www.freesaminow.com
"...Dr. Sami Al-Arian's arrest on February 20, 2003, at the behest of the Bush Administration, was the height of injustices committed against Dr. Al-Arian in his three decades as a law-abiding resident who loved his country; a country where he lived twice as long as he had anywhere
else; a country that shared his values and beliefs more than any other; a country where he raised his family to live, learn, work, and contribute to its betterment.
The trial and acquittal of Dr. Al-Arian in 2005 served not only to demonstrate his innocence against the government's unfounded accusations, but also as an affirmation of his decades of public service. ICP and WISE, the institutions that the government attempted
to destroy in its indictment, were ultimately vindicated. Prosecutors could not show any evidence of wrongdoing. In fact, witnesses called by the government, including professors, lawyers, and federal agents, testified to the value of these organizations and their genuine
nature. Jurors who sat in the trial for six months drew only the logical conclusion that ICP and WISE were legitimate, law-abiding organizations that were highly regarded.
The government's decision to continue to punish Dr. Al-Arian even after his acquittal demonstrates the politically-motivated nature of the actions against him. This effort has been led by those who are openly opposed to the empowerment of American Muslims in the public
square, and have professed deep hostility to the cause of justice for Palestinians..."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Do you disagree with the government now and then ?
Do you actively support organizations that oppose government policy ?
Have you demonstrated or sent letters or contributed money or signed a petition that resists the government or its policies ?
How about this- do you fully expect that if you were ever tried and found INNOCENT- you would be freed from prison ?
Not true.
Last DRANT was about the Blacklist. This is about the National Gulag.
Its easy to close this now, or tell yourself that you're not a Palestinian, for Allah's sake, just a regular citizen expressing yourself like Americans are supposed to.
Please read this. You know who can be next. There's a list of possible actions below.
Please- perform just one, for the victim and his family, for yourself and your children and their children.
Thanks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Sami Al-Arian's Arraignment on Monday Morning
VIRGINIA -- Tomorrow (Monday) morning, June 30th, at 10 AM sharp, Dr. Al-Arian will have his arraignment at the U.S. Courthouse in
Alexandria. He will appear before Judge Leonie Brinkema. We encourage supporters and people of conscience to attend.
Email samialarianactioncommittee@gmail.com if interested in
coordinating a car pool.
WHAT: Dr. Sami Al-Arian's Arraignment WHEN: Monday, June 30, 10 A.M.
WHERE:
Albert V. Bryan
U.S. Courthouse
401 Courthouse Square
Alexandria, VA 22314
WHO: We encourage all supporters to attend!
SEE MORE:
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/06/28/dr-sami-al-arian-to-be-arraigned-
at-10-am-on-monday-june-30th/
DIRECTIONS THROUGH GOOGLE MAP:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&geocode=&q=&near=520+King+St+% 23+307,+Alexandria,+VA+22314&sll=38.818378,- 77.044973&sspn=0.018323,0.063343&ie=UTF8&ll=38.800621,- 77.048106&spn=0.009164,0.031672&z=15&iwloc=addr
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another Milestone for Dr. Al-Arian Spent in Prison
VIRGINIA-- Last month, Dr. Sami Al-Arian marked the 33rd
anniversary of his arrival to the United States. Dr. Al-Arian, who is
currently being held at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in
Portsmouth, Virginia, awaits deportation by immigration officials
while a Virginia prosecutor attempts to keep Dr. Al-Arian imprisoned
indefinitely.
(this has now turned from possible to actual- the Prosecutor has FILED NEW INDICTMENTS AGAINST Dr. Al-Arian- details below)
Here is Dr/ Al-Arian's story:
On April 11, Dr. Al-Arian completed his sentence, following an
additional year spent in jail for civil contempt for his refusal to testify
before a grand jury. A plea agreement reached with the government in
2006 called for Dr. Al-Arian's immediate release and deportation and
promised to protect him from cooperation. After spending more than
five years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, Dr. Al-
Arian has spent the last six weeks in legal limbo –not serving a
sentence and not charged, but not allowed to leave the country.
On May 21, 2008, Dr. Al-Arian spent the 33rd anniversary of his
arrival to the United States in a 7 x 10 cell in a rural Virginia
jail. The son of Palestinian refugees, Dr. Al-Arian, 50, arrived to
the U.S. from Egypt in 1975 as a 17 year-old college freshman.
He completed his graduate studies almost a decade later, receiving a
doctorate in computer engineering and beginning a successful academic
career at the University of South Florida in Tampa. While there, he
became an award-winning tenured professor. He authored a number of
articles in his field and chapters in textbooks and won several
prestigious research grants for his university. Dr. Al-Arian's work
in the classroom consistently garnered high praise from students and
colleagues alike.
