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO—publishers of Fight Back!). This led in 2010 to FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas against 23 leftists and trade unionists in Chicago and Minneapolis, many of them FRSO supporters, as part of a witchhunting investigation falsely identifying solidarity efforts on behalf of Palestinian and Colombian leftists with “material support to terrorism.” Last November, four Cleveland supporters of the populist Occupy movement received prison terms ranging from six to eleven and a half years for a plot concocted by an FBI informant. Meanwhile police “red squads,” which had largely gone underground in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, have resurfaced in many cities under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”

A dangerous vise is being tightened around political protest in this country. First Amendment rights and other civil liberties are shredded in the name of “homeland security,” while the state’s moles and rats cook up felonious “plots” aimed at luring political dissenters close enough to slap charges on them. This is a concerted, bipartisan effort. The use of anti-terror laws against leftists has accelerated under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. From San Francisco, Oakland and Portland to Minneapolis, Chicago and Cleveland, it has been Democratic Party mayors who have led the crackdowns and witchhunts aimed at Occupy and other protesters.

The NATO 3 are scheduled for trial on September 16. The PDC, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, calls on the left and labor movements to join in demanding: Drop all the charges now! The PDC has donated $200 to the legal defense of the NATO 3 and encourages others to do the same. Donations can be made at https://www.wepay.com/donations/nato-5-defense. 

Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Free the Detainees Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1022	19 April 2013

Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Free the Detainees Now!

APRIL 15—A mass hunger strike at the U.S. military’s Guantánamo detention center in Cuba is now in its third month. Precipitated by a raid in February during which prisoners’ Korans were desecrated, the hunger strike includes a number of men who are near death as they protest being consigned to endless incarceration in the prison’s notorious torture chambers. Lawyers for the detainees report that some 130 prisoners are participating in the hunger strike, with the military force-feeding 13 of them. As one striker told attorney David Remes, detainees “feel like they’re living in graves” (Al Jazeera, 19 March). There has been at least one attempted suicide as well as reports of prisoners coughing up blood and others hospitalized for dehydration. On April 13, shortly after a Red Cross delegation investigating the strike had left the camp, guards fired “non-lethal” rounds at prisoners who resisted being forcibly moved to single-cell lockups. In another display of cruelty, a federal judge today dismissed an emergency motion from a hunger striker that sought an end to the mistreatment, sneering that the prisoner had “self-manufactured” his condition.

The hunger strike is a cry of despair over the legal limbo that detainees have suffered under since U.S. imperialism launched its “war on terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As the U.S./NATO began its murderous occupation of Afghanistan, hundreds of detainees were incarcerated indefinitely without a shred of legal rights. Of the 166 men still imprisoned at Guantánamo, 86 were cleared for release years ago. Most of the remaining 80 have not been charged with any crime, and only 30 detainees are subjects of active “investigations.”

A March 14 letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel by detainees’ attorneys described the prisoners as “feeling hopeless in the face of 11 years of detention without prospect of release or trial and the continuing inability of the political branches to carry through on their commitment to close the prison in a just manner” (ccrjustice.org). It is not only that Barack Obama has reneged on his 2008 campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. The letter reports “a background of increasingly regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months,” described by prisoners as a return to conditions in the Bush era that were widely recognized as constituting torture.

Hunger striker Shaker Aamer is one of those who have been held since 2002, never charged, never tried or convicted, cleared to go home but still in detention despite protest from the government of Britain, where his family resides. In a statement published in the New Statesman (5 April), Aamer describes the plight of Yemeni detainee Abu Bakr, a/k/a “171,” who has been on hunger strike since 2005 and has now become a special target of the prison administrator: “Back in October, 171 was tied in the feeding chair, and just left there for 52 hours. Then, from 4 January, he was isolated for a full month.... He thinks they’ll kill him off, to encourage the others to give up their strike.”

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (14 April), another Yemeni hunger striker, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, movingly recounted his ordeal, not least the excruciating pain of the force-feedings. Moqbel observed: “The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen.” Indeed, the U.S. president in early 2010 halted the repatriation of detainees to Yemen under the pretext of “current security conditions” in that country. Today, a majority of the remaining Guantánamo detainees are Yemeni nationals. With the detentions provoking protests in Yemen, its president, who has given his unqualified blessing to the U.S. campaign of terror-by-drone in Yemen, felt compelled to intone: “We believe that keeping someone in prison for over ten years without due process is clear-cut tyranny.”

Whereas the Bush administration rounded up hundreds of men (some under 18 years old) and tossed them into the CIA secret prison and rendition network, the Obama White House has preferred to simply kill its targets, mainly through drone strikes. At the same time, under Obama’s plan to shutter Guantánamo, the system of indefinite detention would have continued, simply relocated onto American soil. But with Congress working to ensure that Guantánamo remain a detention center, the military’s Southern Command has requested up to $170 million to upgrade existing facilities and an additional $49 million for a new prison building to hold “special” detainees.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration cynically paints the force-feeding of prisoners—officially recognized by the United Nations and others as a form of torture—as supposedly protecting their safety and welfare. This was too much even for the Obama-friendly New York Times, which ran a 5 April editorial declaring that “the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantánamo.” For such bourgeois liberals, Guantánamo stains the veneer of “democracy” with which America’s capitalist rulers cover their depredations around the world.

