What: Court Hearing on Federal lawsuit seeking injunction against the implementation of
National Defense Authorization Act
Where: US District Court, 500 Pearl St, Manhattan
When: 9:00 AM, Thursday March 29th
Website: StopNDAA.org

Contact:

Tangerine Bolen, Coordinator and Plaintiff
503-887-0773
Tangerine.bolen@revolutiontruth.org

Carl Mayer, Lead Attorney
609-921-0253
carlmayer@aol.com

At 9:00 AM this Thursday, March 29th at the Southern District of New York Federal Courthouse,
multiple plaintiffs will testify in support of a worldwide lawsuit against the United States
government over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA, also known as
the “Homeland Battlefield” law, permanently suspends due process and Habeas Corpus for
persons accused by the federal government of being involved in hostilities against the United
States, or being an “associated force” of terrorists. The law authorizes military policing of US
citizens for the first time in over 200 years.

The first round of plaintiffs in this historic case, dubbed “the Freedom Seven”, include Chris
Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, and three women
leaders working at the vanguard of civil liberties and basic human rights who have reason to
believe they are in imminent danger of harm under the NDAA. Naomi Wolf and Dr. Cornel West
are in the process of becoming plaintiffs in this lawsuit …

As Hedges noted this week, “If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law we cease to be a
constitutional democracy. Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law. They make
legal what was once illegal.” He continued, “Crimes become patriotic acts. The defense of
freedom and truth becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same
brutal mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national
security. We obey the new laws as we obeyed the old laws, as if there was no difference. And
we spend our energy and our lives appealing to a dead system.”

“The Homeland Battlefield Law is as Orwellian as its name implies. America is not
a “battlefield”; it is a democratic republic. This law is unconstitutional because it violates the
free speech and due process rights of American citizens.” Carl Mayer, lead attorney on the case

Plaintiffs and attorneys on this case will hold a press conference on the courthouse steps at the
conclusion of the hearings, some time after noon. Occupy Wall Street will express solidarity and
support for this lawsuit with a gathering and silent march beginning at Foley Square at 3 PM.

“The NDAA is a sweeping invasion of the traditional right of all Americans to live as free citizens
without the threat of arbitrary detention and incarceration and to speak and express themselves
openly without fear of government.” Bruce Afran, attorney on the case

This lawsuit is accompanied by a global campaign geared to alert the US public and galvanize
people to protest this egregious assault on the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Two
groups, a small, international and all-volunteer organization called RevolutionTruth, and the
million-member civil liberties group Demand Progress, have teamed up to ensure the general
public has a strong platform for standing against the unconstitutional aspects of the NDAA. Over
45,000 emails have been generated to US Congress members from their constituents in support
of the lawsuit in Round One. Round Two will be opened up to the US public and to people
around the world who wish to become plaintiffs. For more information, go to StopNDAA.org

Address for trial and press conference:

United States District Court
Southern District of New York
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
United States Courthouse
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007-1312
Room 15A
Tel: (212) 805-0136

Dear Naomi,

I am writing to you today in hopes of getting the story of my brother covered by you and raising awareness for a case that affects all Americans.

I am fighting for justice for my brother Ahmed Abu-Ali, a U.S. citizen who continues to spend 23 hours every day in solitary confinement at ADX Supermax Prison based on a confession obtained through torture. Ahmed was born in Texas and raised in Falls Church, VA. He spent his free time working with disabled adults, teaching children how to read, and building bridges in interfaith activities, and donated blood regularly to the American Red Cross. Ahmed completed high school in Northern Virginia where he graduated as valedictorian. He then got a full scholarship to study Islamic Literature in Medina.

Ahmed’s life took an unexpected turn when he was 22 years old. On June 8, 2003 he was wrongly detained in Saudi Arabia, amidst a final exam. He was tortured into reading a false confession, held for 20 months without charges or access to attorney. The US government, after denying any involvement in Ahmed’s detention and repeatedly stating they had no interest in him even though they had already acquired the confession tape, suddenly flew him to the US and charged him with conspiracy based only on the confession obtained through torture in a Saudi prison. Despite this, the judge refused to suppress the tainted evidence and didn’t allow evidence of torture to being presented to the jury. Ahmed was sentenced to thirty years, then increased to life in prison, for “conspiracies” that the judge said “did not result in a single actual victim”

Now it has been nearly nine years that Ahmed has spent in solitary confinement in an 8×12 room in Colorado’s Supermax, also called “the clean version of hell.” He is not allowed any contact with the outside world except for limited correspondence with his family and attorney. Now our last available legal option to free Ahmed is a habeas petition, which is scheduled for April 2012.

