«Man darf das System nur mit Ausdauer, nicht mit Hass bekämpfen.»
ICH BIN IMMER NOCH DA
Hugo Portmann hat 31 seiner 56 Lebensjahre im Zuchthaus verbracht. Doch brechen tut ihn das nicht.
http://folio.nzz.ch/2015/juni/ich-bin-immer-noch-da
Richtig ticken
Wie der Langzeitgefangene Hugo Portmann zu seiner Wunschuhr kam. Warum er sich nicht therapieren lassen will. Und ein kleiner Werbespot für Swatch-Besitzer Nick Hayek.
https://www.woz.ch/-6c6b
05.05.2016
https://supportnicoleandjoseph.com/send-letters/
Joseph wurde letzte Woche in den USA unter dem Gesetz Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) verurteilt.
Joseph is currently in federal custody, so please send him letters to help him stay connected to people through the walls of prison and to feel support.
Be aware that prisons monitor inmate mail, so please do not write about any illegal activity.
You may send letters, cards, or postcards to Joseph, but please do not send any other materials. Envelopes should contain Joseph’s address with his inmate number and a return address.
Write to Joseph at:
Joseph Buddenberg #12746-111
MCC San Diego
808 Union Street
San Diego, CA 92101
Title: Briefe schreiben in St. Gallen
Location: Schwarzer Engel, Engelgasse 22, St. Gallen
Link out: Click here
Description: Das Black Pigeons Collective zu Besuch im Schwarzen Engel
Start Date: 2016-06-17
Start Time: 18:00
End Date: 22:00
Posted on May 2, 2016
https://supportnicoleandjoseph.com/2016/05/02/hearing-update-joseph-sentenced-to-2-years-in-prison/
This morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, Joseph Buddenberg was sentenced to two years in federal prison for Conspiracy to Violate the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The sentencing follows his signing a non-cooperating plea agreement in which he plead guilty to conspiring to free thousands of animals from fur farms throughout the U.S. and to cause damage to businesses associated with the fur industry.
“Today’s sentencing must be understood in the context of the complete illegitimacy of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act,” said Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the lead lawyer on several constitutional challenges to the law. “This is a law bought and paid for by corporations that profit from the exploitation of animals, in the service of nothing but their own bottom line. Prosecuting non-violent liberation of animals as ‘terrorism’ is a transparent attempt to silence an entire movement. The AETA violates fundamental constitutional principles of free speech and due process, and we will continue to challenge it wherever it is used. ”
Buddenberg and his co-defendant Nicole Kissane were indicted under the AETA last July. Earlier this year, both signed non-cooperating plea agreements; Kissane’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for June.
Albert Woodfox (Angola 3) war 43 Jahre in Isolationshaft, im Februar wurde er endlich freigelassen. Er berichtet hier die schwierige Zeit nach dem Knast.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/albert-woodfox-43-years-solitary-confinement-wish-i-was-back
Ed Pilkington – April 29, 2016
Before walking out of jail a free man in February, Albert Woodfox spent 43 years almost without pause in an isolation cell, becoming the longest standing solitary confinement prisoner in America. He had no view of the sky from inside his 6ft by 9ft concrete box, no human contact, and taking a walk meant pacing from one end of the cell to the other and back again.
A few days ago he found himself on a beach in Galveston, Texas, in the company of a friend. He stood marvelling at all the beachgoers under a cloudless sky, and stared out over the Gulf of Mexico as it stretched far out to the horizon.
“You could hear the tide and the water coming in,” he says. “It was so strange, walking on the beach and all these people and kids running around.”
Of all the terrifying details of Woodfox’s four decades of solitary incarceration – the absence of human touch, the panic attacks and bouts of claustrophobia, the way they chained him even during the one hour a day he was allowed outside the cell – perhaps the most chilling aspect of all is what he says now. Two months after the state of Louisiana set him free on his 69th birthday, he says he sometimes wishes he was back in that cell.
“Oh yeah! Yeah!” he says passionately when asked whether he sometimes misses his life in lockdown. “You know, human beings are territorial, they feel more comfortable in areas they are secure. In a cell you have a routine, you pretty much know what is going to happen, when it’s going to happen, but in society it’s difficult, it’s looser. So there are moments when, yeah, I wish I was back in the security of a cell.”
He pauses, then adds: “I mean, it does that to you.”
