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The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 11 January 2002
Vol. 6, Number 4 (#639)
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04) Lloyd Grove (Washington Post), "Boxers or Briefs? Rep. Dingell's
Airport Exposure," 8 Jan 02 05) George Monbiot (The [London]
Guardian), "The Taliban of the west: This war is threatening the
very freedoms it claims to be defending," 18 Dec 01
Fascist Crime In the News:
06) Lawrence Budd (Dayton Daily News), "Aryan Nations Figure Guilty On
Weapons Charge: Plea bargain drops other counts," 5 Jan 02
07) Richard Green (AP), "Oklahoma man arrested in weapons case," 9 Jan
02
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04) Boxers or Briefs? Rep. Dingell's Airport Exposure
Lloyd Grove (Washington Post)
8 Jan 02
Count frequent flier Rep. John Dingell, ranking member of the powerful
House Energy and Commerce Committee, among the victims of post-9-11 airline
security measures. After his artificial hip set off a metal detector
Saturday afternoon, the 75-year-old Michigan Democrat was ordered to pull
down his pants at Reagan National Airport as he tried to board Northwest
Airlines Flight 1417 to Detroit.
Dingell, who flies Northwest between Washington and Detroit around 100
times a year, told us yesterday that he explained to an airport security
employee he was wearing a knee brace and surgically implanted pins are in
his ankles, as well as a steel hip joint. Dingell said he refused a request
to send his wallet through the X-ray machine, telling employees that a few
weeks earlier jewelry had been stolen from his wife, General Motors
Foundation President Debbie Dingell, when she sent it through.
It was then that the security employee, known as a screener, ordered him to
unhook the brace from his knee and remove his shoes and socks, Dingell
said. Then the congressman was led into a temporary office and directed to
lower his slacks while the employee waved a metal-detecting wand over his
boxer shorts.
"I complied, but tried to do it with some small bit of dignity," Dingell
said, adding that afterward he couldn't help seething to his wife, "Woman,
do you realize what they made me do?" He added: "It seems to me that there
was some incompetence involved here." The screener appeared to be unaware
of Dingell's status as a congressman, and Dingell stressed that he never
mentioned it during the ordeal.
Northwest Airlines spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch yesterday defended the conduct
of the screener, an employee of the airline's security contractor, Globe
Aviation, saying the employee was merely following procedures mandated by
the Federal Aviation Administration. "We regret any inconveniences that
FAA-mandated procedures created for Representative Dingell," Ebenhoch said,
adding that Globe employees "performed their duties in a professional and
dignified manner."
Maybe. But yesterday, after we alerted Transportation Secretary Norman
Mineta to Dingell's suffering, Mineta phoned his former House colleague to
apologize profusely. "The secretary got ahold of Mr. Dingell and told him
he is appalled," said Mineta's communications director, Chet Lunner, adding
that Mineta had also been subjected to rigorous probing at airports, though
not pants-dropping. "They're old friends, and he said, 'John, I feel your
pain. I fly commercial all the time, and it seems like they sometimes pick
out public officials to make an example of them and show how thorough they
are.' "
Dingell recounted: "I said, 'Norm, I'm not asking for an apology. And I
know we don't want any more events like September 11th. I don't want any
special treatment. I don't want to be treated any better than anyone else,
but I don't want to be treated any worse either.' "
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05) The Taliban of the west: This war is threatening the very freedoms it
claims to be defending
George Monbiot (The [London] Guardian)
18 Dec 01
The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-Enlightenment. As
the last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through the mountains of
eastern Afghanistan, the world's most comprehensive attempt to defy
modernity has been atomised. But this is not, as almost everyone claims, a
triumph for civilisation; for the Taliban has been destroyed by a regime
which is turning its back on the values it claims to defend.
In West Virginia, a 15-year-old girl is fighting the state's supreme court.
Six weeks ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville high school in
Charleston. She had committed two horrible crimes. The first was to apply
to found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on
which she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the
dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of
national security. God bless America." The headmaster claimed that Katie's
actions were disrupting other pupils' education. "To my students," he
explained, "the concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad." The
county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state's
supreme court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defence of free
speech.