Please help me bring attention to his case, which set a disturbing precedent which we MUST reverse!

You can read more about his case at freeahmed.com

Best,

Mariam Abu Ali

The wealthy land-owning Trinity Church in lower Manhattan shies away from Occupy’s recent request to it to allow its peaceful protesters to set up camp on its property: a spokesman for the Church dismissed them as “marginal protesters” and said that to do so would detract the Church from its “mission.” The Episcopal church in London dithers over whether or not to support the Occupy protesters encamped on its own premises. But it is worth taking a second look at what Jesus actually asked his nascent church to do: he asked his followers — who were “marginal protesters” — in no ambiguous terms precisely to support Occupy’s mission.

Jesus was the original Occupy protester. More and more scholarship about the historical Jesus is establishing — as, indeed, the scholars of the Jesus seminar and others have been documenting for nearly three decades — a set of facts that are regularly taught in full in seminaries, but which active clergy have told me off the record they are reluctant to preach about, let alone inform their congregations about, once they are established in ministries: that is: the original Jesus texts probably did not include language about Jesus being a unique Son of God, or about the embrace of Jesus being a unique path to salvation. Rather, the original historical Jesus, according to such scholars as Spong and Crossan, was much more likely to have been a revolutionary Jewish Rabbi continually pointing, not to himself, but to God, and to a “kingdom of heaven” which was not elsewhere – not doctrinal nor ecclesiastical in its essence — but was, rather, made up of the grace that comes from creating economic justice and manifesting egalitarian love, here on earth.

This revolutionary rabbi, according to these scholars, was not determined to set up a new religion but rather to compel the Judaism of his own time to live up to its own core ideals, and he wished to include pagans in what he saw as God’s message of universal love and economic justice.

According to these scholars, the New Testament’s language about Jesus as the one path to salvation, and the anti-Semitic language that separated the emerging first-century Church from its roots as a reform movement aimed at Judaism itself, were later additions, added about sixty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, and resulted from political pressures — including Roman persecution — and the need of an emerging institution to claim certain kinds of doctrinal legitimacy.

Jesus’ original message, they insist, as you can see in the Jesus Seminars’ book “The Five Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus” — which separates the Testaments into what the historical Jesus almost certainly said, what he probably said, what he probably did NOT say and what he almost certainly did not say — indeed reveal a revolutionary Jewish rabbi; and if you read his original message as presented in these scholar’s arguments, you see that today, much more than the established Church, it is Occupy protesters who are most directly carrying out Jesus’s instructions.
Jesus was constantly occupying public and authority-invested space, just as Occupy does. As Yale scholar Dr Wayne Meeks explains, the historical Jesus was continually staging uncomfortable public challenges to the social order; continually holding a mirror in the most disruptive and impolite way up to public hypocrisy and injustice; continually challenging the ’1%” of his day; and continually staging spectacles in public space that blurred conventional boundaries of propriety and that upended conventional separations between Jew and Gentile, “respectable” people and prostitutes, tax collectors and marginalized people; he was continually inviting all to a feast that represented the universalizing love of God. He disruptively and illegally “occupied” that Holy of Holies, the Temple Mount, where the bankers and clergy of the day made massive profits capitalizing the revenue-driven and financially corrupted institutions of the Priesthood and a bloated commerce in the sacrifice trade. He engaged in dangerous and public civil disobedience by literally upending the tables of the money-changers — a direct parallel to the Occupy boycotts and closings of accounts that were staged at major banks this autumn in America. Jesus occupied the Mount of Olives: and as he gave the Sermon on the Mount — a confrontational speech about economic justice (Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth) — he was staging a major subversive public assembly, without a permit — in the very face of a tyrannical Imperial power that consistently arrested political prisoners and other social justice revolutionaries, held them without trial, tortured them and lined the skyscapes of Jerusalem with their crucified bodies (Meeks and others point out that crucifixion in Jesus’ time was not a unique event at all, but a standard punishment for crime and for social justice preaching, as well as for issuing public messages of challenge to the unjust authority of Rome).

