Uhuru Solidarity Movement condemns Obama’s war and torture of African and Arab people – from Guantanamo to U.S. prisons, from Libya to Philadelphia!

Calling all progressive Euro-Americans to come to the Uhuru Solidarity Movement National Convention on June 4 and 5, 2011 in Philadelphia, PA: “Resistance is the Future! Solidarity with African Liberation!”

On Monday, April 25, two reports were released – both vividly demonstrating the depth of the brutality with which the Obama administration is carrying out and intensifying the U.S. aggression and warfare against African and Arab peoples, inside the U.S. and worldwide.

President Obama, promising “hope” and “change” in his election campaign, has in fact escalated the war on Arab and African people at home and abroad. He has initiated the first war by AFRICOM on Africa, with the bombing of Libya and the brutal murder of the Libyan people.

It is Obama who has intensified the attacks on the people of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Colombia and the Israeli genocide on the Palestinian people in Gaza. It is Obama that is attacking the African community in the U.S. with increasing police violence, increasing direct military occupation and mass imprisonment of young Africans.

Guantanamo leaks lift lid on world’s most controversial prison

The Guardian newspaper released an article titled: “Guantanamo leaks lift lid on world’s most controversial prison,” based on the leaking of 759 “secret” U.S. military dossiers covering almost every prisoner since the U.S. prison camp was opened in 2002.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-files-lift-lid-prison

This report reveals the real criminality of the neocolonial Obama regime that carried out mass torture of the 779 mostly Arab men captured and held at Guantanamo in the name of the “war on terror.”

It states that over two years after Obama promised to close Guantanamo, 172 people are still there, unable to even stand trial as they have been so badly tortured over a prolonged period.

It speaks of outrageous rights abuses inflicted on the captives, the vast majority of whom were brought there on ridiculous grounds, including an 89-year-old Afghan villager with dementia. He was brought to the concentration camp to be interrogated about some “suspicious phone numbers.” There is also the 14-year-old boy, tortured for his “possible knowledge of Taliban local leaders.”

The exposé showed that of the 779 prisoners at Guantanamo, the overwhelming majority, 606, were cleared and released by the U.S. due to “no intelligence showing any threat to the U.S. and its allies.”

This rate of false imprisonment is similar to that of the “Stop and Frisk” police policy. In Philadelphia, a quarter of a million people, mostly young African men, were stopped and harassed by the police in 2009 alone. Less than three percent of those was found to have weapons, which was the rationale for this gross abuse of African people’s democratic rights.

Systemic torture of Africans imprisoned in Pennsylvania

The second paper released on April 25 documents the chilling and systemic torture of Africans imprisoned in Pennsylvania’s state prison, SCI Huntingdon.
http://hrcoalition.org/sites/default/files/Unity%20and%20Courage-SCI%20Huntingdon%20Report.pdf

The Human Rights Coalition based this report on a year-long investigation and over 1000 pages of letters, grievances, affidavits and testimonies from prisoners. It shows the courageous resistance by prisoners in solitary confinement in Huntingdon’s Restricted Housing Unit, where they faced the most unimaginable torture and degradation.

It describes the “culture of torture and terror” fostered by the guards and endorsed by the prison administration and the PA Department of Corrections. Africans were deprived of food, water, clothing, bedding and hygiene items. They were starved, were threatened with death, beaten and tortured for any form of resistance.

In September and October 2010, prisoners organized a protest of these conditions. Guards sprayed them with a toxic chemical, “O.C.”, and left them to burn with no water to wash it off.

As horrendous and appalling as the treatment of Africans and others in PA prisons revealed by the report is, we can’t be surprised by it.

We saw how many of the U.S. military guards who tortured Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were trained in PA prisons like SCI Greene and SCI Huntingdon.

U.S. torture techniques are practiced and perfected on African people kidnapped from cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and held in the dungeons of U.S. prisons, U.S. concentration camps.

The Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) absolutely condemns this collective punishment of African, Arab, Mexican and all oppressed people by the U.S. government.

We must stand up as white people living in the belly of imperialism and defend the right of the African community and all others to organize and resist the colonial terror being waged every day against their people.

In February we saw the military occupation and siege of a 33-block radius of the African community on the south side of St. Petersburg, FL, the location of the national office of the Uhuru Movement after a cop was killed. This was no different than how the U.S. marines operate in Afghanistan.