Katie is just one of many young dissenters fighting for the most basic
political freedoms. A few days before Katie was suspended, AJ Brown, a 19-
year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door
to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she
was in possession of "anti-American material". Someone had seen a poster on
her wall, campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. They
asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.
On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane
travelling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by
the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy
Oden, an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at
Bangor airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to
fly on the grounds that she was a "security risk". These incidents and
others like them become significant in the light of two distinct
developments.
The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by
governments backing the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts
approved in Britain and the US have, like the reinstatement of the CIA's
licence to kill, been widely reported. The measures introduced by some
other allied governments are less well known. In the Czech Republic, for
example, a new law permits the prosecution of people expressing sympathy
for the attacks on New York, or even of those sympathising with the
sympathisers. Already one Czech journalist, Tomas Pecina, a reporter for
the Prague-based investigative journal Britske Listy, has been arrested and
charged for criticising the use of the law, on the grounds that this makes
him, too, a supporter of terrorism.
The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology,
of the kind which has been deployed to such devastating effect in
Afghanistan. Unmanned spy planes which could follow the Taliban's cars and
detect the presence of humans behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and
terrifying. Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition
software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the
monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government
databases, ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to
deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.
I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained that it
was "just ridiculous" to suggest that better technologies could lead to
mass surveillance in Britain. Our defence against abuses by government was
guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework
in which it operated. Civil society would ensure there was no danger of
these technologies falling into the "wrong hands".
But what we are witnessing in the US is a rapid reversal of the civic
response which might once have defended the rights and liberties of its
citizens. Katie Sierra's suspension was proposed by her school and upheld
by the courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were
assisted by the airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have
been shopped by one of her neighbours. The state is scorching the
constitution, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.
This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance technology
deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US doctrine of
"full-spectrum dominance". The term covered, at first, only military
matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete mastery of land, sea,
air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because this has been achieved too
easily, the words have already begun to be used more widely, as commercial,
fiscal and monetary policy, the composition of foreign governments and the
activities of dissidents are redefined as matters of security. Another term
for "full-spectrum dominance" is absolute power.
There are, of course, profound differences between the US and Britain. The
US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel desperately
vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek only to dissociate
themselves from the victims being persecuted by Torquemada Blair's
inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval department is preparing to
dispense with most jury trials, which are arguably now the foremost
institutional restraint on the excesses of government.
The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is
brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other
words, can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the
liberties which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human
community - privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement - imply a
dissociation from coherent community.
While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism,
in truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action, which is
drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the
fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us,
strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning
laws, tax breaks, externalisation and blanket advertising which ensure that
most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the
same clothes. The World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF apply the
same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest
corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere.
Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos
on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of
its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinise every detail of our
lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political
control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened
the survival of "western values" as much as the triumph of the west.
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FASCIST CRIME IN THE NEWS:
06) Aryan Nations Figure Guilty On Weapons Charge: Plea bargain drops other
counts
Lawrence Budd (Dayton Daily News)
5 Jan 02
COLUMBUS - The alleged Ohio leader of the Aryan Nations white supremacist
group has pleaded guilty to a single federal weapons charge in exchange for
dismissal of 26 other charges.
U.S. District Judge James Graham convicted Danny W. Kincaid of dealing
firearms without a license from Oct. 7, 2000, to July 2, 2001, when federal
agents raided his home outside Columbus. However, Graham dismissed the
remaining charges, which were based on weapons violations tied to previous
felony convictions in 1965 and 1972, according to court records.
Representatives of the U.S. Attorney declined to comment because Graham has
sealed the court record.
"Documents have been filed with the court sealing all paperwork in
connection with the Kincaid case," said Fred Alverson, spokesman for the
U.S. Attorney's Office in Columbus.
Gordon Hobson, a public defender representing Kincaid, had asked Graham to
dismiss the charges, claiming Ohio restored Kincaid's right to possess
firearms in 1967. On Friday, Kincaid declined comment and Hobson could not
be reached for comment.
