Wages of Rebellion (9 page)

The government demanded that Stewart be given a staggering thirty-year sentence. During the trial, the government lawyers spewed endless myths about Islamic terrorism. The prosecutors displayed on a ten-by-twelve-foot screen a photo of Osama bin Laden found in a codefendant’s basement. The US District Judge John Koeltl repeatedly told the jury that the photo of Bin Laden wasn’t evidence of the truth of the charges.
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Stewart was sentenced, to most people’s astonishment, to twenty-eight months.

After the sentencing, Stewart publicly declared that passing along the information from Abdel-Rahman had been “based on my understanding
of what the client needed, what a lawyer was expected to do.” It had been “necessary,” she said, adding that, in the same circumstances, she would “do it again.” A federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider Stewart’s sentence and make further fact-findings. She was given a new sentence by Koeltl—ten years.

The federal government’s heavy-handed orchestration of fear, Stewart said, has cowed the nation. In the Carswell federal prison in Texas, the women’s facility where she was incarcerated, she heard numerous accounts of gross injustices endured by poor women. She frequently asked these women why they had not demanded a trial rather than submit to a plea deal, or why they had not stood up and proclaimed their innocence. The answer, she said, was always the same: “I was afraid. I was afraid.”

The right-wing Federalist Society, after its founding in 1982, unleashed a frontal assault on the legal system that has transformed it into a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state. After Stanford University asked Stewart to speak there in 2002, she arrived on campus to find that the Federalist Society had pressured the university into rescinding the invitation. Sympathetic students found her a place to talk, but Federalist Society members appeared at the event to jeer and ask caustic questions.

By the 1980s, she said, the federal government was “mopping up” the remnants of radical activists, many of whom had been underground for years. She and other civil rights attorneys were able to battle on behalf of these political radicals, but by the end of the 1980s the state had finished its hunt for underground activists. And lawyers, Stewart said, “were no longer part of the game.”

The occasional victories that she and other civil rights lawyers were able to win before the attacks of 9/11 became nearly impossible to replicate afterward.

“The playing field suddenly changed, and everything favored the prosecution, certainly in federal cases,” she said. “There was no level playing field anymore. It was like if you were the last guy standing and you had to keep them from making the goal. You were at the six-inch line trying to do it. It was impossible to stop them. They controlled it. They controlled what the charges were. They controlled whether an adjournment would be given. They determined whether the cooperation
is worthy, and everybody must cooperate, and it changed into a very different system, certainly on the federal level.”

In her own trial, the government presented audio recordings of her meetings with Abdel-Rahman in the prison in Rochester, Minnesota. The taping of that conversation before the federal Patriot Act would have violated attorney-client privilege, but now such tapings are legal.
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“We continue the facade that we are fair,” she said, “that we have this Constitution we respect, and we can rely on, and that we can embrace. ‘You can’t do that, that’s my constitutional rights, etc.’ When really [our constitutional rights are] a puff of smoke. They don’t really exist.”

She began to reflect on the cost of being imprisoned, something she said she had not fully understood until she was locked up.

“I don’t think I ever appreciated the unrelenting stress,” she said about being in prison. “That you’re always waiting for something to come down. That there’s such arbitrary authority. Guard A says, ‘Go down those stairs, use the stairs.’ Guard B says, ‘You can’t use the stairs, you’re not permitted on the stairs.’ And you say, ‘But Guard A just said—’ ‘I don’t care what he said, this is
my
rule!’ That kind of arbitrary thing, you’re always guessing. What does this guy, what does this woman, want me to do? Where am I? Where is this? And that’s 24/7.”

“You’re always on the cusp of doing the wrong thing, or getting in trouble for something,” she said. “I wrote a letter for a woman, and in order to make a copy I emailed it to Ralph.” She went on: “It was basically asking a judge to stay any decision because they were going to take all of her pension as payment for what she had done. And she wanted to get this letter in right away. So I emailed it to [Ralph,] and for that I lost, I think, about three months of commissary, and email.”

“I found it virtually impossible to convince the women at Carswell that they should not be always thinking that what happened to them was personal,” she said. “They should be looking at political answers, that where they ended up was not because of some personal lack or weakness, but because the political system has designated them to be there as one of the kick-arounds, as one of the not-for-consumption.”

One of the saddest moments in prison was mail call. The names of those who had letters would be read. Some women “waited for their name to be called, and it never happened.” Those who did not get mail
or visits, Stewart said, “become more and more institutionalized. The world of the prison is the only world; the outside world does not exist for them anymore.”

She no longer believes the working class has the ability or consciousness to revolt.

“I’m not waiting for the working class to make the revolution,” she said. “I think that’s a day long gone by. That might have happened in the thirties. It didn’t. We have to look at a new way, some new force.”