The “it” to which he is referring is the “closed cell restriction”, or CCR, into which Woodfox was put in 1972, and where he remained for all but a few months until his release on 19 February. He survived about 15,000 days of isolation – a form of captivity that the United Nations has denounced as torture and that scientific studies have shown is capable of inflicting severe psychological damage on individuals in less than a week.
As a member of the “Angola Three” – former Black Panther activists who were all subject to decades of solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison – Woodfox was put into CCR ostensibly for the murder of a prison guard, for which he has always insisted he was framed. His conviction was twice overturned by a federal court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, and he walked out of custody an innocent man.
His lawyer, George Kendall, of Squire Patton Boggs LLP, fought for years to get him out of isolation, which Kendall called “extreme and cruel punishment”.
In an interview with the Guardian, Woodfox says he is finding the transition from being cooped up alone in a cell to being free more difficult than he had anticipated. “Everything is new, no matter how small or large,” he says.
The weirdest sensation is feeling profoundly uncomfortable in a crowd. “I’m not accustomed to people moving around me and it makes me nervous. Being in a cell on my own, I only had to protect myself from attack in front of the cell as I knew there was no one behind me. Now I’m in society, and I have to remind myself that the chances of being attacked are very small and would usually depend on my own actions.”
Now that he is no longer alone he has also had to learn hard lessons about communal living. In the cell, he explains, his actions only ever affected one person – himself. Now his behaviour has ramifications for others.
“For 43 years the only person who was affected by what I did was me. The most difficult thing for me now is to remember that other people are affected by my actions, whether intentional or unintentional. I’m having to learn a new value system.”
When Woodfox last spoke to the Guardian, a day after his release, he described the panic attacks he had suffered in solitary, which at times forced him to sleep night after night sitting up. Since being released, those attacks have become much less frequent, though he continues to deal with them in time-honoured fashion.
At 3am one night recently when he was staying in the guest room of his brother’s house in Houston, Texas, he woke up in a panic, drenched in sweat. “I got up and paced up and down the room for a couple of hours. I suppose I could have gone out of the house and sat in the back yard, but it never occurred to me that there were other options. I just did what I had always done – paced up and down.”
For years he told himself that if he ever got out of prison he would use his freedom to campaign against solitary confinement, to spare other people from going through the torture he endured. Now he is out, he feels that obligation all the more intensely, concerned as he is about those he has left behind in the CCR cells of Angola.
“The one thing that used to anger and frustrate me in prison was that I felt I had no voice. So I’m dedicating the rest of my life to being a voice for those still in the hell of solitary confinement – I feel such a great responsibility for them.”
He stays in touch with Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, who was recently returned to a dormitory block in Angola having spent more than 30 years in solitary. Woodfox also spends a lot of time on the outside with Robert King, another member of the Angola Three, who was freed in 2001.
No such happy reunion is to be had, however, with the third element of the trio, Herman Wallace, who died in 2013, two days after being released from prison.
The most disturbing part of freedom, Woodfox says, has been the dawning realisation since his release that in America in 2016 there is very little sense of political or social struggle. When he entered prison in the 1970s the country was on fire with political debate; now, as he puts it, “everybody seems to be ‘Me, me, me, me, me.’ It’s all about me, what I need and how I’m going to get it.”
That public indifference has in turn, he believes, allowed solitary confinement to flourish, to the extent that 100,000 Americans are subjected to it each year.
“The people and the government and the courts have turned their back on prisons, and that lets the wardens and officers act as judge, jury and executioner,” he says. “People don’t seem to be socially aware, that’s why solitary confinement exists and why it’s so brutal. Because nobody cares.”
‘If fighting for freedom is a crime, innocence is really the worst of all’
In late 2008, a midst diffuse hostilities triggered by the revolt in Greece following the assassination of Alexis by police, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor launches an investigation of anarchists and anti-authoritarians. In 2010, on the basis of a list of actions that the police attribute to the “anarchist movement” and while the struggle against the construction of a new detention centre in Steenokkerzeel is underway, magistrate Isabelle Panou is assigned to the investigation, now under the anti-terrorism. In May, then in September 2013, a dozen searches took place within this investigation, the searches targeting different homes as well as the anarchist library Acrata in Brussels. It is on this occasion that the existence of an antiterrorist investigation first emerges. This investigation is led by the anti-terrorist branch of the Federal Judicial Police backed by the State Security and the General Intelligence and Security Agency of the army as well as various anti-terrorist branches of other European countries.