Kincaid, 56, of Galena was charged with 16 counts of illegal possession of
firearms in the 10 months leading to his arrest. Ten charges accused
Kincaid of selling the same guns involved in the previous charges to an
informant or undercover federal agent he thought was a convicted felon.
Kincaid's trial had been postponed until February after U.S. Attorney Dana
Peters asked for more time to discuss a plea bargain with Hobson.
Kincaid pleaded guilty to failing to have a license to sell firearms during
a hearing Dec. 21 in federal court in Columbus, according to court records.
It was unclear when Graham intended to sentence Kincaid, identified as "the
Ohio Aryan Nations (AN) leader" in an affidavit filed in July by Tymothy
Burkey, a special agent with the FBI in Dayton assigned to investigate
domestic terrorism.
In the affidavit, Burkey alleged the group's goal is "overthrowing the U.S.
Government and creating all white country in the Northwest part of the
U.S."
"Since the group's inception in the early 1970s, AN members have committed
various crimes to further their goals. Included in these criminal acts have
been armed bank and armored car robberies, murder and explosive and weapon
violations," Burkey said in the affidavit supporting a search of Kincaid's
home.
In September, Richard Butler, founder and long-time leader of the Aryan
Nations, named Dayton native Harold Ray "Butch" Redfeairn heir apparent to
the top spot in the group.
Since then, Aryan Nations leaders have announced plans to move headquarters
to Pennsylvania following the power shift and a court ruling in a civil
lawsuit that cost the group its compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho.
Three weeks after federal agents searched Kincaid's home, Dayton police
detonated a pipe bomb in woods near Centerville Park Apartments in West
Carrollton, which the FBI linked to Kincaid and the Aryan Nations.
Authorities did not identify the man involved in this case.
But David Godfrey, a Montgomery County man, is alleged to have transported
a pipe bomb from his home to Kincaid's home in rural Delaware County,
according to court records.
The bomb was detonated, three days before federal agents raided Godfrey's
Montgomery County apartment, according to Burkey's affidavit in the Kincaid
case.
Godfrey has not been charged in the case, authorities said.
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07) Oklahoma man arrested in weapons case
Richard Green (AP)
9 Jan 02
OKLAHOMA CITY -- An Oklahoma man has been arrested on weapons charges in an
investigation of a Tennessee resident linked to white supremacists and
accused of threatening a synagogue and having illegal explosives and
firearms.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Jack Ray Spores, 33, of
Midwest City, on Tuesday evening at the muffler shop where he works in Del
City, FBI special agent Richard Marquise said Wednesday.
Michael E. Smith, 33, was arrested Friday after police said he pointed a
rifle at a Nashville synagogue and led officers on a chase. He later
directed police to a cache of weapons, including a shoulder-fired, anti-
tank rocket, 13 pipe bombs and bomb-making chemicals. A search of his
Nashville apartment revealed 11 live hand grenades, among other weapons.
They also found white supremacist literature, including The Turner Diaries
and various literature from the National Alliance, the Ku Klux Klan and
other hate groups.
A warrant issued out of Tennessee for the arrest of Spores and Smith
accuses them of possessing and making illegal firearms and explosive
devices.
Oklahoma City FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said investigators believe Spores
supplied Smith with illegal weapons and explosives. Johnson said no weapons
were seized when Spores was arrested, but the FBI investigation continues.
Smith has had associations with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National
Alliance and possibly other extremist groups, said Doug Riggin, supervisory
special agent with the FBI.
Johnson said investigators are trying to determine whether Spores also has
links to these groups, and the extent to which such groups are operating in
Oklahoma.
Smith came to the attention of authorities after someone noticed him
sitting in his car with a rifle pointed at the Congregation Sherith Israel
synagogue, which is near a school.
Smith left before officers arrived, but police were waiting for him at his
Nashville apartment. Officers said that after they confronted him, Smith
led them on a chase while holding a gun to his head.
The chase ended after a few minutes in a parking lot outside a suburban
pharmacy where Smith's wife works, and police said they found an AR-15
assault rifle, a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, ammunition and surgical gloves
in Smith's car.
Authorities said Smith lived in Oklahoma City for a time.
* * * * *
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.
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FASCISM:
We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget.
(No permission required for noncommercial reproduction)
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