Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  Fahad is serving his sentence at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. Hashmi’s father added, “The US government is concerned about human rights in China and Iran. I wonder about Fahad’s rights, and how they have been blatantly violated in this great land. It seems like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is only a saying. My son was treated as guilty until proven innocent.”

  “The Muslim community supported my son by offering prayers, particularly in the month of Ramadan,” he said. “But they were initially afraid to raise their voices against injustice. This reminds me of the fear the Chinese have under Communist rule, or Iranians under Ahmadinejad. As a citizen, I now have developed fear of my own government.”

  “For one charge for luggage storing socks, ponchos, and raincoats in his apartment, he is serving a fifteen-year sentence in the harshest federal prison in the country, still in solitary confinement, still under SAMs,” his father said. “The cooperating witness in the case, the one who brought and delivered the luggage, is now free and able to enjoy his life and family.”

  The despair and bewilderment of Hashmi’s father are a reflection of the wider despair and bewilderment that have gripped the lives of many Muslims.

  “There are many things I’d like to be able to say about the visit and my son’s continuing detention, but because of Fahad’s SAMs, I am forbidden,” Hashmi’s father said. “Everything has changed for my family. Our first grandchild was born nineteen days after Fahad’s arrest, our second two years later. But now everything has a cloud over it—graduations, birthdays, holidays, going to the store or the park or visiting family or running errands, and particularly the Eid day. In other words, we have lost our happiness.”

  The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi and other political prisoners is far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees than physical abuse is. It is torture as science, the dark art of gradual psychological disintegration. By the time Hashmi was hauled into court, it was questionable whether he had the mental and psychological capability to defend himself or make rational judgments. He was told to stop speaking so quickly at his sentencing; he apologized to the court, saying he had spoken little during his years in isolation, and then burst into tears. This is what the system is designed to do.

  Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs, and associations are now a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious.

  There will be more Hashmis. In 2006 the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Illinois, where the inmates, again, are mostly Muslim but also have included a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two counts of arson at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.”43 All calls and mail are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. These facilities replicate the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo.44

  In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law,” a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months, and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.45

  Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists and black radicals in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn African Americans and Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in our impoverished urban ghettos and the Middle East have left many, including Abu-Jamal and Hashmi, wasting away in cages. The state has no intention of limiting its persecution to African Americans and Muslims. They were the first. We are next.

  Cecily McMillan sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray prison jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals, and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room at Rikers Island in New York. Most were clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers’ necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.

  “It’s all out in the open here,” said the twenty-five-year-old graduate student at the New School of Social Research in New York City. I spoke with her the day before she was sentenced in a New York criminal court, on May 19, 2014, to three months in jail and five years’ probation. “The cruelty of power can’t hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. My lawyers think I will get two years. But two years is nothing compared to what these women, who never went to trial, never had the possibility of a trial with adequate legal representation, face. There are women in my dorm who, because they have such a poor command of English, do not even understand their charges. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the charges to them.”

  McMillan endured the last criminal case originating from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that came with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism by turning any arrest into a parole violation. McMillan, one of the few who refused to accept a plea deal and have a felony charge on her record, went to court.

  The Occupy Wall Street movement was not only about battling back against the rise of a corporate oligarchy. It was also about our right to peaceful protest. The police in cities across the country were deployed to short-circuit this right.46 I watched New York City police during the Occupy protests yank people from sidewalks into the street, where they would be arrested. I saw police routinely shove protesters and beat them with batons. I saw activists slammed against police cars. I saw groups of protesters suddenly herded like sheep to be confined within police barricades. I saw, and was caught up in, mass arrests in which those around me were handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk. The police often blasted pepper spray into faces from inches away, temporarily blinding the victims.

  This violence, carried out against nonviolent protesters, came amid draconian city ordinances that effectively outlawed protest and banned demonstrators from public spaces. It was buttressed by heavy police infiltration and surveillance of the movement. When the press or activists attempted to document the abuse by police, they often were assaulted or otherwise blocked from taking photographs or videos. The message the state delivered was clear: Do not dissent. And the McMillan trial was part of the message.

