Washington's anti-terrorism laws will be used on US workers and OWS

The militarization of US society continues this week as the one percent’s political representatives in Congress squabble with each other over how to deal with “terrorism detainees.”

There are still 170 people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay Cuba.  Who they are, only the trusted generals in the military know along with folks like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and maybe they don’t know.  We do know that the US offered tribal warlords in Afghanistan $100 or so per head for each terrorist they handed over.  Naturally, in this very poor and war torn country, these tribal figures with a 7^th century mindset went out and found some terrorists.  (see The Road to Guantanamo) They are “bad people” we are told, people that hate America because we have freedom. They are best tried in military courts as civil jury trials are a bit unreliable for if the evidence doesn’t quite fit, foolish jurors might acquit.

Some Democrats as well as Republicans are at odds with the Obama Administration on this issue as the White House is trying to derail a bi-partisan proposal that would pretty much ensure that detainees would be tried by military tribunals free of public scrutiny. Politicians have used spending bills to insert restrictions on resettlement of Guantanamo prisoners in other countries or moving them to the US to be tried. The restrictions are also aimed at “closing the door to civilian trials for terror suspects” the Wall Street Journal reports. Many of the amendments to the defense bill being discussed this week pertain to the detainment and treatment of so-called terrorists. Kelly Ayotte, a new Senator from New Hampshire is pushing for the secret military tribunals to make it clear that the “US is at war”. At war with whom is the issue?  The military trials would apply to those arrested in or outside the US but captures of terrorists on foreign soil have been rare with the Obama administration’s policy of targeted assassinations.  Bush was more prone to kidnapping suspects and sending them to CIA torture centers around the world so the law would have important domestic consequences.

There are also attempts to eliminate Miranda requirements in cases of “suspected” terrorists. Miranda is the law that offers some protection to those taken in to custody by forces of the state and is an important right for all workers to defend.  This is why in US cop shows you rarely see arrestees invoke their Miranda rights.  Instead, streetwise arrestees talk to cops as if they trusted them and didn’t know better. Don’t want to advertise Miranda.

These are very dangerous developments for US workers as the people we distrust the most will be deciding who are the terrorists or defining what a terrorist act is. The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as "...the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives"

So strikes are acts of terrorism. 

We should not be so incautious to think that the US capitalist class is not engaged in extensive discussions and planning for how to deal with the Occupy Wall Street movement and the inevitability of increased social upheavals ahead in response to them putting the US working class on rations. These very laws and curbs of democratic rights that are being touted as necessary to protect us from “terrorists” will be used against workers on strike or those of us that use our collective power to halt economic activity. Interfering with the capitalists’ god given right to make profit is economic terrorism we can sure we’ll hear that claim.

Terrorism is a tactic and you can’t declare war on a tactic.  This is why the Senator from NH and other bourgeois politicians use the excuse of terrorism to justify their curbing of democratic rights; a war on terrorism has no end to it.  The British used such laws against the Irish (for those who haven't seen In the Name of the Father you should.)Workers should not forget that Unions were illegal at one point in time.  If workers got together to discuss the raising of their wages we were arrested on conspiracy charges and then tried by a jury that our “peers” were excluded from as only “men” of property could sit on them.  Jury qualifications were simply a legal way of silencing the working class in the legal system.

The one percent’s claim that international animosity towards us is due to jealousy and these measures are necessary to protect us is ridiculous, an attempt to hide the brutal role CIA murderers play around the world defending the plunder of the world’s resources by US corporations.  I watched a movie the other night about Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was a Congolese fighter for independence for his country from Belgian imperialism and the control of his country’s resources by foreign corporations.  He is a heroic figure who was murdered in a coup orchestrated by the Belgians and the CIA.  No Congolese or African that can read or write is not aware of this but million of Americans have no idea this occurred and was repeated in many countries throughout the world including Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala and many others.

With Lumumba out of the way the US installed their puppet Mobutu who went on to murder some 2 million people.  He ranks up there with the other US puppet, Iran’s Shah.  Animosity towards the US in these countries (the US government and CIA to be precise as Americans are fairly popular) is due to this meddling and with the Arab masses, the uncritical support of the racist Zionist regime in Israel.  No, the roots of terrorism directed at the US lie in the foreign policy of US capitalism.

The OWS movement and the concern the bourgeois has over the inevitable inclusion of the organized working class in the struggle against the capitalist offensive is the cause of the increased police brutality, militarization of US society and denial of civil rights using terrorism as an excuse.

Our response is not to shy from this offensive but to take it on, to help build the movement that can transform society from a profit based economy to a collective, democratic socialist system of production.  The crisis we face is one of an economic system, of how we produce our needs in society.  A tiny minority of people own, control and determine how we produce the necessities of life and their goal is profit and the accumulation of capital.  We cannot solve the fundamental problems we face without addressing this question----if we don’t deal with it, capitalism will destroy life as we know it.  We owe it to our children and the future of humanity to seize the time.