In 1979, he married Nahla Al-Najjar, another Palestinian refugee, who
became the source of love, guidance, and support for her husband as
they embarked on a mission to build a family and a community. Dr. Al-
Arian credits his wife with sharing his devotion and passion for
community building and activism. She was a pioneer for the inclusion
of women in leadership positions within the American Muslim
community. Along with their five children, they lived in Tampa until
2007 when Mrs. Al-Arian and their two youngest children departed for
Egypt, where they eagerly await Dr. Al-Arian's release and
deportation.
In addition to his professional career, Dr. Al-Arian devoted much
time and energy to the building of civic institutions to enhance the
life of the growing American Muslim community. He has played an
integral role in founding and expanding some of the largest national
organizations, including the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and
the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Locally, he founded the
Islamic Community of Tampa Bay at the Al-Qassam mosque. At its
height, the mosque boasted thousands of congregants and became a
leading participant in some of the most important local charitable
work, including the annual Feed the Hungry event hosted by Tampa's
mayor. Dr. Al-Arian, as the imam, also led the mosque to become the
first to join the Hillsborough Organization for Progress and Equality
(HOPE), a social justice coalition made up of nineteen churches.
Pastor Warren Clark of the First United Church in Tampa recalls one
of his earliest conversations with Dr. Al-Arian, following the Muslim
community's participation in a HOPE event. "(Sami) said, `There are
issues in this town that are more than just Muslim issues. We are
called on by the Quran to work for the poor, the outcast, the hungry,
the widows, and the orphans.' He led his community to engage in this
work in many different ways and through many different organizations.
Within the Muslim community, that legacy has continued on, even in
his absence."
One of Dr. Al-Arian's proudest achievements is establishing the
Islamic Academy of Florida (IAF), a full-time school that offered
students the highest quality education while instilling them with a
sense of moral duty to their community and country. He served as
principal of the school for several years, as it became the lifeblood
of the community. Graduates of IAF have gone on to some of the top
universities in America and most have received scholarships and
acceptance to honors programs.
Dr. Al-Arian was also heavily involved in human rights work,
especially with regard to his homeland of Palestine, in an effort to
relieve the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli
occupation. He was outspoken in opposition to Israeli policies and
eager to inform the American public of the plight of Palestinians in
order to effect positive change. The organization he founded, the
Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP), held annual national
conferences and organized charitable activities to help needy orphans
in Palestine.
Among his many activities, Dr. Al-Arian actively worked to bridge the
divide between East and West. He promoted interfaith dialogue
individually and institutionally, in an effort to establish peace,
tolerance, and understanding between faiths. Another one of his
initiatives, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), was a
groundbreaking think tank at USF that brought together scholars,
experts, and leading intellectuals from around the world. Its
publications were highly regarded by experts in the field. Through
this work, Dr. Al-Arian developed many important and lasting
friendships.
Melva Underbakke, an instructor at USF and member of Friends of Human
Rights, recalls her first impressions of Dr. Al-Arian:
"I met Sami in the early 1990s. He was giving a presentation for the
teachers at the English Language Institute (ELI) at USF. Most of them
didn't know anything about Middle Eastern culture. People liked him
in the Foreign Languages Department because he was trying to build
bridges between East and West. He had a real reputation for doing
that there."
He soon became recognized as a national leader of the American Muslim
community, receiving invitations to speak at numerous churches,
synagogues, and other institutions, including the U.S. Central
Command at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
By the mid-1990s, Dr. Al-Arian's activities were centered on the
latest civil rights struggle in American history: the emerging
national effort to end the unjust detention of Arabs and Muslims for
years without trials through the use of secret evidence. Through
tremendous efforts, including coalition-building, grassroots
mobilization, and congressional lobbying, Dr. Al-Arian would come to
be recognized as "one of the country's leading advocates" of the new
civil rights movement, according to Newsweek magazine.
Having lived in the U.S. for over two decades, he was steeped in the
American civil rights tradition and was a strong believer in fighting
for change through the designated avenues. Furthermore, Dr. Al-Arian
worked hard to empower and enfranchise the American Muslim community
on the local and national levels, encouraging Muslims to vote and run
for office.
Dr. Al-Arian's arrest on February 20, 2003, at the behest of the Bush
Administration, was the height of injustices committed against Dr. Al-
Arian in his three decades as a law-abiding resident who loved his
country; a country where he lived twice as long as he had anywhere
else; a country that shared his values and beliefs more than any
other; a country where he raised his family to live, learn, work, and
contribute to its betterment.
The trial and acquittal of Dr. Al-Arian in 2005 served not only to
demonstrate his innocence against the government's unfounded
accusations, but also as an affirmation of his decades of public
service. ICP and WISE, the institutions that the government attempted
to destroy in its indictment, were ultimately vindicated. Prosecutors
could not show any evidence of wrongdoing. In fact, witnesses called
by the government, including professors, lawyers, and federal agents,
testified to the value of these organizations and their genuine
nature. Jurors who sat in the trial for six months drew only the
logical conclusion that ICP and WISE were legitimate, law-abiding
organizations that were highly regarded.