Do the Occupy protesters set up kitchens and feed all who are hungry, rich or poor, thus creating an inclusive table? This is exactly, argues Crossan, what Jesus sought to do: by inviting rich and poor to sit at the same table and telling his followers to feed all who joined them, he was creating a kind of public theater to demonstrate the power of a society in which people were not divided by race, class, gender and religion, but united in love and justice. When Rabbi Jesus staged an event at which people contributed all the bread and fish they had with them (the miracle of the loaves and fishes) he was setting up a public kitchen like those that Bloomberg cleared out of Zuccotti Park for “safety reasons.” Are the Occupy protesters continually being swept out of public space with attacks on them for being “dirty”? One of the continual themes of Jesus’ preaching is that conventional assessments of what is dirty and what is clean are corrupt, and that true cleanliness comes from compassion and justice, whereas hypocrisy and injustice make one like a “whited sepulcher” — pretty on the outside, but filled with corruption within.

When he confronted the wealthy young man and said, Give up all you have and follow me — when he issued parables that asserted that it was harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven — he was challenging confrontationally the unjust distribution of wealth and the injustice of a system in which the meager possessions of the poor were continually eaten away by crippling, ever-escalating taxation that flowed to a superpower, to military might and to a small wealthy elite of Romans and of a small group of Pharisaic and Sadducean officials mediating between Rome and the common people.

According to the Jesus Seminar scholars, the historical Jesus was not some ethereal divinity, wanting people to “believe in him” as a new kind of God; rather he was a very angry,very loving Jew, confronting the entrenched injustices and superficialities of the Jewish and Roman Establishments of his day, demanding an inclusive love that transcended rigid religious and ethnic boundaries, and insisting that “the Kingdom of God” was a state within each of us, that could be manifested on Earth by sharing what we had, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and engaging in the political and personal practice of peace. He said that THAT was what God wanted. Did he say it in Churches on Sunday, politely? No: he was constantly confronting power in public, constantly p—ing off the powers that be, constantly impolite and disruptive in order to hold a mirror up to hypocrisy, constantly destabilizing “business as usual”, constantly telling his followers to do the same, and constantly asking his disciples to continue that work in his name after he was gone.

Are the Occupy protesters faced with show trials, and more to come now that the NDAA, which suspends due process in America, is due to pass? Yes; so were the early followers of Jesus, and Jesus himself was arrested without evidence, convicted without evidence, tortured and murdered by a state edict, in a politicized show trial. Are the Occupiers practicing non-violence in the face of state violence? Yes; and in so doing they are exactly following Jesus’ instructions to his first-century followers, to ‘turn the other cheek” and not to respond to violence with violence but with love. In creating libraries in which all are free to learn, kitchens in which all are free to eat, and public spaces in which love and justice are modeled as a new social order, are they creating chaos and mess, or are they establishing the Kingdom of Heaven exactly as the historical Jesus insisted it must be built? If you really follow Jesus — the historical Jesus — there is nothing to conclude but that Occupy, more than Trinity Church, more than the British Anglican church, more than any church today that does not publicly step forward to house, feed and support the Occupy movement — is following Jesus’ direct instructions; and that the established Churches who fail to do so, are derelict in their duties, and disobeying the direct commandments of their boss.

Do you want to be a real Jesus follower this Christmas, instead of a Christian-ish “whited sepulcher”? It is worth taking a look at the Five Gospels to see what that angry Jew said and did, according to many scholars. After you have taken on board his message of confrontation of power, public disruption, and universal love, you might make different choices. In his own words, he didn’t want you sitting in Church talking about how great he is; he wanted you in the streets, making the wealthy uncomfortable, and feeding the poor. Do you want to really follow the historical Jesus? If you are a church, welcome Occupy to your physical site. If you are a person, fight for Occupy and other movements’ rights to do what Jesus did: in feeding the hungry, confronting injustice, and speaking truth to power.

