06/05/09 – Will Potter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our guest, Will Potter.
He is from the website, or the proprietor of the website, I guess I should say.
Green is the new red.
Welcome to the show, Will.
How are you?
Alright, thanks for having me.
Well, you're very welcome.
I'm happy to have you here.
This is a story that almost got away from me.
I remember hearing about Amy Goodman's coverage of it, or seeing the headline or something, and it almost escaped me, but I got an email from a Facebook friend, or somebody or other, who reminded me and pointed me toward your website.
This is an extremely important story, and I don't really know anything about it.
I hope you can just give us a freshman class level introduction here of what it means that our government has, around this country, prisons that they call communication management units.
It sounds so innocuous, it must be the most deadly thing this side of Chernobyl, or something.
Absolutely.
Well, first I guess let me give a brief overview for people that didn't see Democracy Now!or haven't heard anything about this.
These communication management units are, there's two of them in the country that we know about.
They were opened, the first one in April of 2006, that they were meant for so-called second tier terrorism inmates.
What these facilities do is they drastically restrict the communications of these prisoners with the outside world, and they add on a bunch of restrictions that even much more dangerous inmates don't receive.
For instance, they limit the amount of phone restriction and personal visits.
The phone calls are limited to 15 minutes a week, live monitored by staff, law enforcement, and NSA.
Other prisoners get about 300 or so a month.
With the mail, what we're seeing is significant delays of communications, and I've experienced that with my letters not even getting in to prisoners I'm trying to correspond with.
And with visits, these prisoners are getting four hours of personal visits a month, as opposed to other prisoners getting 56.
And also they're not allowed to have any personal contact with their family.
On top of all that, and I think really in some ways the more disturbing element of this, is that prisoners aren't being told why they're being put in these facilities.
They're not given any opportunity to appeal their designation, and they're not being told when they can get out.
So what the government is doing is collecting some prisoners, because of what I've seen, because of their political beliefs, sending them off to these facilities without warning, without an appeals process, in the hopes of keeping them out of sight and out of mind, reducing their communications with the outside world with the hopes of making their stories go away and not having as much publicity, not having as much prisoner support efforts, because these are political prisoners and they have support groups, in an effort to send a message to the movement and to instill fear in people and really hit home that if you're too outspoken on political issues, not only when you're out and about, but if you're behind bars, you're going to be singled out for this very restrictive treatment.
I could see that as a chilling effect throughout the prison system, basically, right?
This is one option that awaits you out there.
Well, it's a chilling effect with everyday people.
I mean, when you see some of the people that are in these prisons, just to highlight, I mean, we're not talking about the Timothy McVeighs and the Unabombers and the people like that.
No, they're in the Super Macs.
They're in the Super Macs, exactly.
The people we have in here, just to highlight a couple of them, one is Russell Duffer.
He's an Iraqi-born physician.
He created a charity called Help the Needy to provide food and medicine to the people of Iraq because of the U.S.
-imposed economic sanctions that's killed thousands of children.
He was sentenced to 22 years in prison, not for anything resembling a terrorism offense, but for violating the U.S. embargo and violating the sanctions in order to send medical supplies to kids.
Another example is Daniel McGowan.
He's an environmental activist who never harmed anyone, but he was admitted as a guilt in a string of crimes targeting corporate property in the name of defending the environment.
And the third person I just wanted to highlight really fast is Andrew Stepanian, who has actually been released.
But he ran a controversial website along with some other individuals.
Actually, I should say he was involved in this campaign.
Those individuals were convicted for running a controversial website to close a laboratory called Huntington Life Sciences, and that website had personal information of CEOs that advocated home protests and things like that.
No violence ever took place, and he was never accused of even damaging property.
He was just involved in this campaign, and he was convicted on conspiracy charges, and so he's put in there as well.
There's a wide range of people that are nowhere near what most people would consider a terrorist threat.
Yeah, that definition is getting really loose here.
I mean, that seems like an obvious case of free speech as long as he's posting it on his own website.