  McMillan, who spent part of her childhood living in a trailer park in rural Texas, found herself with several hundred other activists at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in March 2012 to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street. The city, fearing the reestablishment of an encampment, deployed large numbers of police officers to clear the park just before midnight of March 17. The police, heavily shielded, stormed into the gathering in fast-moving lines. Activists, as Democ
racy Now! reported, were shoved, hit, knocked to the ground, and cuffed. Some ran for safety. More than 100 people were arrested on the anniversary. After the violence, numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement. In the mayhem, McMillan—whose bruises were photographed and subsequently displayed to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!—was manhandled by a police officer later identified as Grantley Bovell.

  Bovell, who was in plainclothes and who, according to McMillan, did not identify himself as a policeman, allegedly came up from behind and grabbed McMillan’s breast—a perverse form of assault by New York City police that other female activists also suffered during Occupy protests. McMillan’s elbow made contact with his face, just below the eye, in what she says appeared to be a reaction to the grope. She says she has no memory of the incident. By the end of the confrontation, she was lying on the ground, bruised and convulsing, after being beaten by the police. She was taken to a hospital emergency room, where police handcuffed her to a bed.

  Had McMillan not been an Occupy activist, the trial that came out of this beating would have been about her receiving restitution from New York City for police abuse. Instead, she was charged with felony assault in the second degree and faced up to seven years in prison.

  McMillan’s journey from a rural Texas backwater to Rikers Island was a journey of political awakening. Her parents, divorced when she was small, had little money. At times she lived with her mother, who worked in a Dillard’s department store, as an accountant for a pool hall, and later, after earning a degree, as a registered nurse doing weekly shifts of sixty to seventy hours in hospitals and nursing homes. There were also painful stretches of unemployment.

  Her mother was from Mexico, and she was circumspect about revealing her ethnicity in the deeply white conservative community, one in which blacks and other minorities were not welcome. She never taught her son and daughter Spanish. As a girl, McMillan saw her mother struggle with severe depression, and in one terrifying instance, she was taken to a hospital after she passed out from an overdose of prescription pills. For periods, McMillan, her brother, and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often: she attended thirteen schools, including five high schools. Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.

  Racism was endemic in the area. There was a sign in the nearby town of Vidor, not far from the Louisiana state line, that read: IF YOU ARE DARK GET OUT BEFORE DARK. It had replaced an earlier sign that said: DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS NIGGER.

  The families around the McMillans struggled with all the problems that come with poverty—alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic and sexual violence, and despair. Cecily’s younger brother was serving a seven-year sentence for drug possession in Texas.

  “I grew up around the violence of poverty,” she said. “It was normative.”

  Her parents worked hard to fit into the culture of rural Texas. McMillan said she competed as a child in a beauty pageant called Tiny Miss Valentines of Texas. She was on a cheerleading team. She ran track.

  “My parents tried,” McMillan said. “They wanted to give us everything. They wanted us to have a lifestyle we could be proud of. My parents, because we were … at times poor, were ashamed of who we were. I asked my mother to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes at the Salvation Army and cut off the insignias and sew them onto my old clothes. I was afraid of being made fun of at school. My mother got up at five in the morning before work and made us pigs in a blanket, putting the little sausages into croissants. She wanted my brother and myself to be proud of her. She really did a lot with so very little.”

  McMillan spent most of her summers with her paternal grandmother in Atlanta. Those visits opened up another world for her. She attended a Spanish-language camp. She went to blues and jazz festivals. She attended a theater summer camp called Seven Stages that focused on cultural and political perspectives. When she was a teenager, McMillan wrote collective theater pieces, including one in which she wore the American flag as a burka and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a character dressed as Darth Vader walked onto the stage. “My father was horrified,” she said. “He walked out of the theater.” As a thirteen-year-old, she was in a play called I Hate Anne Frank. “It was about American sensationalism,” she said. “It asked how the entire experience of the Holocaust could be turned for many people into a girl’s positive narrative, a disgusting false optimism. It was not well received.”

  In Atlanta, art, and especially theater, awakened her to the realities endured by others, from Muslims in the Middle East to the black underclass in the United States. And unlike in the Texas towns where she grew up, she made black friends in Atlanta. She began to wonder about the lives of the African Americans who lived near her in rural Texas. What was it like for them? How did they endure racism? Did black women suffer the way her mother suffered? She began to openly question and challenge the conventions and assumptions of the white community around her. She read extensively, falling in love with the work of Albert Camus.