But at the same time she wants people to prepare.

“The most important thing is, don’t let yourself get isolated,” she said. “Don’t feel that you’re the only one in the room that thinks this way and you must be crazy or something, and they’re going to get you because you’re the only one. Find the other people who think like you. They’re out there. There are people out there. There are groups. There’s everyone from the raging grannies right up to the very serious lefties, but there’s somebody out there, make sure you’re not all alone. That’s the worst part of what we face these days. As long as you’re with other people, you have a fighting chance, and you can organize more people.” “This is a pretty loveless world we live in,” she concluded. “We have lots of romantic love. We have lots of
Sex and the City
. But real love, love that is the kind that saves people, and makes the world better, and makes you go to bed with a smile on your face, that love is lacking greatly. You have to search for that.”

The courts were perhaps the last institution that liberal reformers had faith in before they too fell victim to the demands of corporate power. There are no institutions left that provide the citizen with a voice.

M
y own dead end with the judicial system occurred in April 2014 when the US Supreme Court refused to hear
Hedges v. Obama
, the lawsuit I brought against Barack Obama concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This provision permits the military to seize US citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process.
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The refusal by the Supreme Court to hear the case means that extraordinary rendition by our government of US citizens on US soil is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, are now exclusive servants of corporate power. It means that the consent of the governed—in a poll conducted by
OpenCongress.com
the NDAA provision had a 97 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke.
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And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose what remains of our liberty.

The attorneys Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer and I had brought the case to the US Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by coplaintiffs, the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; the journalist Alexa O’Brien; activist Tangerine Bolen; Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir; and Occupy activist Kai Wargalla. US District Judge Katherine B. Forrest in 2012 declared Section 1021(b)(2) unconstitutional. The Obama administration not only appealed—we expected it to appeal—but demanded that the law be immediately put back into effect until the appeal was heard. Forrest, displaying the same judicial courage she showed with her ruling, refused to do this.

The government swiftly went to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. It asked, in the name of national security, that the court stay the district court’s injunction until the government’s appeal could be heard. The Second Circuit agreed. The law went back on the books. Afran, Mayer, and I surmised that the administration acted this quickly because it was already using the law to detain US citizens in black sites, most likely dual citizens with roots in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The administration would have been in contempt of court if Forrest’s ruling had been allowed to stand while the federal authorities detained US citizens under the statute. Government attorneys, when asked by Judge Forrest, refused to say whether or not the government was already using the law, buttressing our suspicion that it was in use.

The Second Circuit overturned Forrest’s ruling in July 2013 in a decision that did not force it to rule on the actual constitutionality of
Section 1021(b)(2). It cited the Supreme Court ruling in
Clapper v. Amnesty International
, another case in which I was a plaintiff, to say that I had no standing, or right, to bring the NDAA case to court.
Clapper v. Amnesty International
had challenged the secret wiretapping of US citizens under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The Supreme Court had ruled in
Clapper
that our concern about government surveillance was “speculation.” It said that we were required to prove to the court that the FISA Act would be used to monitor those we interviewed. The Court knew, of course, that the government does not disclose whom it is monitoring. And it knew we could not offer proof.

The documentation proving that we—and nearly all Americans—are victims of government surveillance had not yet been provided to the press by Edward Snowden. Snowden, who worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency (NSA) center in Hawaii, fled the country before leaking thousands of classified documents that detailed the massive government surveillance operation within the United States and abroad. The Second Circuit used the spurious Supreme Court ruling to make its own spurious ruling. It said that because we could not show that the indefinite-detention law was about to be used against us, just as we could not prove government monitoring of our communications, we could not challenge the law. It was a dirty game of judicial avoidance on two egregious violations of the Constitution.

In refusing to hear our lawsuit, the courts have overturned nearly 150 years of case law that repeatedly holds that the military has no jurisdiction over civilians. Now a US citizen charged by the government with “substantially supporting” al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or those in the nebulous category of “associated forces”—some of the language of Section 1021(b)(2)—is lawfully subject to extraordinary rendition on US soil. And those seized and placed in military jails can be kept there until “the end of hostilities.”

Judge Forrest, in her 112-page ruling against the section, noted that under this provision of the NDAA whole categories of Americans could be subject to seizure by the military. These might include Muslims, activists, Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black,
obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police, and destroy property—and any other Americans labeled as domestic terrorists by the state. Forrest wrote that Section 1021(b)(2) echoed the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in
Korematsu v. United States
, which supported the government’s use of the military to detain at least 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps without due process during World War II.
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When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice through the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists, and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, would make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge, like the imprisonment of Lynne Stewart, is one more signpost on the road to revolt. The longer citizens are locked out of and abused by systems of power the more these systems become targets.