The government's decision to continue to punish Dr. Al-Arian even
after his acquittal demonstrates the politically-motivated nature of
the actions against him. This effort has been led by those who are
openly opposed to the empowerment of American Muslims in the public
square, and have professed deep hostility to the cause of justice for
Palestinians.
For the past five years, Dr. Al-Arian has witnessed the gravest of
injustices, some that he spent years of his life fighting against,
and others never thought imaginable in a free society. As he
continues to endure imprisonment with no end in sight, abusive
treatment at the hands of prison officials, and isolation from those
who love and depend on him, many Americans and people the world over
wonder if justice is indeed possible in such dark times when the
abuse of government power knows no bounds.
Dr. Al-Arian, however, maintains his unshakeable faith that the
people, on whom the system of justice depends, will ultimately bring
an end to the abuses committed in their name. Each day, more people
add their voice to the thousands who call on America to live up to
its time-tested principles.
As Pastor Clark recalls, it is Dr. Al-Arian's strong faith that has
always guided him through the toughest of times. "I recall attending
an event at the Islamic Community during the height of the media
campaign against Sami, after 9/11, but before he was arrested. I
asked him how he was doing and I expected him to say things were bad,
but he said, `You know Warren, I feel closer to God now than I have
ever felt.' It was another window into the deep wellspring he uses to
overcome the most terrible circumstances. That really spoke to me."
As we approach a crossroads in the contemporary civil rights
struggle, the case of Dr. Al-Arian takes center stage. Agha Saeed,
chair of the American Muslim Taskforce for Civil Rights and Elections
and a colleague of Dr. Al-Arian's for many years, reflects on the
current situation. "Today, Dr. Al-Arian, one of the most prominent
political prisoners in the United States, symbolizes the struggle for
freedom of Palestine. Tomorrow, let me predict, based on his heroic
sacrifices, he will be recognized as a major 21st century civil
rights leader in the Unites States." Such designations do not come
without a heavy price. It is up to all those who stand for justice to
ensure that the sacrifices made by Dr. Al-Arian are not forgotten.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace
June 27, 2008
Bush Justice Department Indicts Dr. Sami Al-Arian: The Injustice
Continues
ALEXANDRIA – The Bush Administration's persecution of Dr. Sami Al
Arian reached new heights on Thursday when prosecutors in the Eastern
District of Virginia brought charges against him, entering a new
phase in the politically-motivated campaign of the past five years.
The indictment charges Dr. Al-Arian with two counts of criminal
contempt, relating to two attempts by Virginia prosecutors to bring
him before a grand jury investigating other Muslim organizations.
Dr. Al-Arian had already been held in civil contempt for more than
one year for his refusal to testify. A plea agreement signed with
Florida prosecutors following his 2005 acquittal protected him from
cooperating in any additional cases. It was intended to bring his
case to a close by allowing him to leave the country. Two federal
courts have refused to allow evidentiary hearings that would allow
the plea agreement to be enforced.
Even with the additional time served, Dr. Al-Arian's sentence ended
on April 7 of this year. He was then taken into the custody of
immigration authorities who were making preparations for his
deportation.
In the midst of that process, the Bush Administration made its last
ditch effort to continue its punishment of Dr. Al-Arian by bringing
new charges against him. He now faces additional prison time if
convicted. Criminal contempt is the only charge in American law that
has no maximum penalty.
"This indictment proves that the government was never interested in
any information that Dr. Al-Arian has on the IIIT matter," his
attorney, Professor Jonathan Turley, wrote on his blog. IIIT or the
International Institute of Islamic Thought is the Muslim think tank
that is the target of a six-year witch-hunt by a prosecutor based in
Virginia. "This was a classic perjury trap used repeatedly by the
government to punish those individuals who could not be convicted
before an American jury."
He continues: "They have indicted him despite the fact that the
prosecutors admitted that he is a minor witness in the IIIT
investigation and he has already given two detailed statements under
oath to the government and offered to take a polygraph examination to
prove that he has given true information about his knowledge of IIIT.
Dr. Al-Arian has addressed every document cited by the government as
the reason for his being called before the grand jury. He has shown
that he has no incriminating information to offer against either IIIT
or its officers."
Here's the link to Turley's entire statement:
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/06/26/dr-sami-al-arian-indicted-on-two-
counts-of-criminal-contempt/
These charges follow a string of abuses by a rogue prosecutor whose
actions appear to be politically motivated. Assistant US Attorney
Gordon Kromberg's bigoted remarks against Arabs and Muslims have been
widely publicized in the media and condemned by leading human rights
organizations. His actions have resulted in the unjust prosecution of
many American Muslim activists, including at least one case of a
perjury trap similar to that faced by Dr. Al-Arian.