The investigation is closed in 2014, culminating in the referral of twelve anarchists and anti-authoritarians to the Court Chambers.
After a session for the legalization of the specific methods of research used in this investigation (shadowing, phone tapping, microphone placement in one house, secret searches, attempts at infiltration, placement of video surveillance devices outside homes and inside one home) in October 2015, the case is referred to the Court Chamber. The sitting of the Chamber is scheduled for May 10, 2016 and will determine whether a trial should be held, and if so, under what charges.
In this investigation, the Federal Prosecutor has attempted to draw up no less than 29 individualized charges. Nine comrades are accused of belonging to a terrorist organization and involvement in terrorist activities for more or less extended periods. Three of them are also accused of being the “leaders”. In addition, three other people arrested in the wake of an attack on the police station of Marolles are accused of belonging to this terrorist group for a day, as well as various charges related to the attack. This is as far as concerns the general accusation.
This is then complemented by more specific charges such as participation in a non-authorisation demonstration outside the detention centre 127bis in Steenokkerzeel (transformed into “attempted arson” and a “terrorist offence” by the prosecutors), preparation and participation in an attack on the police station in Marolles (qualified by the prosecution as a “terrorist offence”), assault and wounding of police officers on several occasions, obstruction of the public highway, damage in various forms, shoplifting, arson of prison guards’ cars in the Ittre prison car park, incitement to commit terrorist offences… It should be noted that these specific allegations are each aimed at specific comrades, that is to say not everyone has been charged with all the allegations.
The backdrop to this investigation that has gone on for several years and produced no fewer than 32 boxes of papers, is that the Federal Prosecutor hypothesizes that an “anarchist terrorist group” would be active, in particular in Brussels, and that the accused would have “participated” in or “favoured” those activities. For example it has produced a list of about 150 attacks, a good number of which incendiary, against the structures of domination, police stations, courts, banks, companies that enrich themselves out of incarceration, construction sites, cars of diplomats, Eurocrats and NATO officials, mobile phone antennas… All these attacks took place in Brussels and surrounding area between 2008 and 2013.
The invention of a terrorist group that would be responsible for all of these facts (if only by the fact of “having rendered them possible”) allows pretty pirouettes for the prosecution: a library becomes a place of recruitment, discussions become clandestine meetings, leaflets and newspapers of anarchist critique become urban guerrilla manuals, demos and rallies become calls to terrorism, the affinity ties between people in struggle and the self-organization that might flow from them become “a structured terrorist group.” The invention of an “anarchist terrorist group ” is obviously a rather clumsy attempt by the State to reduce anti-authoritarian and revolutionary subversion to the work of a single “structured group”. In trying to put a handful of inconvenient anarchists behind bars the State is seeking to discourage the refractory from taking direct action against what oppresses and exploits us and impose absolute silence on any desires, possibilities and critical reflections that clash with this authoritarian world.
What has been committed to trial therefore is a mosaic of struggles, revolts, ideas, direct actions, critique, revolutionary imaginaries, agitations that have been attempting to attack dominion for years. In this, the possible trial concerns not only the comrades accused, but also each individual, every anarchist, every revolutionary, every rebel against order, every insubordinate to authority who refuses to stand idly by in the face of exploitation and oppression. What is being targetted is the search for autonomy in action, self-organization in the struggle, direct action in all its diversity, the choice to defend and disseminate anarchist and revolutionary ideas, to participate along with other rebels in self-organized and autonomous combat.
And finally, without any doubt, a combative approach of anarchism that starts off from the individual, affinity, informality.
It would be absurd to separate the repression that is striking some anarchists and anti-authoritarians today from all the repression that is seeking to subdue (often preventively) any criticism of the established order and revolt. By dint of “terrorist threats”, refugee crisis, the fight against crime and very real wars, State repression today is going into top gear. At a time when change and restructuring is changing the grounds of social conflict faster and faster, neutralizing those who disturb their thinking and their actions is part of a set that targets the exploited and oppressed: the hardening of the conditions of survival, the militarization of borders, the imposition of massive technological control, the construction of new detention camps, …
Defending oneself against this repressive coup that wants to send comrades to court on charges of terrorism is to defend any possibility and space of anarchist and anti-authoritarian action. … And, by solidarity with the accused comrades, face the State repression aimed at paralyzing all subversive action.