When I was in Zuccotti Park last week I thanked the cops each personally for standing peacefully by while citizens exercised first amendment rights and thought they could not say anything many faces softened, smiled and seemed relieved not to be demonized…it is hard for cops to be put in positions that dehumanize them too and psychologically traumatizing to be forced to act against their morals. This is a war and they are forced into front lines they did not choose. So Occupy, and everyone, be kind to the cops whenever you can please, thank them when they are non-violent, reach out to them.

Most importantly: I would say it would be VERY powerful for an OWS representative (NOT A LEADER! JUST A ROLE!) to reach out to the policemens’ benevolent associations in each city and try to find common ground. Even if you can’t get decent ground rules it will have a softening effect. Also the OWS rep should ask: ” how can we help you…?” There are thing cops need too that Occupy could help deliver.

What most citizens don’t fully understand is that hardball politics behind the scenes is not about confrontation — it is about waging favors. Most effective it is veiled confrontation (what can that group conceivably do to me if I make them angry?) combined with overt offers of favors (what can they get for me?) Occupy is in a very powerful position if they only begin to understand this. If If you REALLY want to know how the game is played — a game that is being played right now AGAINST you — you would have the OWS reps in every city go to a meeting with police benevolent association with your LOCAL REGISTERED VOTER LISTS in hand and say, “we want to put better pay and retirement for cops and other first responders on the ballot and are willing to get out the vote for this.”

This will work miracles. THEN THEY ARE BEING COURTED BY TWO PAYMASTERS.. that gives them freedom they don’t now have to resist orders to be brutal — .then they have a way to NOT listen to Chase Bloomberg DHS etc because YOU have their back and they have an alternative to beating the sh– out of you — Chase is seeking them out, and offering them 3.6 million in ‘help’, you seek them out and offer a get out the vote drive that is worth millions more to them — YOU become their constituency and their allies AGAINST the banks, shadowy police consultancy, DHS etc — that is how the big boys play. This will literally save lives, not to mention make OWS or other citizen groups an unstoppable force.

SUNDAY

Sunday I went to Anglia Ruskin College where the Limmud is held. All day event, like a festival of ideas. I heard the very inspiring A. B Yehoshua, one of Israel’s greatest novelists and of the generation that founded the country. He is considered I believe very liberal, and he was very humane. But the whole first session was a debate about Jewish identity and I felt once again how wherever I run into this kind of ‘identity’ debate — who is black? who is white? who is english? etc etc etc — I find it exhausting and beside the point. Who cares who is what? I wanted to raise my hand to suggest (which I now believe) that the original mistake of our people was to cast ‘Jewishness’ as an ethnicity or even a religion rather than an ethical commitment that is open to anyone – but there was no time, and I thought it might be misapprehended. But something amazing I have found (and checked with Elaine Pagels, who said it is true) everywhere in the Old Testament that God says the ‘chosen people’ thing, he is actually not saying ‘you are ethnically my chosen people and this (Israel) is the land I give you geographically). He is actually always saying really clearly a very different kind of covenant: IF you are ethical – visit the prisoner, shelter the orphan, welcome the stranger in your land — THEN you will be my people. So ‘my people’ is actually a PROCESS or a set of ethical actions, NOT an ethnicity — and presumably open to anyone and not conditioned by who your mom is. Major news flash I would say…and if we really understood this it would transform the middle east. Are we God’s people? Only if and when we behave justly, but then so is everyone else able to be God’s people..there seems to be in the Old Testament no such thing as an ethnic rather than ethical ‘chosen people’….or at least not in many many instances of the ‘covenant’ being specified …

So to continue: another moment that I was sorry to hear was when the question arose to Yehoshua — who you must understand was delightful, personable, caring, egalitarian, it is just these habits of mind are so deep — about language: why don’t Israelis more systematically learn Arabic? And he said: “We are the majority, so we don’t need Arabic. But Israeli Arabs are the minority so they need Hebrew.” I was sorry again to hear this — we don’t NEED Arabic? What a narrow view of ‘need’ — again I say this with great respect for Yehoshua in general. It is just that there is so much further to go.