Homeland Security, FBI, SWAT teams and many other police agencies carried out door-to-door searches. They stopped cars and busses going in and out of the community and stuck guns in children’s faces. The police didn’t even know who they were looking for, but the entire African community was locked down and under siege. This is colonial occupation!

We have to say that just as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and throughout the Middle East and North Africa have the right to resist their poverty and oppression at the hands of U.S.-backed regimes, so do African people in the U.S. have the right to resist.

We have to recognize that U.S. occupation of communities of Arab and African people from Afghanistan to Philadelphia, and kidnapping, imprisonment and torture of prisoners, is part of the U.S. colonial war on African and other oppressed peoples worldwide.

The Uhuru Movement shows that imperialism is in the deepest crisis of its existence

The U.S. and imperialist economy can only exist on stolen resources – oil, gold, diamonds, bauxite, coltan – and all the wealth and minerals stolen daily by U.S. corporations, the World Bank and IMF from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

Today, the crisis is deepening because oppressed people are fighting fiercely to control their own resources and regain their self-determination – from Iraq, to Haiti, and inside the U.S.

Obama has the largest military budget of all time

In a desperate attempt to control the world’s resources, Obama has the largest military budget of all time: $700 billion. The U.S. government spends $200 billion every year on the war on African people in the U.S.

Philadelphia alone spends $1.1 billion a year on police, prisons and courts. This is counterinsurgency war that builds the trillion dollar prison economy by terrorizing a whole young generation of African people – from places like north and southwest Philly!

Call to build a real anti-war movement

We have the urgent responsibility to build a real anti-war movement from the white community in solidarity with African people’s just resistance and liberation struggle!

We condemn ALL U.S. colonial wars and call for all other white people like ourselves who are tired of hearing these atrocities that the U.S. government carries out in our name, and who are compelled to do something to change this reality, to join Uhuru Solidarity Movement and come to the USM National Convention on June 4 and 5 in Philadelphia.

The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is the organization of Euro-Americans or white people who organize under the leadership of the African-led Uhuru Movement for reparations and material solidarity with the struggle for African liberation, in the U.S. and worldwide.

It is the ONLY organization in the world where we can truly make a difference because we work under the strategy and leadership of the rising African Revolution.

Being active in USM is how we can change our historic relationship as colonial oppressors of African and other people.

This is the only way we can start to reverse the history of imperialism, where we live off the wealth and power created from the enslavement of African people and the genocide of Indigenous people – who are still captive in the other concentration camps, the so-called reservations, living in poverty and dying at an average age of 44 years!

Come to the Uhuru Solidarity Movement Convention – June 4 and 5 in Philadelphia

This year’s Convention will feature

• Keynote speaker Omali Yeshitela, founder and leader of the Uhuru Movement and Chairman of the African Socialist International
• Diop Olugbala, International President of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement
• Glen Ford, Executive Editor of BlackAgendaReport.com and member of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations
• Nellie Bailey, Director of the Harlem Tenants Council (also member of Black is Back Coalition)
• Pam Africa of MOVE and the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
• Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee
  

Learn more about the Convention on the USM website. Register by emailing registration@uhurusolidarity.org.

STAND UP AGAINST U.S. WARS AND TORTURE!

ATTEND THE UHURU SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT CONVENTION!

GET ORGANIZED TO PARTICIPATE IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE FUTURE OF RESISTANCE AND LIBERATION FOR AFRICAN AND ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES!

UHURU! REPARATIONS NOW!

Links:
• Learn more and JOIN the Uhuru Solidarity Movement: www.uhurusolidarity.org.
• Uhuru News: www.uhurunews.com
• Black is Back Coalition: www.blackisbackcoalition.org

A Response

This is in response to Renee.

Thank you so much for all of your very thoughtful input and please excuse me for the time it has taken me to respond. I really appreciate your discussion.

As you probably know from looking at our blog I am part of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, a predominately white organization that was formed by the African People’s Socialist Party that leads the Uhuru Movement.

The Uhuru Movement organizes African people all over the world for the liberation and reunification of Africa as the birthright of African people everywhere. The solidarity committee organizes in white communities and among other people who want to become allies of the African Liberation Movement.

The Uhuru Movement understands that African people everywhere are one people, forcibly dispersed by the slave trade and that Africa is the birthright of all African people everywhere. Like the Palestinian people they believe in the right to return to their homeland.

Just recently the Uhuru Movement held a conference in Nairobi organizing the East African division of the African Socialist International. There will be a North American conference in Washington, DC on May 22, 23. More information is available at www.uhurunews.com Please also see www.apscuhuru.org where we have several power point slide show presentations on various issues.