Yeah, and it's certainly pushing the limits, and it's very controversial, the speech, some of the things that they're posting and advocating people to have protests at people's homes.
But you're right, it's absolutely a First Amendment case.
With all these people, they're being singled out because of their political beliefs, and with the case of Andy and Daniel and Raffel Doffer, I mean, all three of them have very strong public support networks, and they've been chastised by the government for having such a vocal group of people sending letters to the prisons, calling the prisons, working with the media, both Andy and Daniel were on Democracy Now!
, Raffel Doffer's attorneys have been on Democracy Now!
when I was on the program, and the government doesn't like this very much.
Tell us again about the restrictions inside for the prisoners.
All of it, I guess, is in the name of preventing them from communicating terrorist instructions to other terrorists on the outside or something like that, but it seems like, from what I know of it, these restrictions in the name of communications secrecy and whatever actually go quite beyond that.
Right.
I mean, to give you a couple of examples, when these prisoners are transported within the prison, the entire prison goes on lockdown.
And what I mean by that is these communication management units are a secretive unit within a larger prison at Marion, Illinois, in a terror hut.
So when these individuals are transported, for whatever reason, and a new person is brought in or somebody else is taken out, the entire facility goes on lockdown and is shut down.
People are transported with what are called black boxes, kind of straight out of Con Air, if you remember that movie, where they're exactly like a film, black boxes covering their wrists and their handcuffs, and that's a treatment generally reserved for the most dangerous inmates.
But now we're applying this kind of Hannibal Lecter-style treatment to nonviolent political activists.
Then I went ahead and interrupted you anyway, sorry.
No, no, absolutely.
Yeah, that is, I mean, so this is, it's punishment itself is the point.
The way that they're treated, it's supposed to just be, oh, we're being very careful that terrorist instructions don't get out.
But basically these men are being mistreated like they're Guantanamo inmates, only on American soil.
Right.
Well, and an important point to make also is that, you know, in some of the comments I had on the article I put up on greenestwhenyouread.com that have circulated elsewhere, people make the comments like, well, of course, terrorists and prisoners should have their communications monitored.
Well, you know, folks, that's not the issue here.
All prisoners have their communications monitored.
All prisoners have restrictions on their visitations and their mail and have their mail subject to search and photocopying and it goes through law enforcement.
The difference with this is they're applying these extreme measures in order to punish people because of their political beliefs and to add additional levels of restriction with the outside world and with the press.
I mean, that's what's really significant here.
And on top of that, there's no due process.
Well, what about their communications with their lawyers?
I know that Lynn Stewart, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's lawyer, she ended up going to prison herself because they were overhearing her confidential privileged conversations with her client, which according to them included her passing on instructions for a revolution that never happened in Egypt or something.
Right, exactly.
I mean, Lynn Stewart's case, I think, unfortunately, is not an isolated instance.
Lauren Regan is an attorney in Oregon who's worked on a lot of these cases and is working with Daniel McGowan, who's currently incarcerated in one of these facilities, and she has reported that some of her confidential communications with Daniel have ended up being the knowledge of prison officials.
So, you know, it's clear there's, you know, I can't say the extent of this and certainly would not imply that the government is doing this in every case, but there's some problems going on with monitoring these communications.
Do you know how it's determined and who it's determined by, which activists or whoever else get thrown in here?
We don't.
And I'm actually going to, in the next week or so, I'm going to be putting on GreenWithLennyRed.com that shows a little bit more of what's going on here.
But for one thing, the government won't say who is in these facilities.
They won't release any list.
They won't confirm what prisoners are there.
Further, the government won't say what are the criteria for someone ending up in this facility.
And third, the government won't say what are the criteria for someone getting out.
So that being said, we do have a little bit of information.
I mean, Daniel McGowan and Andy Estepanian, when they were transferred to these communication management units, they both received a notice of transfer from the Bureau of Prisons.
And on Daniel McGowan's notice of transfer, which I have up on the website, it lists specifically his membership in a so-called terrorist organization.