Yehoshua then issued a kind of invitation to Israeli Arabs – a bit unclear because at first he said “Jewish people’ then ‘Israeli people’ — a kind of welcome, if they wanted to join the ‘Israeli (or Jewish) people.’ Not that he said he thought many would wish to, but he rather sweetly and a bit awkwardly made the gesture. Which I appreciate. But then I thought also – how colonizing — unconsciously. Is this the only option? And I thought of the conversation I had in my apartment once with a well-known media figure from Egypt and a friend of his who was an Egyptian activist. It took my breath away: these liberal and well educated young people said that they no longer wanted a ‘two state solution.’ They wanted a ‘one-state solution.’ And isn’t that what it should be ideally — one democracy, a secular democracy?

Another amazing thing that came out of Yehoshua’s talk was his point that there have been MANY Zionisms before and separate to this one, and that while this is the one that took hold that is kind of an accident, and that there were other Zionisms that were secular — or universalist…that could have ‘won’ historically. He also said that Jews choose diaspora because then they don’t have to deal with being confined by their fellow Jews in a state — that the have more freedom in diaspora. Fascinating and kind of true.

One last think I did not love: Yehoshua spoke of the Holocaust as different from every other massacre. In kind, existentially. Israelis often do this, so do Jews in general. I think this is a mistake. It may be the ‘biggest’ and most technological but is it ‘worse’ than four hundred years in slavery? Is it so different from other annihilations that were smaller just because Sierra Leone or Congo did not have the technology? Hate is hate, death is death, and I fear we do not create a 21st century ‘Jewishness’ by clinging to exceptionalism about our tragedy — it is exactly on a spectrum with every other genocide in history, I would argue.

So another event on Sunday was Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge neuroscientist who is doing leading edge work on the brain, talking about how they have found the ‘empathy loop’ in the human brain; and that you can see cruelty on an MRI — that early trauma (and ideology — and ‘us’ versus ‘them ideology) can ‘turn down’ the effectiveness of the brain’s empathy loop. Again, totally fascinating. So I asked about adult trauma – that is, when I visited child soldiers in Sierra Leone who had been forced to rape, amputate etc, they were often deliberately traumatized first even if they had never had trauma in their lives before, to ‘prepare’ them to do those things. And Mathis Chiroux whom you know on this page, the Afghanistan vet, has also written about systematic dehumanization on US army bases, for maybe the same reason. So if you traumatize people as adults, can you turn them into killing machines more easily? He did seem to suggest that this was possible though he confined his remarks to trauma in childhood. I do think that 9/11 hype works this way — and the holocaust does too re: Israel — that if people are traumatized then face an ideology that hardens their trauma into ‘us versus them’ it prepares them to do things that depend on a loss of empathy …

Finally: Then I presented: ‘Civil Rights and the London Riots.” I drew on the citizen reporting here about the riots, that proved that up and down the UK police had been told to ‘stand down.’ I also described the documented role of provocateurs in civil unrest globally and my suspicions about how neatly the riots started and stopped, and changed the media cycle which had been drawing closer to a major scandal in the Police and in the Government.

A first questioner said: “I work in the Magistrate’s office and I can tell you that the people charged were ‘real rioters.”

I told her I did not question that — I wondered about escalation or management of social unrest for a political purpose. Why were the police told to stand down while neighborhoods were destroyed?

She said, “they were told to stand down this time because of the violence that had resulted from the student riots last time.”

It was a very interesting answer. Do I find it persuasive? No — and as she spoke, I wondered if even she found it persuasive, seen in the light that I was suggesting it be investigated. But I recommended that UK reporters follow up and find out more about that very weird (to me) directive: ‘stand down’ because LAST time some kids got hurt in student riots? Is that plausible? As neighborhood after neighborhood burns?

I also have a comprehensive ‘ten steps to fascism’ tailored for the UK now, and ask my UK community to take it and run with it — one audience member very wisely added the example of the ‘cat’ story (a cat was cited by Tories recently as the ridiculous excess of Human Rights legislation that allowed an immigrant to stay in the country — he actually was in a serious relationship and the cat was taken by the magistrate as evidence of the commitment). Why is targeting Human Rights law at the top of the Cameron agenda, with everything else faced by the UK? Also scary: news stories that the SAS is building a giant base in the heart of London — with military hardware of all kinds — to ‘fight al qaeda’ during the OLYMPICS….and a teenager has been forbidden to fly because of ‘hate speech’ — again I kept warning my UK audience: they start with the ‘other’ …

The organizations to support in Britain are Reprieve and Justice. Please add more if I am missing some.

