U.S. forces in Iraq have detained 10,000 prisoners without evidence of their wrongdoing, a U.S. detention centers in Iraq commander said on Monday.

POTA and its predecessor, Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), were extensively abused. They typically targeted the religious minorities, specifically Muslims, and allowed for their harassment and persecution. The TADA story is especially horrifying. Some 67,000 people were arrested under it, but only 8,000 put on trial, and a mere 725 convicted. Official TADA Review Committees themselves found the law’s application untenable in all but 5,000 cases. In 1993, Gujarat witnessed no terrorism, but more than 19,000 people were still arrested under TADA. Religious minorities were selectively targeted under both Acts. For instance, in Rajasthan, of 115 TADA detainees, 112 were Muslims and three Sikhs. Gujarat had a worse pattern under POTA, when all but one of the 200-plus detainees were Muslims, the remaining one a Sikh.
(...) The passing of the two new laws is certain to increase the alienation of India's Muslims from the state. They have been the principal victims of India's anti-terrorism strategy and activities in recent years.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

republicans and torture:
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary debate, Fox News moderator Brit Hume — who appears to have been watching too much “24″ himself — raised what he described as “a fictional but we think plausible scenario involving terrorism and the response to it.” He then laid out the kind of “ticking-bomb” scenario on which virtually every episode of “24″ is premised — precisely the kind that most intelligence experts consider fictional and entirely implausible.
(...) As governor of the State That Dares Not Speak Its Name — at least not in GOP circles — Mitt Romney naturally had to up the ante. “You said the person’s going to be in Guantanamo. I’m glad they’re at Guantanamo…. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo.” I am politician, hear me roar! And, oh yeah: “Enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used.”
(...) Unlike Hunter and Tancredo, Giuliani and Romney took pains to insist that they didn’t favor torture, just … you know, “enhanced interrogation.” But water-boarding, which neither would disavow, is unquestionably a form of torture. It involves taking a bound, gagged and blindfolded prisoner and pouring water over him or holding him underwater to induce an unbearable sensation of drowning. It was used in the Spanish Inquisition and by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge — fellas who make Jack Bauer look like a softie.
(...) McCain’s chest-beating Republican rivals would do well to listen to him, and to read the letter Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, sent May 10 to all U.S. troops there: “Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information…. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary…. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight … is how we behave. In everything we do, we must … treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.”

thank god, as giuliani says, the US is on the offensive:
Wary of a number of federal anti-terror cases that proved to be overblown, two legal experts Tuesday cautioned about attaching too much significance to the arrest Tuesday of six Muslims for plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey.
(...) "The fact is that most of those arrested (in the past) are small fry and wanna-bes," said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "That's a reflection of the fact that al-Qaida has a hard time getting people in here and has higher priorities."
(...) The fact that the New Jersey men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store for copying onto DVDs, he said, "somewhat indicates they weren't the A team of terrorists."

thank god, as giuliani says, the US is on the offensive:
Wary of a number of federal anti-terror cases that proved to be overblown, two legal experts Tuesday cautioned about attaching too much significance to the arrest Tuesday of six Muslims for plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey.
(...) "The fact is that most of those arrested (in the past) are small fry and wanna-bes," said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "That's a reflection of the fact that al-Qaida has a hard time getting people in here and has higher priorities."
(...) The fact that the New Jersey men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store for copying onto DVDs, he said, "somewhat indicates they weren't the A team of terrorists."