They say he is a leader in the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, and that's his reason for being placed in this facility.
Well, the one thing that's kind of absurd to anyone who's been following these environmental cases is that there are no leaders in these organizations.
They're organizations of name only.
The Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front are only a calling card for anyone who goes out and abides by a certain set of guidelines of nonviolent engaging in property destruction.
Well, and see, you get to the crux of the terrorist argument right there, because I'm not necessarily of the same mind as the environmentalists on a lot of whose property they decide to destroy in whichever circumstances or whatever, but destruction of inanimate objects is not violence.
And yet, that's the turn of the phrase that they use right there.
Anytime that there's a riot, usually the police start it, of course, but whatever.
Anytime there's a riot with left-wing activists or whatever, a McDonald's window being broken is called violence, even though there are no casualties whatsoever.
And that's the way that they get to, first they twist property destruction into violence, and then they get to twist that violence into, well, it's politically related violence, so it's obviously terrorism.
And there's your slippery slope right there.
Exactly.
And I think those are exactly the steps that have been gone down to get to this point.
And I think a really glaring example of that kind of hypocrisy that you just outlined is in what happened this last week.
I mean, we had someone with anti-abortion views murder a doctor who provided a lawful service to women, who was an abortion provider.
And if you look at how this is being treated in the press and by the government, the government and the Department of Justice held a press conference about this.
It was very interesting that not once did they use the word terrorism.
So what we have is not only have they defined property destruction as violence, like you said, and then they say politically motivated violence is terrorism, even if it's breaking a McDonald's window.
But then there's this third caveat, which is, well, it's only terrorism then based on some sense of politics.
If you have these right-wing political beliefs, the government isn't going out of its way to label that terrorism and apply these terrorism enhancements and new legislation.
And meanwhile, it ought to be completely apparent to common sense, because I think that you're right that the politics has a lot to do with it.
But terrorism is acts of violence against innocent people.
That's right there in the definition.
And so in this case, I mean, I want to define this definition as narrowly as I can, or maybe even abandon it altogether and just prosecute people for murder when they murder people.
But in the case of this abortion doctor that was killed, it's an assassination, right?
But the guy who killed him had a fixation on this guy and killed this guy.
He didn't go and throw grenades into the stores of all the buildings nearby in order to terrorize people from being anywhere near an abortion doctor ever again or anything like that.
It wasn't terrorism.
It was an assassination.
And yet you're right, if it was a left-winger who assassinated a corporate CEO, then that would be terrorism to the state in an instant.
They get to play with language we don't.
And another way of thinking about that is look at the history of groups worldwide that most people would associate with terrorist activity.
Like if an organization sets a bomb in a market in Iraq and that bomb goes off, it kills innocent people.
But what makes it terrorism by the government's definition is it's intended to instill fear in everybody else.
It's intended to be perceived as a random act of violence, so nobody knows if they're going to be next, if you're going to be targeted.
What we're seeing with the anti-abortion movement in this case, and also the environmental and animal rights movements, there isn't that random element.
Nobody is randomly going out and breaking windows of any car that they see.
The property destruction and environmental movement is targeting an SUV dealership that sells Hummers and then sending out a communique saying, we targeted this dealership to make a political statement about the destruction of the planet with these gas-guzzling vehicles.
It's not intended to make everyone who drives a car afraid for their life, and I think that's a really important point to make with how broadly this brush is being used.
Especially when we're in the age of the war on terror, where terrorism means a kamikaze hijack of a plane full of innocent people into a tower full of innocent people.
Terrorism means hellfire raining down from the sky.
And then when you go and put some hippie environmental activist into that category, you're playing with serious fire here.
I think we all pretty much get it, don't we, that when you have no Bill of Rights left, you don't get it back the next day or something.
It's gone then.
And that's what we're doing now, is we're playing with all these definitions.