  “I would miss bus stops because I would be reading The Stranger or The Plague,” she said. “Existentialism to me was beautiful. It said the world is shit. It said this is the lot humanity is given. But human beings have to try their best. They swim and they swim and they swim against the waves until they can’t swim any longer. You can choose to view these waves as personal attacks against you and give up, or you can swim. And Camus said you should not sell out for a lifeboat. These forces are impersonal. They are structural. I learned from Camus how to live and how to die with dignity.”

  She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, through a partial scholarship and loans. As an undergraduate, she worked as a student teacher in inner-city schools in Chicago and joined the Young Democratic Socialists, the youth chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. In the fall of 2011, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where she planned to write a master’s thesis on Jane Addams, Hull House, and the settlement movement. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in the city six days after she arrived at the school.

  McMillan said that at first she was disappointed with the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park and felt that it lacked political maturity. She had participated in the political protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in early 2011, and the solidarity of government workers, including police, that she saw there deeply influenced her feelings about activism.47 She came away strongly committed to nonviolence.

  “Police officers sat down to occupy with us,” she said of the protests in Madison. “It was unprecedented. We were with teachers, the fire department, police, and students. You walked around saying thank you to the police. You embraced police. [But then] I went to Occupy in New York and saw drum circles and people walking around naked. There was yoga. I thought, What is this? I thought for many protesters this was just some social experiment they would go back to their academic institutions and write about. Where I come from people are hungry. Women are getting raped. Fathers and stepfathers beat the shit out of children. People die.… Some people would rather not live.

  “At first I looked at the Occupiers and thought they were so bourgeois,” she went on. “I thought they were trying to dress down their class by wearing all black. I was disgusted. But in the end I was wrong. I wasn’t meeting them where they were. These were kids, some of whom had been to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, [who] were the jewels of their family’s legacy. They were doing something radical. They had never been given the opportunity to have their voices heard, to have their own agency. They weren’t clowns, like I first thought. They were really brave. We learned to have conversations. And that was beautiful. And these people are my friends today.”

  She joined Occupy Wall Street’s Demands Working Group, which attempted to draw up a list of core demands that the movement could endorse. She continued with her academic work at the New School for Social Research and also worked part-time. McMillan was visiting her
grandmother, who was terminally ill in Atlanta, in November 2011 when the police cleared out the Zuccotti Park encampment. When she returned to the New School, she took part in the occupation of school buildings, but some Occupiers trashed the property, leading to a bitter disagreement between her and other activists. Radical elements in the movement who supported the property destruction held a “shadow trial” and condemned her as a “bureaucratic provocateur.”

  “I started putting together an affinity group after the New School occupation,” she said. “I realized there was a serious problem between anarchists and socialists and democratic socialists. I wanted, like Bayard Rustin, to bring everyone together. I wanted to repair the fractured left. I wanted to build coalitions.”

  Judge Ronald A. Zweibel was caustic and hostile to McMillan and her defense team when I attended the trial. Her defense lawyers said he barred video evidence that would have helped her case. He issued a gag order that forbade the defense lawyers, Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg, from communicating with the press. The jury was also barred from being made aware of the widespread and indiscriminate violence that took place in the park that night, much of it photographed. And the judge denied her bail.

  Bovell, the policeman who McMillan says beat her, had been investigated at least twice by the Internal Affairs Bureau of the New York City Police Department, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. Stolar’s motion requesting access to Bovell’s NYPD personnel file was rejected by Judge Zweibel, who said the attorney had “failed to even establish that ‘prior misconduct’ of any sort has been found, or documented, by the NYPD against Officer Bovell.”48 In one of these cases, Bovell and his partner were sued for allegedly using an unmarked police car to strike a seventeen-year-old fleeing on a dirt bike. The teenager said his nose was broken, two teeth were knocked out, and his forehead was lacerated. The case was settled out of court. The officer was allegedly also captured on a video that appeared to show him kicking a suspect on the floor of a Bronx grocery, according to Stolar. Stolar also said he had seen documents that implicated Bovell in a ticket-fixing scandal in his Bronx precinct.