This indictment is only the latest in what has become the standard by
which the Bush Justice Department operates. After refusing to honor
the agreement it reached with Dr. Al-Arian in April 2006, it never
approached the grand jury process in good faith either. As Dr. Al
Arian's attorney has revealed, prosecutors were not interested in
obtaining any information, but only used the grand jury subpoenas as
a means by which to bring new charges against him and keep him
imprisoned. These actions signal an erosion of the justice system,
much to the dismay of all Americans who trust their officials will
carry out the law on an impartial and depoliticized basis.
TAKE ACTION:
All concerned Americans are urged to continue their protest of the
abuses committed by the Bush Administration in their name. We ask
that you write to the Attorney General about the injustices suffered
by Dr. Al-Arian. We also ask that you contact your representatives in
Congress and members of the Judiciary Committee, requesting that they
investigate the actions of the rogue prosecutor.
Please check www.freesaminow.com for updates regarding the new
charges against Dr. Al-Arian.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax: (202) 307-6777
E-mails to the Department of Justice, including the Attorney General,
may be sent to AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.
US Department of Justice
Office of Professional Responsibility
950 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20530
House Judiciary Chair
The Hon. John Conyers, Jr.
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
Fax: (202) 225-0072
E-mail: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
Senate Judiciary Chair
Sen. Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224- 4242
E-mail: senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
For more information about Dr. Al-Arian's case, please:
See the Washington Post article "Former Professor Indicted In Muslim
Charities Case" by Jerry Markon, Friday, June 27, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR20080
62603664.html
We encourage you to write letters to the editor of the Washington
Post about Dr. Al-Arian's case, expressing your outrage about the new
charges:
The e-mail address is letters@washpost.com.
Do not send attachments; they will not be read.
To contribute to Dr. Al-Arian's legal defense, please send checks to:
National Liberty Fund
P.O. Box 1211
24525 E. Welches Road
Welches, OR 97067
If you have not done so already, please do these 3 SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL ACTS:
1. Call Vincent Archibeque, Assistant Field Office Director of the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE): (703) 285-6221.
Stress that Dr. Al-Arian's prison term ended on April 11th and that his imprisonment since then has been COMPLETELY ILLEGAL. Ask Mr. Archibeque to do everything he can to ensure that Dr. Al-Arian is released and deported as soon as possible in accordance with the terms of his plea agreement.
2. Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (Department of Homeland Security):
(866)-644-8360 (press 1 for English and then press 5 to leave a message)
Stress that Dr. Al-Arian's prison term ended on April 11th and that his imprisonment since then has been COMPLETELY ILLEGAL. Ask that Dr. Al-Arian be released and deported as soon as possible in accordance with the terms of his plea agreement.
Again, always be polite but firm.
If you don't speak to a live person:
- simply leave a message on the answering machine; and
- call back later that day or the next day to try to get through.
3. Email Attorney General Michael Mukasey: ASKDOJ@usdoj.gov
Ask Mr. Mukasey to ensure that Dr. Al-Arian is deported as soon as possible in accordance with the plea agreement.
(For a letter template, please refer to the postings section on this page)
- Before sending the email, make sure to BCC samialarianactioncommittee@gmail.com
NOTE: In any given civil rights campaign, there are always more people willing to make a
phone call than write an email. Your emails are very important. Just use our letter template
and take JUST FIVE MINUTES to write out your message. Precisely because so few people
ever write their own letter, yours will be EXPONENTIALLY more powerful for that.
If you have not signed our petition, please do so by visiting petition.freesaminow.com
To learn how you can help EVEN MORE, please visit:
http://www.freesamialarian.com/help.html
PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!
Join our regular Listserv today! Simply send an email to
tampabaycoalitionforjusticeandpeace-subscribe@yahoogroups.com to receive the latest
updates on Dr. Al-Arian!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read more!!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
DRANT #306: US XIS OF EVIL
I am continually shocked, but rarely surprised that so many of us have no idea, or claim to have no idea, that everything- I mean everything- we are enduring right now is nothing new. That, like any cranky adolescent, America is just going through a funny new stage, and the mood will pass in time like acne or embarrassing nocturnal emissions. That the world is much scarier than ever, that the threats to our precious American way of life are unprecedented and justify unprecedented methods.
That all of this is a blip, an anomaly sprung from a bizarre confluence of unique and unpredictable but gravely life-threatening events- through no fault of our own.
That we have done nothing to cause any of it, and that pretty soon now, we'll shake it off, and get back to the great, gentle, humanistic, benevolent, peaceful, globally beloved REAL America whose memory we all cherish and adore.