I'm surprised we don't have prisons already full of people who are identified as persons of interest, which they made up to try to pin the anthrax attacks on that innocent guy Hatfill before they paid him a million dollars and left him alone.
And ever since then, local media all across the country, national media all across the country, any kind of crime reporting on TV, this guy was a person of interest, that guy was a person of interest.
Even though this is just a made-up phrase that has no, you're not a suspect, like in the law where there's such a thing as a suspect that has due process and certain rights and privileges and so forth get kicked in.
No, you're just a person of interest.
We get to smear you all over TV, but with nothing.
I don't know why they're not going ahead and finding a certain way to detain persons of interest.
As long as we're making stuff up here, let's go hog wild, like Bill Hicks said.
To make the argument even broader, I think for a lot of people listening to this, there's a tendency I've found in talking to people that think, well, I'm either not an environmental or animal rights activist, or I'm certainly not doing anything like this.
I'm not doing property destruction.
I'm also not engaging in a really controversial campaign.
What do I have to worry about any of this?
But what we've seen time and again throughout U.S. history, and I'd argue world history, is when you have a government that is creating a definition of an other, of a dissent and demonizing dissent, they start with a small, marginal group of people because it's easier to do it that way.
You can break off a small group, call them radicals, tell the rest of the progressive organizations, well, you don't have anything to worry about because you guys aren't as radical.
If you don't break the law, you don't have anything to worry about.
And then at the same time, the rest of the country isn't paying attention because they don't think they have anything to worry about.
And then what happens is you slowly expand that definition.
You expand it from animal rights and environmental activists who are damaging property to animal rights and environmental activists in general, which is exactly what has happened.
And then you expand that to other organizations and other movements.
And the net just gradually grows until you encompass a wider group of people.
And that's why everyone paying attention really should be concerned about this.
Well, and especially on the right, it seems like, now that the Democrats are in power, the right wing has discovered that government can be dangerous all of a sudden.
They forgot that conveniently for eight years somehow.
But now you have the government.
Right-wingers, when they're dissenters, they're also armed.
They have rifles.
Left-wing hippies don't usually have rifles.
But right-wingers are scary when they're in the dissent to the state.
And so you have all these reports coming out by Homeland Security saying, oh, no, it's going to be like right after Waco when we killed all those innocent people and all those other guys joined militias and so forth.
And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When these people feel like they're threatened, that's going to be the first thing they do is, I mean, hell, we can see the run on ammunition already and so forth in reaction.
And then quite unlike yourself and your very careful language that you've used on this show, the liberals on MSNBC were basically saying, oh, no, you know, the whole right-wing movement, everybody who owns a rifle and is anti-abortion is basically part of this whole murder doctors movement with this other guy and invoking all this collective guilt about this dangerous, domestic terrorist movement among us and so forth.
And, you know, as my friend Will Grigg pointed out to me, it was just a couple days later that a guy killed an army recruiter and wounded another.
And so are we going to now apply that to the anti-war movement, that everybody who's part of the anti-war movement and has a rifle, I guess, now they're all part of this domestic terrorist anti-war assassination of soldiers ring or something?
We need to all be very, very careful about how we throw around this terminology and the way we categorize people in groups and declare them guilty.
And it's something that especially whichever side is in power is more apt to do at any given time.
Absolutely.
And I think what really makes me nervous right now is seeing all of this and seeing how easy people gravitate to, well, we're the ones in power now.
I mean, we, you know, the people that identify as Democrats or liberals or whatever.
And so let's just take the same tools that are being used against us and against progressive groups and lefty groups for so not long and now let's just turn it around and use the same thing back on others.
And it takes a degree of humility and also some guts to stand up and take a truly free speech, first amendment, civil libertarian, and in some ways it's kind of a conservative position and say no, across the board, it's not okay to do this guilt by association smear tactic.
Yes, there are terrible elements within the anti-abortion movement, but it's really reactionary and it's been disappointing to me to see some mainstream organizations come out and try to lump it all together and to silence first amendment activity and to demonize people that aren't doing anything like that.