Links – UK Diary 2011
UK Diary: November 2nd & 3rd, 2011
UK Diary: November 4th & 5th
UK Diary: November 6th, 2011

FRIDAY

Friday I joined a group in a private club after a day of meetings. The group was off the record but there were people from politics, media, etc.

There is something important to understand about the way power works globally: I have tried to explain this before: there are many theories online about nefarious secretive groups. Most of these are nonsense. It would be really useful for democracy-building if people just understood the elements of basic cronyism: meaning: at a certain point up the ladder of influence, everyone is two phone calls away from everyone else, and everyone is doing favors whenever possible for everyone else. So you don’t need a sneaky cabal with some hidden agenda. Whatever you want to do, if you are in power or close to power, is two legitimate phone calls away – either you went to college with that person or someone you know knows him or is in some social relationship to him.

It is really important for citizens to understand this because it helps them direct their energies more effectively: ‘crony capitalism’ (crony media, crony law) is a really important concept. Don’t waste your time with hidden-society theories — aim all of your efforts at transparency and accountability in terms of laws that disclose and can regulate who is doing what with whom, and who benefits.

SATURDAY

Saturday morning I arrive in Cambridge. Beautiful misty day. I check in to a spectacular college, founded by Henry 8th. Massive court, fountain, grass quadrangles — the same grass quadrangles that Virginia Woolf criticized in Three Guineas (or A Room of One’s Own? sorry I am jet-lagged) because the only people who can walk on the grass are the dons. I was very kindly taken to see an incredible private garden backing onto the river Cam by one of my hosts, who is a don, and his wife, and for Virginia Woolf’s sake I took a few (legal, because of my host) steps on the five hundred year old lawn.

The future is definitely Chinese and Korean if you look at who is at Cambridge: like Oxford, the next generation is very heavily Chinese and Indian (and at Cambridge, Korean). I wonder what the connections are — is Oxbridge seeking out these kids or are they battling to apply? Also masses of middle-class Chinese young people are cruising excitedly through the streets as tourists. This is really fascinating to me — why is a pilgrimage to Cambridge so high on the list of the newly affluent in China? What does it mean to them? It is certainly a sign to me of the need to train these kids systematically in democracy and civil society at these and other institutions — it is a great opportunity to make sure the future, which is Chinese and Indian, will also have a chance of being democratic.

Saturday evening, drinks at King’s College for the Limmud, an event where I spoke which is Jewish-themed. Usually I never do ethnically themed events unless they have an inclusive mssion and this one does. I met Prof Boyarin from Berkeley, and told him that I saw all these web links of hate quotes attributed to the Talmud. He said that they were taken out of context and he would send me information to share with my community. I also met a couple of sweet Israelis now working in Cambridge. I asked why Arabic was not being taught systemically alongside Hebrew in Israeli schools — I always think what a rich civil society we would have built up by now in Israel/Palestine if people could just communicate and build links separate from politics. They said that some Arabic is being taught intensively but it is not colloquial it is formal — possibly so that the next generation of intelligence officers can surveil the Arabic press and listen in, etc. I was sad about this missed opportunity.

Links – UK Diary 2011
UK Diary: November 2nd & 3rd, 2011
UK Diary: November 4th & 5th
UK Diary: November 6th, 2011

taken out as always when I say that for the ‘pat down.” But this time a new question: “Do you have any sore or sensitive parts of your body?” Sensitive parts of my body? Silly question, I thought, did this nice lady never take eighth grade health class? “My genitals,” I answered, “but I gather I am not legally permitted to ask you to avoid them.” Then halleluiah SOMETHING CHANGED: she gave the rest of me a thorough pat down but avoided second and third base!!!! I went through O’ Hare airport for once UNMOLESTED! So I think this new question that seemed standardized may be a response to citizen outcry and a way for TSA to AVOID touching people’s privates without actually appearing to back down… which proves yet again that the whole molestation requirement in the first place was nothing but KINKY TERROR-HYPE THEATRE with no actual security effect. So now when you go through and want to avoid the x ray machines just say “my genitals are sensitive” (or you can try “I have suppurating syphilitic wounds,” and see what happens) and maybe you too can pass unmolested!!!