As if we have not been a vicious and rapacious perpetrator of global aggression, murder, genocide, fascism, slavery, and pervasive oppression -- not only of the poor innocent indigenous victims we first found on this land that's our land, or brought here to do the dirty work for free -- but ceaselessly, mercilessly and with consistent national complicity committed on our own citizens.
The author of this review, himself a child victim, sees a lot of the evil, and much of the current expression of that evil. What he cannot bring himself to see is the true nature of America and Americans.
He cannot bring himself to see that THIS is who and what we are, and have always been, that there are concentration camps in the USA: the infamous and widely videotaped FEMA camps, the I.C.E. detention centers spread across the landscape, the thousands of privately-run-for-profit Prisons that enslave 3 million or so of our citizens. Like many such victims, he clings to the belief that Daddy was really a good man, and really truly loved him- but just made some bad mistakes.
Daddy did it to him, and is still doing to millions of us- right here in the USA (see below). You don't need to search in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib for serial abuse, torture, enslavement- and certainly not for oppression, censorship, vilification, nor the willful national complicity that makes it all possible.
Dalton Trumbo loved America too much, and sadly, so does this reviewer of a remarkable new film about Trumbo, his life, and the disgraceful but historically consistent persecution then called "Blacklisting" and now under the department of Homeland Security, but still sponsored by the good folks of the USA.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dalton Trumbo and American Evil
By Andrew O'Hehir
June 26, 2008, salon.com
"Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. "
"The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent
lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and
their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society,
which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and
downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic
conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional,
pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian
elements in this country with a test case: How far could
constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-
sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and
would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have
been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a
different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight."
"... No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations..."
No one has ever summed up the Hollywood blacklist of the
1950s -- and, by extension, the entire history of that
decade's anti-Communist witch hunt -- any better than this:
"The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who
survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad
faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and
cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and
stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to
search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because
there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less
than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final
tally we were all victims because almost without exception
each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to
say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and
receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why
none of us -- right, left, or center -- emerged from that
long nightmare without sin."
Those words were spoken by Dalton Trumbo in 1971, when he
received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild
of America -- as he noted at the time, an award bestowed by
those who had fought for him, those who had betrayed him and
those who had only the vaguest notion who he was. In
"Trumbo," the new film directed by Peter Askin and adapted
from Christopher Trumbo's off- Broadway play about his
father, the speech is given an electrifying reading by actor
David Strathairn. "Trumbo" is a terrific picture, a blend of
interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's
letters and speeches (by Strathairn, Michael Douglas, Joan
Allen, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy and others) that vividly
illustrates why the blacklist remains an urgent issue 60
years later. One could wish it were a bit more honest about
the sources of Trumbo's obvious mixed feelings about himself
and his fellow leftists. (Perhaps Christopher Trumbo's
forthcoming book will address this.)
Dalton Trumbo was the most famous and probably the most
talented of the Hollywood 10, the group of left-wing film
industry professionals who went to prison after refusing to
cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in
1947. Along with many other actors, writers, directors and
musicians, they were then banished from the business. Trumbo
himself served 10 months in federal prison after his
conviction for contempt of the 80th Congress; as he remarks
in an archival interview seen in the film, he entirely agreed
with the verdict, as he felt nothing but contempt for that
Congress and several later ones.
He continued to write scripts under assumed names and in
impoverished circumstances after his release from prison, and
spent several years with his wife and three kids in Mexico
working for little or nothing. He wrote at least 30 films and
doctored or rewrote countless others. He won two Academy
Awards decades after the fact, one of them posthumous. (They
were for "Roman Holiday" in 1953 and "The Brave One" in
1956.) His other screenplays included "Kitty Foyle"
(nominated for a 1940 Oscar), "Gun Crazy," "Lonely Are the
Brave," "The Sandpiper" and the antiwar classic "Johnny Got
His Gun," adapted from his own novel and his only directing
effort. Trumbo also became the first of the Hollywood 10 to
break the blacklist, when Otto Preminger hired him to write
"Exodus" and Kirk Douglas hired him to write "Spartacus,"
both made in 1960.
If the Hollywood blacklist and the entire Red Scare has
become a murky, antique-seeming affair in most people's
minds, there are reasons for that. Inevitably, the passage of
time and the death of nearly all the participants has turned
it into a remote artifact of black-and-white newsreel
footage. I think the fact that most of the Hollywood 10 and
other blacklistees continued to work, under various ruses,
and even formed an expatriate Red community of sorts in
Mexico, makes the whole thing seem like a romantic caper. In
fact, it was a cruel and deeply symbolic act of tyranny that
displays all too clearly one of the running themes of
American history: Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. I know, that's starting to seem unpleasantly
familiar, but let's not get ahead of the story.