a book on guantanamo:
Leading human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, the United States prison camp in Cuba, are treated worse than the Irish hunger strikers during the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Guantanamo hunger strikes began in June 2005. They have now lasted nine times longer than the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland of the early 1980s.
(...) "In 1981, the British recognised that it was unethical to force feed a hunger striker. Twice a day my client, Shaker Aamer, is strapped into a torture chair and a 110 centimetre tube is forced up his nose. Occasionally, it goes into his lungs - which is excruciatingly painful and quite deliberate."
(...) However, some 42 men remain on hunger strike. The longest surviving has lasted 620 days with forced feeding. Stafford Smith's clients, Shaker Aamer and Al Jazeera journalist Sami al Haj, have been on hunger strike for 115 and 106 days respectively.
(...) The strikers are demanding a fair trial, for abuse of the Koran to cease and that juvenile prisoners should not be kept in solitary confinement. They want an end to violations of the Geneva Convention, such as the provision of yellow unsanitary water and inedible food. They also want different sorts of treatment - which depend upon how compliant prisoners are, to stop. Compliant prisoners wear white uniforms while others wear orange and brown uniforms.
(...) He admits to encountering some suspicion from prisoners who think those lawyers who do come into the camp are there to provide a veneer of respectability for the whole inhumane process of detention. But Stafford Smith stresses: "Some of the guys are crazy now, losing their minds. They are being horribly abused. Probably the worst abuse is the daily torture the hunger strikers undergo."
(...) Stafford Smith is keen to point out that Guantanamo is just one of an increasing number of US detention centres all over the world. "There are almost 14,000 people being held in secret prisons from Iraq to Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, to name but a few."
(...) "I think it was Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness who said that the internment process created the greatest recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. A CIA agent admitted as much in the present context in 2004, when he said that, for every person you put in Guantanamo, it would create 10 who want to blow up the US. Now that figure is more likely to be 1,000 for every new prisoner."
(...) A new threat had to be found to replace the Russians and it is Muslim fundamentalism. But Stafford Smith says: "The idea that the world today faces a greater threat than when the Germans were bombing London to oblivion or when the Russians held massive amounts of nuclear weapons just does not stand up to analysis. The suggestion international laws now need to be torn up because of the threat is foolish and amounts to incredible populism."

donald rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld was personally deciding on whether interrogators could use "stress positions" (an old CIA technique) like making prisoners stand for up to four hours, or exploit "individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress," or strip them naked, or question them for 28 hours at a stretch, without sleep, or use "a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation". These and other methods, euphemistically dubbed "counter-resistance techniques" in Pentagon documents that always avoided the word "torture," were outlined in an "action memo" submitted on November 27, 2002, for Rumsfeld's approval by Haynes. The lawyer noted that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard General Richard Myers (respectively deputy defense secretary, under-secretary for policy and chairman of the joint chiefs) had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction. A week later, Rumsfeld scrawled his signature in the "approved" box but added, "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
(...) Schmidt is adamant that Rumsfeld intended the techniques "for Mister Kahtani (sic) number one." And so Qahtani's jailers now began forcing him to stand for long periods, isolating him, stripping him, telling him to bark like a dog, and more. "There were no limits put on this and no boundaries", Schmidt reported. After a few days, the sessions had to be temporarily suspended when Qahtani's heartbeat slowed to 35 beats a minute. "Somewhere", General Schmidt observes, "there had to be a throttle on this", and the "throttle" controlling the interrogation was ultimately Rumsfeld, who was "personally involved", the general stresses, "in the interrogation of one person." Bypassing the normal chain of command, the secretary called the prison chief directly on a weekly basis for reports on progress with Qahtani.
(...) His principal complaint was that the reports were failing to confirm what he knew to be true ­ that hostile acts against U.S. forces in Iraq were entirely the work of FSLs ["Former Saddam Loyalists"] and dead-enders. Scathingly, he compared the quality of the Iraqi material with the excellent intelligence that was now, in his view, being extracted from the prisoners at Guantanamo, or "Gitmo," as the military termed it, under the able supervision of prison commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Rumsfeld concluded his diatribe with a forthright instruction to Stephen Cambone [under-secretary of defense for intel]ligence] that Miller be ordered immediately to the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where the unfortunate PUCs [Persons Under Confinement] were ending up, and "Gitmoise it." Cambone in turn dispatched the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a fervent Christian fundamentalist given to deriding the Muslims' Allah as "an idol," to Cuba to brief Miller on his mission.
(...) First on his list of appointments was Lt. Ricardo Sanchez, who had succeeded McKiernan as the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. It must have been an instructive conversation, since within 36 hours Sanchez issued instructions on detainee interrogation that mirrored those authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo in December the previous year that gave cover to techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, "fear of dogs," and "mild" physical contact with prisoners.
(...) When Rumsfeld first learned that there were pictures extant of naked, humiliated and terrified prisoners being abused by cheerful, he said, according to an aide who was present, "I didn't know you were allowed to bring cameras into a prison."
(...) However, when she went to look for herself, she found they had missed something, a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. "It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the signature. The line read: "Make sure this happens!!"
(...) Responding to a question from Lou Dobbs that though there were six soldiers facing charges, "their superiors had to know what was going on here." Grange responded quickly: "Or they didn't know at all because they lacked the supervision of those soldiers or (were not) inspecting part of their command." In other words, the higher command's fault lay not in encouraging the torture at Abu Ghraib, but simply in failing to notice what the guards were up to. "These soldiers," continued Grange indignantly, "these few soldiers let down the rest of the force in Iraq and the United States, to include veterans like myself. It is unexcusable."
(...) Meanwhile, Rumsfeld accepted full responsibility without taking any blame, a standard response for high officials implicated in scandal.
(...) What Rumsfeld did not mention in all his public protestations of regret over Abu Ghraib was that in the same month of May 2004 he had on his desk a report prepared by the Navy inspector general's office detailing the interrogation methods, refined in their cruelty, being practiced on Jose Padilla and other inmates in the South Carolina naval brig. Padilla, a Puerto Rican former gang member, found himself incarcerated on the direct authority of the secretary of defense, one of three prisoners accused of terrorism held in the jail and subjected to a carefully designed regime of isolation and sensory deprivation. Padilla, according to his attorneys, would ultimately spend 1,307 days in a nine-by-seven-foot cell, often chained to the ground by his wrists and torso and kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud noises. In repeated legal arguments, administration lawyers maintained that Rumsfeld was entitled to hold anyone deemed 'an enemy combatant' in his rapidly excpanding prison system.