Today was a good day.

UPDATE OCT. 20 9:52am – update from Naomi
I wanted to send a thank you note to your group (ed. note- Naomi is referring to the demonstrators who were there the night of her arrest) and to the NLG observers who came to look for us at the first precinct. I will do a more eloquent version when I can but please pass on to them all how grateful we are and also that I do believe this kind of looking out for one another does help a great deal to achieve more transparency. Thank you all so much.

UPDATE OCT. 19 11:15pm – update from Naomi
So important I am reposting it and confirmed by my contacts in the film business: even filming crews must REQUEST pedestrians to cross the street, they have no right to compel them: ` if one looks into the auspices of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, one of the buzz banners used right on their homepage is “Free Locations, Free Police Assistance”. Clearly, attracting location usage is very big business for the city. The NYPD is clearly mandated with making life easy for those choosing the city as a location shoot or premiere event. What is also interesting (again, if one chooses to look into things a little more deeply) is that the Code of Conduct/Keys to the City regulations (to which every permit holder must agree to adhere) specifically require that the permit holder itself must ensure safe pedestrian passage through the subject site.’ dang you are good reporters.

UPDATE OCT. 19 11:10pm – update from Naomi
Excellent and accurate piece on Huffington Post that confirms that Huffpost did not have anything to do with the arrests and, far more significantly, that NEITHER DID THE PERMIT in question which had no stipulation about clearing peaceful pedestrians. On the contrary, the permit in question requires pedestrian access. Link: Author Naomi Wolf Speaks Out About Her Arrest At Occupy Wall Street
Protest

earlier update:

A better smoking gun! I just learned from an informed source that the permit that the cops invoked as a grounds for arresting my partner and me for walking peacefully on a public sidewalk was one that the Huffington Post had secured (appropriately) for a possible red carpet and pylons, which they did not choose to set up. They were apparently not informed about the arrests at the time – arrests whose legitimacy was ascribed to “their” permit — and of course this kind of permit for a red-carpet-type event on sidewalks says nothing about preventing pedestrian access or giving police powers to arrest pedestrians who step onto the sidewalk. I have been at many such red carpet events and pedestrians pass peacefully by on the sidewalk — the red carpet entity does not have the right to “control the sidewalk for a number of hours” as one officer mis-described the powers of this permit to me.

UPDATE OCT. 19 7:13pm – update from admin
Here’s the link to the MSNBC interview Naomi did earlier today: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/#44963874

UPDATE OCT. 19 3:56pm – update from admin
Journalist Glenn Gabel sent us a video that he put together that puts last night into context as far as what was happening on the street at the time Naomi was arrested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld_mpgvagUc — Thanks for sharing that Glenn!

UPDATE OCT. 19 3:24pm – update from admin
Joan Hamburg podcast is live, hour two starts at 18:50 : http://www.wor710.com/pages/8386067.php

UPDATE OCT. 19 12:32pm – update from admin
Guardian piece is live: Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street

UPDATE OCT. 19 11:36am – update from admin

1) Please note, Naomi was arrested for “resisting a lawful order” and not for disorderly conduct as previously noted. This distinction has been corrected throughout the notes below.
2) Naomi will be on the Joan Hamburg show at 1:30pm

UPDATE OCT. 19 9:55am – more notes from Naomi

- Please note that I will be on MSNBC at eleven thirty (eastern) today.

- Also: some press reports say that I was arrested because I ignored police warnings to get off the sidewalk or that I was arrested for using a megaphone without a permit. Both of these are untrue. I told the protesters that the NYC permit requirement that states that using a megaphone is illegal (though the officer who arrested me used a megaphone) is an unverifiable untransparent requirement because it is basically made up by the administration, permits can be denied with no recourse for any reason, and that we have the right to freedom of speech and assembly. I also did not ‘ignore’ police warnings to get off the street. I DISAGREED with them because I knew the law and I knew that they were misinterpreting or misrepresenting the permit in question. There is no requirement in the permit to ‘get off the street’ if you are not obstructing traffic.

In a real civil society you can’t get arrested if you are obeying the law. I was. My understanding of the permit in question was the legal and accurate one and the police’s interpretation of it was not legal and not accurate.