Historians in recent years have legitimately attempted to
wrestle with the era's complexities and shine light into its
darker corners. It has long since become clear, for example,
that many American Communists, Trumbo included, succumbed to
the paranoia and authoritarianism that by Stalin's time were
ingrained doctrines of their faith. Ironically enough, during
World War II Trumbo apparently informed the FBI about his
contacts with people he suspected were Nazi sympathizers. He
later said this was a "foolish" decision, and that he quickly
understood that the agents were more interested in him than
in his letters from possible Hitler-lovers. None of this is
mentioned in the film.
Along with honest historical inquiry, however, has come a
smug, contrarian right-wing campaign to muddy the waters and
make the paranoid derangement of '50s America seem somehow
justified. If American Communists held a misguided faith in
the Stalinist Soviet state, the thinking goes, and if some
tiny percentage of them were Soviet agents or spies (and
let's stipulate that those things are true) then all 80,000
or so were, prima facie, seditious revolutionaries and
threats to democracy -- and the Hollywood 10 really were
trying to pervert healthy Americans with Red propaganda
concealed as entertainment. Not all versions of the neocon
rehabilitation of McCarthyism are quite so baldly ludicrous,
but all must make the imaginative leap that a tiny,
ineffective and consistently persecuted political movement,
which throughout its brief heyday attempted to reassure the
public that "Communism is 20th century Americanism," was in
fact an immensely powerful and sinister force.
All disputes about history are really arguments about the
present, and that goes double in this case. Contemporary
right-wingers don't care about the real story of Dalton
Trumbo, his nine original co-defendants or the dozens of
other blacklistees that followed. (A random assortment: John
Garfield, Dashiell Hammett, Judy Holliday, Langston Hughes,
Gypsy Rose Lee, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker,
Edward G. Robinson, Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Josh White.) In
fact, as Askin's film makes clear, Trumbo was a witty,
irascible, mule-stubborn individualist who grew up on
Colorado rangeland and was a poor candidate for Marxist-
Leninist groupthink. He was a Communist Party member for, at
most, four or five years, and like most other American Reds
of the period -- like, say, my mother -- he was more
attracted to the excitement, the sense of action and heady
adventure, than to the core ideology. (No, I'm not a neutral
observer of this issue, if that's even possible.)
What the more intelligent neocons see in the 1950s crackdown
on Communism is both an underlying pattern and an instructive
example, having to do with power and how to wield it. The
real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent
lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and
their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society,
which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and
downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic
conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional,
pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian
elements in this country with a test case: How far could
constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-
sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and
would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have
been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a
different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight.
In one devastating letter read in the film, Trumbo observes
that the liberal producer who doesn't believe in the
blacklist but apologetically tells him he can't hire a known
Communist because "that's the country these days" is more
oppressive than any congressional blowhard. His eloquent
anger toward the country that he believes betrayed freedom,
principle and basic human decency in its moment of postwar
crisis is matched by his confidence that if he could poll the
entire American population on one question -- "Would you like
a man who informs on his friend?" -- the universal answer
would be no.
But the lesson of "Trumbo" that clearly resonates in 2008 is
that even in an increasingly pluralistic society, public
tolerance can readily be turned against those who hold
troubling ideologies or alien beliefs, and in that situation
terrible things become acceptable. Some of those things are
small, like the cruelty and ostracism Trumbo's daughter
endured in elementary school, and some are larger. One of the
anti-Communist movement's darkest triumphs was the Emergency
Detention Act of 1950, which envisioned the suspension of
constitutional rights in a national emergency, and funded the
creation of six concentration camps for American civilians
who "probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with
others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage." It was
passed by Congress over Harry Truman's veto, but without much
public debate.
Not much about this act is easily available online, a
startling fact in this age of information overload. Congress
repealed it in 1971, and the six camps -- some of them
formerly used as Japanese-American internment camps during
World War II -- fell into disrepair. But it obviously struck
some people as a good idea, and so today our secret prisons
are in other countries and governed by no law, and so far
they have not housed any cantankerous Hollywood
screenwriters. No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations. His wife and
kids loved him, and he finally got his Oscars. Surely that
counts for something.
"Trumbo" opens June 27 in New York and Los Angeles, with
national release to follow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpts. Please access the following for complete info:
www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2005/05/location_of_con.html
Location of Concentration Camps in America
There are over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational
and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by
full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be
implemented in the United States, and all it would take is a presidential
signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a
warrant to which a list of names is attached.
The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus"
of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly
rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many
military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons. Operation
Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be
implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose.
Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the
program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the
federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and
thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already
listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this
operation.
The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from
the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of
the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest
of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan
facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2
million people. Now let's review the justification for any actions taken...
Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for
nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:...
Read more!!
That all of this is a blip, an anomaly sprung from a bizarre confluence of unique and unpredictable but gravely life-threatening events- through no fault of our own.