immigrants in prison:
Approximately 400 immigrants are incarcerated in Hutto, and at least half of the prisoners are children, according to Texans United for Families. Many of the immigrants--who are limited to countries other than Mexico--have made requests for asylum in the U.S. They await deportation hearings without any charges for months, and sometimes years.
(...) On March 6, the ACLU sued Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on behalf of 10 children in the Taylor jail. The ACLU based its lawsuit on a 1997 settlement protecting immigrant minors that resulted from a class-action suit accusing immigration officials of abusing minors. In its current initiative, the ACLU accuses Hutto of violating every provision of the 1997 settlement, including not giving children the right to wear their own clothes or have privacy.
(...) Families are awakened at 5:30 or 5:45 a.m., and must be through bathing by 6 a.m. They are given 20 minutes to eat. "If we haven't finished," Elsa says, "the officials say they aren't interested--the time to eat has finished."
(...) After the 20-minute meal, the prisoners return to their cells "to do nothing," Elsa says. "They don't allow us to sleep, only to sit and wait for the hours, days, months to pass." The prisoners aren't allowed to have books sent to them, and a great deal of the day is spent in senseless head counts to make sure no one has escaped.
(...) In his deposition, Kevin complained about the ridiculous excuse for an education system at Hutto. "Students" in the class of 25 ranged in age from six to 12 years old. "All we do is color and draw pictures and watch Spanish movies," Kevin said. Kevin also said that his bed was small and cold, and stuck next to a smelly washroom. His mother had to use the toilet in front of him.
(...) Johnson-Castro also visited Raymondville, the home of a $65 million tent city that holds 2,000 immigrants who speak more than 40 different languages in windowless hothouses. They are locked down 23 hours a day.