As revolutionary proletarian opponents of imperialism, we call for closing Guantánamo as well as for the release of all the remaining detainees, despite the enormous gulf between our Marxist worldview and that of the reactionary Islamist forces that the detainees are alleged to support. Our program is not that of liberal reformers who seek to perfect the mechanisms of imperialist rule by cleaning up its “excesses.” Our fight is to mobilize the working class in opposition to imperialist wars and occupations and in defense of all the exploited and oppressed, a struggle that must culminate in proletarian revolution to destroy the imperialists’ machinery of state terror once and for all. 

For The Late Mad- Hatter Journalist Benny Sachem

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

There was a time when I would read everything that the mad-hatter journalist Benny Sachem wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Benny’s passing represents the end of an era. Not because I agreed with his (or their) political perspectives, or his cultural critiques but because, as a guy I respect, Kevin Callahan, a columnist for The Portland Gazette, pointed out one time he represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. Thompson as everybody knows, everybody from the back pages of the 1960s and 1970s knows, gored more oxen that one would think possible. But Benny did too.

Benny, like Thompson, went after, viciously went after which was the only possible way to do the thing, and do it right, one Richard Milhous Nixon. Yah, the guy who lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960, went away bleeding over everybody who would stand for it and spilled that same blood on everything he could get his grabby little hands around and came roaring back as the second coming of Count Dracula. In short as a President of the United States and common criminal who will forever replace guys like James Buchanan and Warren Harding as the bad boy of the White House. But see here was the beauty of a guy like Sachem, and Thompson too, he went after the thug Nixon when he was riding high during his first term back in the late 1960s when he was like some Madonna figure and most journalists were finding ways to take a dive for the duration and bury their heads in the sand and as well when he was almost sanctified in 1972 when he beat a bush league politician like George McGovern like a gong. Sachem was merciless in dragging Nixon down in the pits, into the pits of what a famous politician, one of the Kennedy boys, maybe Bobby of blessed memory I think, called Nixon the “dark side “of the American experiment. And he never let up beating Nixon like a gong while he down in the gutter with the common crooks, dope dealers, and hookers. Benny treated him rightly as just another night court denizen.

That wasn’t all though like Thompson Benny took on even bigger game in the American cultural night. Sacred mobbed up Las Vegas and its vengeful seeking of the American disposable dollar, the big hatted, bourbon-soaked untouchable Kentucky Derby from Thompson’s home state, and, Christ, this took real cojones, dismissing the football Super Bowl as so much bad hubris. And Benny Sachem, maybe a little less famously than Thompson always did the same thing on his various beats, mostly at the Kansas City Herald Tribune. Benny, from the same no holds barred school of journalism as Thompson, the notorious Gonzo school where a reporter actually reported stuff he thought about as well as the just the facts jack, not only took on old punching bag Nixon but he also skewered guys like Hubert Humphrey and that bush league George McGovern whom Thompson gave a pass to. See Benny, unlike Thompson, had no ill-defined political agenda so he didn’t have to give passes to those he was trying to influence, or in order to get some cozy one-on-one interview. One can hardly forget the time when Benny and the usually unflappable McGovern almost went mano y mano on national television when Benny asked about his hidden young mistress back in Fargo, or one of those dank Dakota places. That was pure Benny, go for the jugular, and take no prisoners

Benny was even better as being the thorn in side of lesser politicians, the guys who wanted to make it to the top but didn’t, didn’t in more than one case because of some Benny expose. Like that time that Muskie, the guy from Maine who ran as Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 was riding high before Benny got to his doctor who was issuing him morphine prescriptions. Jesus, a stone-cold junkie as President. Thanks Benny on that one. Or like the time he stopped Jerry Brown, yah, the California guy who has been running for some office since Hector was a pup, in his tracks when he exposed the Mexican cartel cocaine connection that was funding his presidential bids back in the 1980s. And who was caught sampling the merchandise as well, right in public, claiming it was just a snuff box like it was about 1750 or something. Kudos Benny.

But Benny was best known for his sports columns, for his disassembling of the disassemblers who people that industry, including some of his fellow sports- writers. Who can forget that expose of the famed football writer, Grantland Stevens, who it turned out was stealing his copy straight from the publicity department of the Chicago Bears and claiming it was his stone-cold own work. Or the time he dismissed the New York Yankees, a team he loved from childhood having grown up in the shadow of the stadium in the Bronx, as nothing but candy asses and pretty boys, overpaid as well. He even out bad hubris-ed [sic] Thompson on the Super Bowl calling it a worse show than some low rent drag queen review in the Village. There were too many individual player stories that he wrote to mention here but as a measure of his power by the end of his career he was persona non grata in most American sports locker rooms, including that of the saintly PGA. That is to his credit.

And of course, as well, you had to read Benny for his love of language, language that curled around an idea. Not some academic-trained use this word here and that word there and please, not too many syllables because someone might either not understand the word or become offended by use of the reference. He took more heat than one could shake a stick at for calling George Stevens, the baseball owner, a troglodyte, which of course he was (and Benny tracing his habits proved that to be true but everybody thought it was some off-the-wall sexual reference). One could go on and on.

Of course some of his characterizations would not be politically correct these days, and probably rightly so, as when he called one professional lady golfer a daughter of Sappho and another a daughter of Lesbos, or some pleasing and pleasant black ball player an Uncle Tom, or ditto some Latino player Tio Taco. Worse was when he would call about every guy not hunkered down with weight and muscle “light on his feet,” or a hermaphrodite. Fortunately most people who read his stuff were clueless on his references but in those days you could say that stuff an and not get called on the carpet for it since nobody wanted to have to prove they were, or were not, what he characterized them as. Not in court anyway.

Those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news flash world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so. Adieu Benny, warts and all.