The criminalization of political opposition in America

Cecily McMillan faces a jail term of up to seven years in prison because she inadvertently elbowed a New York City cop as he was manhandling her during the police operation that broke up a demonstration in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park on March 17, 2012. This occurred at the tail end of the Occupy Wall Street protests against corporate greed and social inequality. Sentencing is set for May 19.

The trial judge barred presentation of evidence on McMillan's injuries while allowing the prosecution to show an anonymous, grainy YouTube video of the incident, which, according to the prosecution, supported the police version of events. So flagrant is the injustice in McMillan's case that nine of the twelve jurors who convicted her wrote to the judge asking that the she be given probation rather than a prison sentence.

In the NATO 3 case, the victims of government frame-up are three young men, Brian Church, 22, Brent Betterly, 26, and Jared Chase, 28. They were sentenced to five, six and eight years in prison respectively. Their "crime" was to be taken in by two undercover cops who engaged them in drunken discussions prior to a May, 2012 demonstration at a NATO summit in Chicago about throwing Molotov cocktails into police stations, an Obama election campaign office, and the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The three were induced to fill with gasoline some of the bottles they had emptied of beer, but none of the alleged weapons ever left the apartment in which they were staying. No evidence was presented that the three actually planned to go through with the attacks. That, however, did not stop the prosecution from branding them as terrorists and seeking convictions for violating an Illinois state law modeled on the federal Patriot Act. A local jury acquitted them of the terror charges, but convicted them of lesser counts of possession of incendiary devices -- the beer bottles -- for which they received substantial prison terms.

These frame-ups follow a pattern that has now become familiar, where individuals are targeted either because they are politically active or vulnerable to provocation, and prosecuted for actions that are either fabricated out of whole cloth, or would never have occurred in the absence of incitement by police agents.

Among the most prominent recent cases:

* The 2010 imprisonment of Lynne Stewart, the attorney who represented the blind sheik, Omar Abdul-Rahman, who was convicted of conspiring to bomb targets in New York City. Stewart was convicted on charges of carrying messages from her client to the public, in violation of prison regulations, and spent four years in prison before being released early this year, at age 74, facing impending death due to cancer.

* The September 2010 raids on homes and offices of members of the Twin Cities Antiwar Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Minneapolis and Chicago, where one alleged "offense" was that some of those involved in the group had visited Colombia and occupied Palestine. The Obama administration justified the raids under the "material support for terrorism" provisions of the Patriot Act.

* The conviction and imprisonment in 2012 of five young men described as "anarchists" in Cleveland, under circumstances nearly identical to the NATO 3 case, for an alleged plot to bomb a highway bridge. The "plot" was devised by FBI agents using a confidential informant. The sting operation targeted people active in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It required six months to convince the five young men to agree to buy what they were told were explosives from undercover operatives, leading to the arrests. At least two of the arrested men were said to have mental problems. They were sentenced to between 6 and 11.5 years.

* The July 2012 FBI raids on the homes of anti-Wall Street protesters in Portland, Oregon and Seattle and Olympia, Washington. As in the 2010 raids, dozens of heavily armed federal agents smashed down doors and used stun grenades, pulling their victims from their beds at gunpoint, then seizing computers, literature, banners and other explicitly political materials. A warrant presented at one home cited the need to confiscate "anti-government or anarchist literature or material."

The political significance of all these cases is that they were actions carried out by the Obama administration and had either the direct participation or the political blessing of the FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies of the federal government.