guantanamo bay:
The real problem -- the conundrum wrapped in an enigma -- comes with another group. At present, there are in Gitmo perhaps 160 detainees (as the public affairs staff at the facility told me), who will most likely never be charged, never be tried, and may nonetheless never be sent home. It's a category without a name, or really any precedent -- a category that all too conveniently defies solution and so keeps Guantanamo in operation.
(...) How could a new president extricate us from this mess? The next occupant of the White House should start by accepting the following very American principle: Those who are not going to be charged with a crime should be returned to their home country, a third country, or the country where they were initially captured .
(...) The current Guantanamo debacle has little to do with the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, or even, for that matter, a realistic assessment of the more pressing terrorist threats to the United States. At its heart of hearts lies a simple fear of political embarrassment.
(...) Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the "worst of the worst" (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, what the Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and -- sometimes -- children.
(...) The Bush administration is already releasing the wrongly detained. Detainee by detainee, it has been quietly whittling away at its mistakes, sending home 385 detainees who look no more or less guilty than those remaining in custody.
(...) Those at Gitmo convicted of crimes should serve their sentences in U.S. military prisons on U.S. soil. Opponents insist that this would "endanger" Americans. According to Senator Jim DeMint, "To bring known terrorists, many of whom have killed Americans, to our shores risks the lives of additional Americans and encourages more attacks on our soil." Does Senator DeMint actually believe this? Does he truly consider the U.S. military incapable of keeping convicted prisoners under lock and key? How would a future president weigh such doubts against the giant sigh of relief the world at large would heave when the last door opened on the last cell in Guantanamo.
(...) I assured them that, outside of the 14 high-value detainees, the Bush administration hasn't sent a single new prisoner to Guantanamo since late 2004. But, as it turned out, they knew something I didn't. Last month, a little story appeared in the back pages of some American newspapers. The United States had indeed moved its first new captive to Guantanamo in over two years -- and, according to the Washington buzz, more such detainees can be expected sooner or later, either from a war in Iran or some other "front" in the administration's global counterterrorism offensive.

the numbers and the hype:
There were 498 incidents in eleven EU countries last year labelled as "terrorist attacks." The Basque separatist group ETA did best (136 terrorist attacks) and was responsible for the only deadly attack, killing two in Madrid. The remaining 497 fortunately cost no human lives. How about the Islamic terrorists then? Considering the perpetual warnings in our daily papers, the findings in the Europol report is, to say the least, surprising. The truth is that Islamists only carried out one out of the 498 terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2006. [report available here]
(...) Either way, even after taking these plots into account, the report proves the genuine magnitude of Islamic terrorism in Europe--it's not exactly a huge threat.
(...) If we look at the people arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences, the figures are rather disproportionate; about half of them arrested were Muslim. In plain English: Muslims are a group causing very little terrorism in Europe, while at the same time much more likely to be arrested on suspicion of it. The constant media coverage of Muslims being arrested creates the false image of a serious threat in order to benefit the imperialist world-view Washington wants us to adopt. Meanwhile the Americans and their accomplices are carrying out genocide in Iraq. Clearly, something needs to be done about the media.

