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While corporate polluters and criminals get a free pass from the federal government and an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab crusade is in full-swing, stoked by right-wing goons and their media shills, it is little wonder then, that Friday's raids targeted supporters of the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Neo-McCarthyite Witchhunt
With a pretext that the raids were seeking "evidence related to an ongoing Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation," FBI spokesperson Steve Warfield told The New York Times that repressors are "looking at activities connected to the material support of terrorism."
Attorney Ted Dooley who represents Mick Kelly, a union- and socialist activist targeted by the Bureau told the Times that the SWAT team broke down Kelly's door at 7 a.m. on Friday and served a search warrant on his companion.
According to Dooley, the warrant claimed the secret state was searching for "evidence" that activist groups had provided "material support" to "Hezbollah, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia."
Dooley told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the raids are nothing less than "a probe into the political beliefs of American citizens and any organization anywhere that opposes the American imperial design."
The political nature of the raids was blatantly transparent. A copy of the search warrant on Kelly's home obtained by Twin Cities Independent Media Center (TC-IMC) revealed that the order, signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Nelson specified that Kelly's membership in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was a primary motive behind the Bureau's home invasion.
The warrant allowed the FBI to take "documents, files, books, photographs, videos, souvenirs, war relics, notebooks, address books, diaries, journals, maps, or other evidence, including evidence in electronic form relating to Kelly's travels to and from and presence and activities in Minnesota and other foreign countries, to which Kelly has traveled as part of his work for FRSO."
Reprising the red-hunting frenzy of the McCarthy period at the height of the Cold War, the warrant specifies that the Bureau was authorized by Obama's Justice Department to seize material relating to "the recruitment, indoctrination, and facilitation of other individuals in the United States to join FRSO, including materials related to the identity and location of recruiters, facilitators, and recruits, the means by which the recruits were recruited to join FRSO, the means by which the recruitment was financed and arranged."
In other words, with a bogus "terrorism investigation" as a pretext, the Obama regime is targeting socialist political groups for destruction in order for Democrats to whip-up "War on Terror" and anticommunist hysteria prior to November general elections that may see Congress pass into the hands of the troglodytic Republican faction of war criminals and corporatists.
Grand Jury Intimidation
In addition to turning over the homes of antiwar and solidarity activists in Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, the FBI handed out subpoenas ordering individuals to appear before a federal grand jury that will convene next month in Chicago.
While the Bureau cannot compel citizens to answer their questions, administrative means can be used by the secret state to coerce testimony against fellow activists: the federal grand jury system.
As civil liberties scholar Frank Donner wrote in his groundbreaking book, The Age of Surveillance: "Federal grand juries, judicial bodies limited under our legal system to an accusatory role, were in the same way [as red-hunting congressional committees] taken over by the executive branch in the Nixon years and converted into intelligence instruments."
Historically, federal grand juries have targeted dissident groups and individuals as an harassment and intimidation tactic, particularly when activists and organizations challenged the government's imperial adventures abroad and capitalist depredations at home.
Individuals subpoenaed by the state who refuse to answer questions posed by Star Chamber inquisitors can be receive an indeterminate jail sentence for failing to do so.