Regardless of how much contempt you have for them, you know, you really have to take the higher ground and be logically consistent and say, well, no matter how much I despise what you're advocating, I'm going to defend your right to say it lawfully and peacefully, regardless of these other extreme elements in your movement, because that's how I want other groups to be treated as well.
And once you start trying to draw these lines and say, well, based on politics, we can demonize this entire group of people, but based on politics we can defend this group, it just falls apart.
I don't think you can defend that ground very easily.
Well, and in fact it's funny because any other circumstance where you broadly categorize people, there are all kinds of different splits and factions and differences in there.
I don't know very much about the pro-life movement at all, honestly, but using my imagination and common sense, I've got a figure that 99, well, I don't know, 90-plus, 95-something percent of them simply want the law changed, and there are activists who want the law changed, just the same way is true about environmentalists and socialists and whoever else on the left.
Not enough people, I think, are calling for the overthrow of the government, you know?
Right, right.
Well, I think that's exactly it.
I mean, and I got some pushback from talking about this in speaking events or on the website, because it's not really a position a lot of people want to take.
I think the easy response is you see something like this, and you see people you oppose, and you see a vulnerability.
And the gut reaction, I think it's logical, is to go on the offensive and attack and to think you can use that word terrorism to get some political victory.
But what I've seen, I've been writing about this stuff with animal rights and environmental movements for ten years, and the reaction of these movements to this terrorism label, it doesn't stop illegal activity.
I mean, what we've seen time and again with animal rights and environmental movements where the government applies this term and pushes new legislation and crazy 30-year court sentences and things like that, it really mobilizes and lights a fire under some of these grassroots and clandestine organizations, and they go out and do even more in retaliation.
So, I mean, a note of caution just based on these experiences to people that are trying to really go out of their way to label every conservative as a terrorist right now.
It has a tendency to backfire.
Absolutely.
And of course, you know, this is, see, I'm a libertarian.
I don't count myself of the left or the right.
And so from my point of view, I always see it as generally half the left is good and half the right is good, and yet the libertarian halves of the left and the right never are the ones who, you know, are enacting the policies once they're in power when they switch back and forth.
It's always like you said, oh, well, now the power is ours.
We're going to use it against you, and back and forth and back and forth like that over the generations.
You might even be familiar with the Rush Limbaugh quote from a few months ago where he said, oh, these Democrats want to build this giant government and use it against us rich people.
Well, the next time we have the power, we're going to use it against them right back as though he hadn't just, you know, had his guys in power for eight years.
So back and forth and back and forth it goes.
Meanwhile, the good left and the good right and the libertarians who just want to be free and, you know, have basic peace and prosperity and that kind of thing, we end up doomed to these people's games as they switch back and forth, back and forth and continue all the worst policies and fix none of them.
Well, and I think a really striking example of all that is with Obama, the new Obama administration.
You know, a lot of people I don't think raised enough concern about what is amounting to an absolutely abysmal record so far in just a few months on civil liberties and civil rights issues.
I mean, he has defended warrantless wiretapping.
His administration has defended extraordinary renditions, sending people to other countries to be tortured, withholding the torture photos.
I mean, the list goes on and on, and I think we need to remember that and there's an explanation for this, is that once you give the government a wide range of power, you can't expect them not to use it.
And you can't expect a new administration, regardless whether they're Democrat or Republican, to want to give up power.
Once power is given, the people in power don't want to give it back.
I mean, that's not how it works.
So we're seeing the consequences of that.
The powers that George W. Bush took or was afforded through a weak Congress now reside with President Obama, and he's using them, and he's refusing to give them back.
Yeah, you let me know as soon as you hear that he's decided to close down these communication management units.
I love that.
Soviets could have thought of that title, right?
As soon as he decides to bring hope and change to these prisons, you let me know about it.
I'm waiting.
I'll do that.
All right, everybody, that's Will Potter.
The website is greenisthenewred.com, and also put a slash blog on there if you want.
Check out the blog.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.