inhumanity reigns at guantanamo bay:
According to "Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay," a report released earlier this month by Amnesty International, the situation inside Guantánamo is actually becoming worse for detainees--particularly the approximately 160 (out of a total of 385) detainees who are thought to be housed at Camp 6. According to the report, Camp 6 "has created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation in which detainees are confined to almost completely sealed, individual cells, with minimal contact with any other human being."
(...) Prisoners in Camp 6 are confined to 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, and are allowed out only infrequently to shower or to exercise in enclosed areas surrounded by high concrete-and-wire walls. They are not able to speak to each other except by shouting through a narrow gap at the bottom of their steel cell doors. There are no outside windows, and detainees have reported that air conditioning is left on high--making the metal cells intolerably cold.
(...) As 27-year-old Yemeni hunger striker Adnan Farhan Abdullatif reportedly told his lawyer in late February, "My wish is to die. We are living in a dying situation."
(...) Naval Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed the hunger strike and prisoners' complaints as "propaganda," telling reporters that hunger strikes are a tactic taught in the al-Qaeda training manual--and that the number of strikers has dropped in the past when the media stopped covering them. But Durand left out the main reason the U.S. was able to break down hunger strikers previously--brutal force feedings.
(...) There have been several hunger strikes at Guantánamo since the camp opened in 2001. The largest occurred in 2005, when at least 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers--defined as having missed nine consecutive meals. Most detainees were eventually broken from their strike through force-feeding techniques--in which they were strapped into restraint chairs, had feeding tubes inserted and then were left strapped down for lengthy periods of time.
(...) Lawyers for some detainees described U.S. military personnel violently inserting feeding tubes to the point of drawing blood, and Physicians for Human Rights called the force feedings of inmates a "brutal and inhumane" tactic that violates international medical codes of ethics.
(...) Sudanese detainee Sami al-Hajj, a former cameraman for al-Jazeera, had been on hunger strike for more than 95 days as Socialist Worker went to press--and was being routinely force-fed. "At nine o'clock in the morning, they force feed him, and he is strapped to a chair," his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, recently told Reuters. "They force a tube up his nose. It is excruciatingly painful. That lasts about an hour...Three times so far, according to what Sami has told me, they have put the tube in his lung...and that is effectively drowning him."
(...) Additionally, though CSRTs are supposed to determine whether a detainee should be declared an "enemy combatant"--which means they then can be held indefinitely--the process is a kangaroo court. Defense lawyers and the media are barred from the proceedings, and prisoners aren't allowed to see "classified" evidence against them.
(...) Last month, after being held at Guantánamo for more than five years, David Hicks pleaded guilty to a single, relatively minor count in exchange for a plea bargain that will allow him to return to Australia to serve out the remaining nine months of a 7-year sentence. To get his plea deal, however, Hicks--who has grown his hair to waist length in order to block out the bright lights that shine 24 hours a day in his cell--had to agree to withdraw allegations that he had been abused during his detention, to a one-year ban on speaking to the media, and never to sue the U.S.
(...) Since the Bush administration doesn't allow prisoners to detail allegations of torture publicly, however, the following appears in the "transcript" of al-Nashiri's tribunal:

PRESIDENT [of the tribunal]: Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: [CENSORED] What else do I want to say? [CENSORED] There were doing so many things. What else did they do? [CENSORED] After that, another method of torture began. [CENSORED] They used to ask me questions, and the investigator after that used to laugh. And I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn't replay what I heard, he used to [CENSORED].

congressional hearings on extraordinary rendition:
"I HOPE IT'S YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS THAT DIE" said US Representative Dana Rohrabacker to American citizens who questioned the Bush Administration’s unlawful extraordinary rendition policies.
(...) The European Parliamentary human rights committee had issued a report in January, 2007 sharply critical of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in which persons from all over the world were detained by either CIA or local police and then flown by CIA jet (torture taxi) to other countries where they were imprisoned (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Djibouti, Morocco, Yemen. The report was equally critical of European governments for allowing the unlawful flights to take place.
(...) From 2001 through 2005, the governments of fourteen countries in Europe allowed at least 1,245 CIA flights with illegally abducted terrorist suspects to be flown through their airspace or to land on their territory. Germany, Britain, Ireland and Portugal allowed the highest numbers of covert flights. As well as at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA, there were an unspecified number of US military flights for the same purpose.
(...) [guantanamo facts] Some who were kidnapped ended up in Guantanamo. Others were flown to prisons in other countries for interrogation and torture. Many of those who were subjected to extraordinary rendition are still in Guantanano. Many have been there for over 5 years. Over 400 of the 770 persons who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo over the 5 years it has been opened, have been released. Only 380 are left imprisoned in Guantanamo. Only 3 have been charged by the Military Commission and only one tried in Guantanamo. After five years of being held prisoner, Australian citizen David Hicks was convicted in March, 2007 of material support to terrorism and sentenced to only seven months further imprisonment which he is serving in Australia. The Bush administration has said it will try only 50-70 of the 380 remaining in Guantanamo. That means that of 770 who have been in Guantanamo, on 50-70 will be tried. The others eventually will be freed due to lack of evidence of a crime. Many will have spent five years or more in imprisonment.
(...) [!] Rohrabacher then attacked and belittled the European Community for outlawing the death penalty saying that “You in the European community won’t stand up to evil people, you won’t execute them. Eichmann deserved to be executed, just like these terrorists must be executed.”