If fighting for freedom is a crime, innocence is really the worst of all.
More info and contact…
La Lime
Caisse de solidarité bruxelloise
lalime@riseup.net
Gathering every first monday of the month at 19h30 at Acrata
Next gathering: Monday 2nd of May 2016.
Acrata
bibliothèque anarchiste
acrata@post.com
https://acratabxl.wordpress.com/
Rue de la Grande Ile 32 – Bruxelles
Translated by Act for freedom now!
The Guardian hat eine App kreiert (!?!?) mit der man virtuell die Realität von Isolationshaft erleben kann.
Schon das Video anzuschauen ist schockierend.
Diese beklemmende Leere, diese Kälte.
Was hier ein einfacher Brief wohl ausmachen kann…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6×9-a-virtual-experience-of-solitary-confinement#gvr-360
14. April 2016
http://www.augenauf.ch/aktivitaeten/157-solidaritaet-mit-nekane-txapartegi-free-nekane.html
Am Mittwoch, 6. April wurde Nekane Txapartegi in Zürich verhaftet. Die Verhaftung erfolgte aufgrund eines europäischen Haftbefehls und eines spanischen Auslieferungsantrags. Nekane Txapartegi ist eine ehemalige Stadträtin aus der baskischen Kleinstadt Asteasu. Sie war in verschiedenen linken Bewegungen aktiv und als Journalistin für verschiedene linke Zeitschriften tätig.
Nekane Txapartegi wurde 1999 von der spanischen paramilitärischen Polizei Guardia Civil verhaftet. Während der berüchtigten Incomunicado-Haft – ohne Zugang zu einem Anwalt oder sonstigen Kontakten – wurde sie massiv gefoltert und vergewaltigt. Ihre Aussagen führten zu einer Anklage gegen ihre Folterer, die sie auch identifizieren konnte. Das Verfahren wurde, wie in Spanien in solchen Fällen leider üblich, eingestellt. Amnesty International und andere Menschenrechtsorganisationen dokumentierten diesen besonders schweren Fall von Misshandlungen, Schlägen und sexueller Gewalt. Nach ihrer Freilassung flüchtete sie 2007 aus Spanien. Bei einem politischen Massenprozess gegen linke AktivistInnen wurde sie 2009 zu einer Haftstrafe von sechs Jahren und neun Monaten verurteilt. Erst am Dienstag, dem 12. April, konnte ein Schweizer Anwalt Nekane besuchen und ihre Verteidigung übernehmen. Seinen Berichten zufolge geht es ihr den Umständen entsprechend gut. Sie sieht den kommenden Zeiten mutig und aktiv entgegen. In der Zwischenzeit hat sich in der Schweiz die Solidaritätsgruppe “Free Nekane!” gebildet. Die Solidaritätsgruppe ist offen für engagierte Menschen und Kollektive, die Nekane und ihre Familie unterstützen und ihren Fall bekanntmachen möchten. Bei einer Auslieferung droht Nekane Txapartegi eine Haft weit entfernt ihrer Heimat. Durch diese “Dispersion” genannte Massnahme werden baskische Gefangene hunderte oder gar über tausend Kilometer vom Baskenland entfernt gefangen gehalten. Dies soll den Austausch zwischen baskischen Gefangenen und eine Solidarisierung erschweren. Für die betroffenen Familien bedeutet dies stundenlange Anfahrtswege ür kurze Besuche ihrer Angehörigen. Das oberste Ziel ist, die Auslieferung an Spanien zu verhindern. Keine Auslieferung des Folteropfers an ihre Peiniger!
Die Gruppe wird dafür mit Informationen und solidarischen Aktivitäten an die breite Öffentlichkeit gelangen. Die Kontaktadresse lautet: freenekane@immerda.ch.
11.4.2016
Rebecca Rubin– Earth & animal liberation/Green Scare/Operation Backfire prisoner was released to a halfway house!
OUTSTANDING NEWS: Today, Rebecca Rubin– Earth & animal liberation/Green Scare/Operation Backfire prisoner was released to a halfway house!
— NYC ABC (@nycabc) April 12, 2016
