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	Workers Vanguard No. 873	7 July 2006

Racist "Anti-Terror" Roundup in Florida

Protest FBI Entrapment!

On June 22, Federal agents and the Miami police SWAT team swarmed through the black ghetto of Liberty City, cordoning off several blocks and blowtorching the door of a warehouse. Following this “gangbusters” stunt, seven young black men, six of Haitian origin, were arrested on a series of fantastical charges—including plotting to blow up Chicago’s 110-story Sears Tower and FBI buildings. Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Rotschild Augustine, Lyglenson Lemorin and Stanley Grant Phanor now face decades in prison, victims of a racist and outrageous government entrapment operation.

A dramatic announcement by FBI director Robert Mueller on Larry King Live and press conferences trumpeted the arrests, seeking to whip up a frenzy of fear, as images of the Sears Tower were all over TV. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales labeled the Liberty City men “a new brand” of “homegrown terrorists.” What he meant was, they’re all black people. Immediately after the September 11 attacks, we warned that the government would wield “the all-purpose spectre of ‘terrorism’ to further the exploitation of labor and the vicious racial subjugation of the black population, to round up immigrants and to target any perceived opponents of the bourgeoisie’s class rule” (“Crazed Imperialists on the Warpath,” WV No. 767, 26 October 2001). The “war on terror” is not a military conflict but a reactionary political agenda for U.S. imperialist marauding internationally coupled with repression at home. It has become yet another stick to beat the black population with, a population already suffering daily cop terror in racist America.

It instantly became obvious that the only “link” the Miami arrestees ever had to any “terrorist” organization was, in fact, created by an FBI informant pretending to be an Al Qaeda agent during the eight-month-long sting operation. Even Gonzales admitted that the men posed “no immediate threat,” while the deputy director of the FBI allowed that the group’s alleged plotting was “more aspirational than operational.” They were a loose, apparently eclectic religious grouping with no money, let alone explosives.

Behind the government’s absurd tales stands unrelenting state cruelty. These young men face spending up to 20 years in prison, as they are charged with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization, conspiracy to destroy buildings by use of explosives and conspiracy to levy war against the United States. We say, free them and drop the charges!

Black People Targeted by “War on Terror”

A “guest expert” on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 speculated on possible connections with “black separatist” organizations, outrageously claiming, “especially the African-American community in prison…have been fertile recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda.” Black journalist Herb Boyd wrote in the Amsterdam News (29 June) about the Miami Seven case: “You don’t have to recall the machinations of Cointelpro that helped facilitate the destruction of the Black Panther Party to feel the hot breath of entrapment…. It was even more disturbing to hear a commentator…state that the African American community is stocked with a veritable reservoir of young Black men who would be susceptible to the inducement of al Qaeda.”

Miami’s Liberty City is one of this country’s many decaying urban ghettos. The area first became nationally known in 1980, when the city exploded after five white cops were acquitted for beating to death a black man. The resulting upsurge ended in 855 arrests and 18 deaths. Today across America, over 900,000 black men and women, including one out of every eight black men between the ages of 25 and 29, are in prison, mainly victims of the “war on drugs.” “We used to have agents and confidential informants creating drug deals in Liberty City. Now it looks like they are creating homegrown cells,” observed David O. Markus of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (Miami Herald, 25 June).

Conspiracy and Entrapment

“Conspiracy” is what the government uses to nail anyone it wants to silence yet can’t charge with a single demonstrable criminal act. Organizing against slavery was “conspiratorial,” and labor unions used to be considered illegal conspiracies in this country.

Homeland Security’s supposed “triumphs” in its endless “war on terror” are based on pure entrapment—which means, legally, that the state itself is the main instigator of the crime for which it then arrests others. In late May in New York City, Shahawar Matin Siraj was convicted of supposedly plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station. He was entrapped by a well-paid informer who had been sniffing around Brooklyn mosques. The Brooklyn Bay Ridge Muslim community is so riddled with not-so-undercover spies that, as one high school teacher said, “It’s like a police state here” (New York Times, 27 May).

In California, the government claimed it had broken up “an al-Qaida terrorist cell” (Sacramento Bee, 10 June 2005) in the small city of Lodi. In fact, two Pakistani Americans, ice-cream truck driver Umer Hayat and his son Hamid Hayat, were victimized by an FBI anti-Muslim witchhunt. An FBI informant managed to milk over $200,000 from the Feds for his bizarre stories, including that he’d seen Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque! This paid provocateur was the government’s star witness against the Hayats, who were browbeaten into “confessing” to various FBI-concocted terror training scenarios, all of which they later recanted. Hamid Hayat was convicted and now faces up to 39 years in prison. (His father’s case ended with a hung jury.)

The Canadian state has decided to ramp up its own sting operations. On June 2-3, 17 Muslims, mainly youth, were arrested in Toronto, denied the right to meet privately with their lawyers, and charged with plotting attacks in southern Ontario, another classic case of the state manufacturing a terrorism scare to intimidate the population. As far as we can tell (given that the Canadian state can keep the evidence secret in the name of “national security” and the media is forbidden to write about the court proceedings), the only “evidence” against most of these youth is that they played paintball and, in yet another sting operation, bought fertilizer from a Mountie!

Meanwhile, right next to Liberty City in Miami lie plush enclaves inhabited by actual, certifiable terrorists: the counterrevolutionary Cuban American gusanos, who really do have the “material resources” (supplied by the CIA among others) to launch massive terrorist attacks. The American government and its gusano allies long to reconquer Cuba for capitalist exploitation. The same day as the Liberty City sweep, a former member of the Cuban American National Foundation openly bragged that his group, supplied with an arsenal that included a cargo helicopter, ten ultralight radio-controlled planes, seven vessels and abundant explosive materials, had planned to attack Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro (Miami Herald online, 22 June).

Despite its scare tactics, the Bush administration’s drive for police-state powers has met some roadblocks. On June 29 the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees violated both federal and international law. Afterward, New York Senator Charles Schumer said that had the administration “come to Congress a few years ago on this issue, my guess is they would have gotten most of what they wanted” (New York Times, 3 July). Now, led by Republican Senator Arlen Specter, key members of Congress have started work on legislation that would give the Bush administration a slightly modified version of the military tribunals it wants.

Both the bourgeois courts and capitalist politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, defend the interests of U.S. imperialism and its repressive state apparatus, whatever their temporary differences. We need to build a revolutionary workers party dedicated to the overthrow of this barbaric system and to the establishment of workers rule to remove from power the most bloodthirsty danger to all humanity: the U.S. ruling class. Down with the “war on terror”! Free all the detainees! U.S. out of Guantánamo!