lands of liberty?:
MI5 is adopting tactics used by the police to keep tabs on paedophiles and other sex offenders to monitor the activities of known or suspected Islamic extremists, The Times has learnt.
(...) Security sources say that monitoring extremists is only part of the drive to deal with the growing challenge of a younger generation of Muslims, most of them of Pakistani origin, being suborned into supporting terrorism.
(...) This is a highly sensitive issue, especially as Muslim leaders have accused MI5 and the police of using all their resources to spy on their communities.

on "sacco and vanzetti" teaching us about our own time (zinn):
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti revealed, in its starkest terms, that the noble words inscribed above our courthouses, “Equal Justice Before the Law,” have always been a lie. Those two men, the fish peddler and the shoemaker, could not get justice in the American system, because justice is not meted out equally to the poor and the rich, the native born and the foreign born, the orthodox and the radical, the white and the person of color. And while injustice may play itself out today more subtly and in more intricate ways than it did in the crude circumstances of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, its essence remains.
(...) When Eugene Debs and a thousand others were sent to prison during World War I, under the Espionage Act, was it because they were guilty of espionage? Hardly. They were socialists who spoke out against the war. In affirming the ten-year sentence of Debs, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made it clear why Debs must go to prison. He quoted from Debs’ speech: “The master class has always declared the wars, the subject class has always fought the battles.”
(...) A study showed that 70% of the people in New York state prisons came from seven neighborhoods in New York City—neighborhoods of poverty and desperation.
(...) At the beginning of the trial, Judge Thayer (who, speaking to a golf acquaintance, had referred to the defendants during the trial as “those anarchist bastards”) said to the jury: “Gentlemen, I call upon you to render this service here that you have been summoned to perform with the same spirit of patriotism, courage, and devotion to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas.”
(...) Sacco told the court, on sentencing: “I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class…That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class.”
(...) Sacco wrote to his son Dante: “So son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother…take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees…But remember always, Dante, in this play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only…help the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends…. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”
(...)When Vanzetti was arrested, he had a leaflet in his pocket advertising a meeting to take place in five days. It is a leaflet that could be distributed today, all over the world, as appropriate now as it was the day of their arrest. It read:

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.

That meeting did not take place. But their spirit still exists today with people who believe and love and struggle all over the world.

on "sacco and vanzetti" teaching us about our own time (zinn):
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti revealed, in its starkest terms, that the noble words inscribed above our courthouses, “Equal Justice Before the Law,” have always been a lie. Those two men, the fish peddler and the shoemaker, could not get justice in the American system, because justice is not meted out equally to the poor and the rich, the native born and the foreign born, the orthodox and the radical, the white and the person of color. And while injustice may play itself out today more subtly and in more intricate ways than it did in the crude circumstances of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, its essence remains.
(...) When Eugene Debs and a thousand others were sent to prison during World War I, under the Espionage Act, was it because they were guilty of espionage? Hardly. They were socialists who spoke out against the war. In affirming the ten-year sentence of Debs, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made it clear why Debs must go to prison. He quoted from Debs’ speech: “The master class has always declared the wars, the subject class has always fought the battles.”
(...) A study showed that 70% of the people in New York state prisons came from seven neighborhoods in New York City—neighborhoods of poverty and desperation.
(...) At the beginning of the trial, Judge Thayer (who, speaking to a golf acquaintance, had referred to the defendants during the trial as “those anarchist bastards”) said to the jury: “Gentlemen, I call upon you to render this service here that you have been summoned to perform with the same spirit of patriotism, courage, and devotion to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas.”
(...) Sacco told the court, on sentencing: “I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class…That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class.”
(...) Sacco wrote to his son Dante: “So son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother…take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees…But remember always, Dante, in this play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only…help the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends…. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”
(...)When Vanzetti was arrested, he had a leaflet in his pocket advertising a meeting to take place in five days. It is a leaflet that could be distributed today, all over the world, as appropriate now as it was the day of their arrest. It read:

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.

That meeting did not take place. But their spirit still exists today with people who believe and love and struggle all over the world.