That we have done nothing to cause any of it, and that pretty soon now, we'll shake it off, and get back to the great, gentle, humanistic, benevolent, peaceful, globally beloved REAL America whose memory we all cherish and adore.
As if we have not been a vicious and rapacious perpetrator of global aggression, murder, genocide, fascism, slavery, and pervasive oppression -- not only of the poor innocent indigenous victims we first found on this land that's our land, or brought here to do the dirty work for free -- but ceaselessly, mercilessly and with consistent national complicity committed on our own citizens.
The author of this review, himself a child victim, sees a lot of the evil, and much of the current expression of that evil. What he cannot bring himself to see is the true nature of America and Americans.
He cannot bring himself to see that THIS is who and what we are, and have always been, that there are concentration camps in the USA: the infamous and widely videotaped FEMA camps, the I.C.E. detention centers spread across the landscape, the thousands of privately-run-for-profit Prisons that enslave 3 million or so of our citizens. Like many such victims, he clings to the belief that Daddy was really a good man, and really truly loved him- but just made some bad mistakes.
Daddy did it to him, and is still doing to millions of us- right here in the USA (see below). You don't need to search in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib for serial abuse, torture, enslavement- and certainly not for oppression, censorship, vilification, nor the willful national complicity that makes it all possible.
Dalton Trumbo loved America too much, and sadly, so does this reviewer of a remarkable new film about Trumbo, his life, and the disgraceful but historically consistent persecution then called "Blacklisting" and now under the department of Homeland Security, but still sponsored by the good folks of the USA.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dalton Trumbo and American Evil
By Andrew O'Hehir
June 26, 2008, salon.com
"Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. "
"The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent
lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and
their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society,
which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and
downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic
conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional,
pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian
elements in this country with a test case: How far could
constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-
sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and
would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have
been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a
different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight."
"... No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations..."
No one has ever summed up the Hollywood blacklist of the
1950s -- and, by extension, the entire history of that
decade's anti-Communist witch hunt -- any better than this:
"The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who
survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad
faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and
cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and
stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to
search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because
there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less
than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final
tally we were all victims because almost without exception
each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to
say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and
receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why
none of us -- right, left, or center -- emerged from that
long nightmare without sin."
Those words were spoken by Dalton Trumbo in 1971, when he
received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild
of America -- as he noted at the time, an award bestowed by
those who had fought for him, those who had betrayed him and
those who had only the vaguest notion who he was. In
"Trumbo," the new film directed by Peter Askin and adapted
from Christopher Trumbo's off- Broadway play about his
father, the speech is given an electrifying reading by actor
David Strathairn. "Trumbo" is a terrific picture, a blend of
interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's
letters and speeches (by Strathairn, Michael Douglas, Joan
Allen, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy and others) that vividly
illustrates why the blacklist remains an urgent issue 60
years later. One could wish it were a bit more honest about
the sources of Trumbo's obvious mixed feelings about himself
and his fellow leftists. (Perhaps Christopher Trumbo's
forthcoming book will address this.)
Dalton Trumbo was the most famous and probably the most
talented of the Hollywood 10, the group of left-wing film
industry professionals who went to prison after refusing to
cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in
1947. Along with many other actors, writers, directors and
musicians, they were then banished from the business. Trumbo
himself served 10 months in federal prison after his
conviction for contempt of the 80th Congress; as he remarks
in an archival interview seen in the film, he entirely agreed
with the verdict, as he felt nothing but contempt for that
Congress and several later ones.
He continued to write scripts under assumed names and in
impoverished circumstances after his release from prison, and
spent several years with his wife and three kids in Mexico
working for little or nothing. He wrote at least 30 films and
doctored or rewrote countless others. He won two Academy
Awards decades after the fact, one of them posthumous. (They
were for "Roman Holiday" in 1953 and "The Brave One" in
1956.) His other screenplays included "Kitty Foyle"
(nominated for a 1940 Oscar), "Gun Crazy," "Lonely Are the
Brave," "The Sandpiper" and the antiwar classic "Johnny Got
His Gun," adapted from his own novel and his only directing
effort. Trumbo also became the first of the Hollywood 10 to
break the blacklist, when Otto Preminger hired him to write
"Exodus" and Kirk Douglas hired him to write "Spartacus,"
both made in 1960.
If the Hollywood blacklist and the entire Red Scare has
become a murky, antique-seeming affair in most people's
minds, there are reasons for that. Inevitably, the passage of
time and the death of nearly all the participants has turned
it into a remote artifact of black-and-white newsreel
footage. I think the fact that most of the Hollywood 10 and
other blacklistees continued to work, under various ruses,
and even formed an expatriate Red community of sorts in
Mexico, makes the whole thing seem like a romantic caper. In
fact, it was a cruel and deeply symbolic act of tyranny that
displays all too clearly one of the running themes of
American history: Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. I know, that's starting to seem unpleasantly
familiar, but let's not get ahead of the story.
