Musings on U.S. Judicial Repression

However, since September 11, 2001, a series of laws has legalized what had been unconstitutional police, FBI and U.S. military domestic activities. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activists opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal corporate government has passed new laws broadening the Patriot Act. Specifically, these new laws severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent, as for example, the October 17, 2006, signing of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007. In a private Oval Office ceremony, the president signed the bill that permits his office to declare a public emergency and station troops anywhere in America, taking control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to suppress public disorder. On this same day, the president signed the Military Commission Act of 2006, that allows for torture and detention abroad, as Section 1076 titled, Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies, essentially puts in place the mechanism for the implementation of “martial law” according to Section 333, which states:

“…the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard, in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constitutional authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (‘refuse’ or ‘fail’ in)…”

Domestically, the police, courts and prisons are the primary institutions of repressing the aspirations of human rights the mass and popular movement seeks to achieve, prisons being the last rung in the ladder of judicial coercion. Hence, the mass and popular movement must demand:

Unfortunately, the majority of young New Afrikans do not know their peoples’ history of struggle in this country beyond the civil rights movement. Therefore, they are unable to recount the conditions of heroic struggles as those of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner and the hundreds of slave rebellions pre-civil war. They are unaware of the forced migration of New Afrikans from the South after the civil war because of the Hayes/Tilden compromise and advent of the Klu Klux Klan out of the Confederate Army. They are unable to relate to the history of racist lynching of thousands throughout the South that served to bring the NAACP into existence in 1909, evolving out of the Niagara Movement with its anti-lynching program. They know nothing about the killing of nearly 100 New Afrikans during white racist riots in 1919 in Chicago and New York, or the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma. They do not truly understand how the practice of the Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation gave birth to the civil rights movement, out of which the Black liberation movement was born. It is this history of struggle, and particularly the legacy of struggle represented by the Black Panther Party, that is currently being attack with the persecution of the SF 8.