"They took about four hours to search the house. I don't know how many boxes they carried out. They gave me a receipt, but I refused to sign it. I said, "I don't know what you've taken.'"
Sundin said it was "immediately clear" to her that she was being targeted for her antiwar activism, and, in particular, her activity against US foreign policy in Colombia and the Middle East.
"The US is heavily involved in Colombia," Sundin said. "They've been building military bases and they've been funding the Colombian government's war against its own people. It's the third largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world.
"Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. And the Palestinian people have lived for generations--sixty-plus years--without an internationally recognized state. Their homes are bulldozed, they're second-class citizens with no right to participate in the political process. And in places like Gaza bombs fall from the sky."
Sundin said she is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a founding member of the Anti-War Committee of the Twin Cities, and a member of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) Local 3800. She is a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Sundin's opposition to US foreign policy took her to Iraq in 1998, where the sanctions regime imposed on the country by the Clinton administration and its allies had created a humanitarian disaster.
"We went to a children's hospital where I was most struck by the empty shelves in the pharmacy and the stories that doctors shared of a health care system that had been the best in the Middle East, but had been paralyzed by the sanctions and the war," she said. "So you had children that died because there weren't IV fluids to give them. You had people who died because they couldn't get inhalers for asthma, antibiotics, heart medicine. These things just weren't available there" The most striking thing I saw was Al Ameriya, which was a bomb shelter that was destroyed by two US smart bombs in 1991."
Sundin said she does not know what sort of case the government intends to make against her. The search warrant indicates the FBI may well seek criminal prosecution based on the "Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," which, in effect, proscribes political speech in support of organizations the US president defines as "terrorist."
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