Historians in recent years have legitimately attempted to
wrestle with the era's complexities and shine light into its
darker corners. It has long since become clear, for example,
that many American Communists, Trumbo included, succumbed to
the paranoia and authoritarianism that by Stalin's time were
ingrained doctrines of their faith. Ironically enough, during
World War II Trumbo apparently informed the FBI about his
contacts with people he suspected were Nazi sympathizers. He
later said this was a "foolish" decision, and that he quickly
understood that the agents were more interested in him than
in his letters from possible Hitler-lovers. None of this is
mentioned in the film.
Along with honest historical inquiry, however, has come a
smug, contrarian right-wing campaign to muddy the waters and
make the paranoid derangement of '50s America seem somehow
justified. If American Communists held a misguided faith in
the Stalinist Soviet state, the thinking goes, and if some
tiny percentage of them were Soviet agents or spies (and
let's stipulate that those things are true) then all 80,000
or so were, prima facie, seditious revolutionaries and
threats to democracy -- and the Hollywood 10 really were
trying to pervert healthy Americans with Red propaganda
concealed as entertainment. Not all versions of the neocon
rehabilitation of McCarthyism are quite so baldly ludicrous,
but all must make the imaginative leap that a tiny,
ineffective and consistently persecuted political movement,
which throughout its brief heyday attempted to reassure the
public that "Communism is 20th century Americanism," was in
fact an immensely powerful and sinister force.
All disputes about history are really arguments about the
present, and that goes double in this case. Contemporary
right-wingers don't care about the real story of Dalton
Trumbo, his nine original co-defendants or the dozens of
other blacklistees that followed. (A random assortment: John
Garfield, Dashiell Hammett, Judy Holliday, Langston Hughes,
Gypsy Rose Lee, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker,
Edward G. Robinson, Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Josh White.) In
fact, as Askin's film makes clear, Trumbo was a witty,
irascible, mule-stubborn individualist who grew up on
Colorado rangeland and was a poor candidate for Marxist-
Leninist groupthink. He was a Communist Party member for, at
most, four or five years, and like most other American Reds
of the period -- like, say, my mother -- he was more
attracted to the excitement, the sense of action and heady
adventure, than to the core ideology. (No, I'm not a neutral
observer of this issue, if that's even possible.)
What the more intelligent neocons see in the 1950s crackdown
on Communism is both an underlying pattern and an instructive
example, having to do with power and how to wield it. The
real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent
lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and
their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society,
which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and
downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic
conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional,
pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian
elements in this country with a test case: How far could
constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-
sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and
would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have
been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a
different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight.
In one devastating letter read in the film, Trumbo observes
that the liberal producer who doesn't believe in the
blacklist but apologetically tells him he can't hire a known
Communist because "that's the country these days" is more
oppressive than any congressional blowhard. His eloquent
anger toward the country that he believes betrayed freedom,
principle and basic human decency in its moment of postwar
crisis is matched by his confidence that if he could poll the
entire American population on one question -- "Would you like
a man who informs on his friend?" -- the universal answer
would be no.
But the lesson of "Trumbo" that clearly resonates in 2008 is
that even in an increasingly pluralistic society, public
tolerance can readily be turned against those who hold
troubling ideologies or alien beliefs, and in that situation
terrible things become acceptable. Some of those things are
small, like the cruelty and ostracism Trumbo's daughter
endured in elementary school, and some are larger. One of the
anti-Communist movement's darkest triumphs was the Emergency
Detention Act of 1950, which envisioned the suspension of
constitutional rights in a national emergency, and funded the
creation of six concentration camps for American civilians
who "probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with
others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage." It was
passed by Congress over Harry Truman's veto, but without much
public debate.
Not much about this act is easily available online, a
startling fact in this age of information overload. Congress
repealed it in 1971, and the six camps -- some of them
formerly used as Japanese-American internment camps during
World War II -- fell into disrepair. But it obviously struck
some people as a good idea, and so today our secret prisons
are in other countries and governed by no law, and so far
they have not housed any cantankerous Hollywood
screenwriters. No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations. His wife and
kids loved him, and he finally got his Oscars. Surely that
counts for something.
"Trumbo" opens June 27 in New York and Los Angeles, with
national release to follow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpts. Please access the following for complete info:
www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2005/05/location_of_con.html
Location of Concentration Camps in America
There are over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational
and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by
full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be
implemented in the United States, and all it would take is a presidential
signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a
warrant to which a list of names is attached.
The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus"
of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly
rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many
military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons. Operation
Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be
implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose.
Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the
program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the
federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and
thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already
listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this
operation.
The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from
the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of
the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest
of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan
facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2
million people. Now let's review the justification for any actions taken...
Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for
nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:...
Read more!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