- So I gather from a note below at police are saying the event had a ‘street activities permit’ which allows the entity to ‘control’ the sidewalk for an number of hours. I have never heard of such a thing and if it exists it is a serious issue for a civil society. Can someone please call NYPD spokesperson’s office and ask them to send or scan a copy of that permit? It is a public document and citizens have the right to see it. 270 Hudson Street. Huffington Post Gamechangers event. At the very least we need a bill to ensure that the permits police claim are in force are transparent available documents, present and available to protesters and their lawyers to check at the site, and that they can’t just make parameters up on the spot.

UPDATE OCT. 19 9:48am – video of the arrest

Here is video of the arrest. You see that I was standing completely still and speaking very calmly to the officer, on a sidewalk that the permit specified protesters could march if they did not obstruct foot traffic which they were not; they were in single file and there was about twelve feet on either side of them/us. My arrest was for resisting a lawful order (ed. note- revised from “disorderly conduct”). PLease decide for yourself if my completely still position, calm voice and compliance with what I knew to be the terms of the permit can be construed in that way:

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UPDATE OCT. 19 2:55am

:: Please note: Below are Naomi’s initial reactions to her arrest the evening of October 18th. It is a compilation of several posts she made to her Facebook page after being released from custody. A more detailed piece will follow. ::

- I have been released from custody. I was completely complying with the law and the permit as it was described to me by police and I was arrested for standing lawfully on the sidewalk. I will post more tomorrow. Thank you for your messages of support.

- Thank you all again for your support. Given the coverage, I feel that I should put on record a bit of what happened, full details in the am. The protesters were being told that they needed to leave the sidewalk outside of the Huffington Post event because “Huffington Post had a permit” to control the use of the sidewalk. I have a chapter in Give Me Liberty on NYC permits so I knew that could not be accurate. Sidewalks are public spaces and can’t be leased by private entities. I asked for a copy of the permit. A spokesman finally acknowledged that the permit allowed for pedestrian access as long as it did not obstruct foot traffic on the sidewalk. (more)

- I said, okay, we won’t obstruct pedestrian traffic, we will just walk. SO I invited the OWS protesters to come back from across the street and walk with me in a single file so no one obstructed the flow of pedestrians. A phalanx of white-shirted police then approached us and with a megaphone said, “you are disobeying a lawful order to disperse and will be arrested. I approached (respectfully and peacefully) the officer with the megaphone and said I was confused: the permit allowed us to walk if we did not obstruct traffic and we were not doing so. He stood before me and said “Will you get out of my way?” I did not say anything but I could not fall back because I knew he was misinterpreting the law. The sidewalks were being properly handled by the protesters even according to the restrictive permit. I did not step aside so he indicated that I should be cuffed, and my hands were cuffed behind me with plastic handcuffs. My partner and I were taken, cuffed, in a police van to I believe the seventh precinct (they had planned to take us to the first, I am so grateful to protesters who appeared on our behalf at the first) where we were held in separate cells for about half an hour. My cell had blood or feces on the wall. The staff were very courteous. But I was told that I would be released with a summons but that if I rejoined the protesters and got arrested my fingerprints would be taken, the sergeant gestured at a camera and said my photo would be taken, it would all be entered into a federal database and follow me forever. He also said if I spoke I should be careful not to say anything that could be construed as ‘inciting a riot.’ I said hadn’t broken the law — my summons was for resisting a lawful order (ed. note- revised from “disorderly conduct”). Many witnesses will confirm I stood perfectly still and addressed the officer with great courtesy. I said that we hadn’t broken the law according to the permit in question. He said that when an officer deems a situation as safety issue, it trumps the permit. I asked, then how can any situation not be subject to an officer deeming it a “safety issue’? He did not explain but gave me a section of the criminal code to look up. I was arrested for resisting a lawful order (ed. note- revised from “disorderly conduct”) although my conduct was peaceful respectful law-abiding and orderly. I was arrested for not backing down when a police officer told me contrary to what I knew about the law and the permit process that a private entity owned the sidewalk. He was mistaken and I was correct. I behaved entirely lawfully and my arrest was unlawful.

http://www.facebook.com/naomi.wolf.author

PHOTO COURTESY OF @MikeShanePhoto