I want to address two of the many good points that you make.

1. Yes, we must always use any political space Obama might provide to organize against imperialism, but I do not believe we are “safer,” because imperialism is in a deep crisis and is desperate. Besides, if a few of us inside the U.S. are less under fire it is because the hell has been intensified for just about everybody else, including the African and indigenous communities here.

As you point out they are closing Guantanamo but opening new dungeons inside the U.S. They just captured a 15 year old “pirate” who will be tried as an adult and will be sent to one of those places for life. The child was brought from Somalia where the U.S. destroyed the government, steals the oil, dumps toxic waste into the seas and plunged the population into near starvation. So who’s the “pirate”?

Obama’s “against torture” but will not prosecute anyone for 266 waterboardings of two people.

Obama surrounds himself with more Zionists than any government outside of Tel Aviv. He does not address the brutal containment policies against oppressed communities inside the U.S. Policies that have nearly 7.5 million people tied to the prison system, three-fourths of them African and Mexican.

As you point out Obama is representing the ruling class. He may have a somewhat different approach than Bush but represents the same parasitic system built on slavery, genocide and colonialism.

2. Regarding the question of the cops getting killed in Oakland:

While I would always support the organized liberation movement in whatever form it takes in Palestine or other colonized territories, I would also support an unorganized Palestinian child who killed an occupying solider with a rock or even a Palestinian drunkard or a thief who blasted a soldier or a settler.

The whole population is under the thumb of a murderous, vicious occupation that destroys the independence, freedom, future, economy and social cohesion of a people. A lot of people have social contradictions in conquered societies because the divisions and societal breakdowns are part of the colonizers’ counterinsurgency plan. The British said about Africa: “divide and rule,” and they did so brutally.

Some soldiers may be good fathers, nice guys etc., but they still have a job and that is to carry out the orders of the occupying state power against the oppressed people.

So, yes, I would always deeply understand the resistance of African people in the U.S. as justified. Resistance by any means necessary, no matter what form it takes, individualized, spontaneous or organized. Oppressed people have a right to resist and they may not always have the luxury to understand even what they are doing.

African working class communities live in unmitigated hell under martial law in the U.S. You probably saw on video the blatant murder of Oscar Grant as he was shot in the back in a subdued position by BART police.

But what about Caspar Banjo, 71, a famous African artist killed last year by police in Oakland, and Gary King and Jody Woodfox, and Anita Gay, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallou and countless others killed by police?

Kathryn Johnston, 92, was shot by drug cops who broke down her door. They left her to bleed to death and planted drugs in her basement in Atlanta.

Very few murderous cops have even lost their jobs for their crimes, much less stood trial.

In New York city last year 400,000 African and Latino men were stopped and frisked by police. There’s no such thing as “being good, avoiding trouble.” For every African woman pregnant with a baby boy there is a prison bed already planned.

And speaking of drugs. The U.S. government imposes the drugs on the community, and the government and the banks make the vast majority of the profits. That is well-documented by people like Gary Webb, even PBS Frontline documentaries and in many other places. You can also watch some of our slide shows or read my book, Overturning the Culture of Violence.

Long standing businesses in black communities all over the U.S. were destroyed after the Black Power Movement of the 60s. There are no jobs in African communities and real unemployment is 50% and higher. Nobody wants to grow up to be a drug dealer, but people are forced to put food on the table through a penny-ante trade, while white collar people make the real money on illegal drugs but never get their fingernails dirty.

Then they bring in prisons with the largest prison population in the entire world by far. Where are prisons? They are in rural white communities for the most part and have long served as economic stimulus for country towns. In fact, prisons are the third largest industry in rural America today.

Towns all over the U.S. are vying for prisons for jobs, development, etc.—all at the expense of African and Mexican people incarcerated with discriminatory sentencing, Three Strikes and Jim Crow drug laws. Seventy-five percent of drug use and sales are by white people, but most of those who get sent to prison are African and Mexican. White people get rehab; Africans get 30 years to life.

I never knew Lovelle Mixon but I can bet that he wanted what most people want: a good job, a family, a nice place to stay. But he had nothing but grinding poverty and a dead end everywhere he turned. I read that he said that he said he did not want to go back to prison.

We must recognize that Occupied Palestine is right here, Iraq is right here, Afghanistan is right here, that there is a colony in every urban inner city that is at its boiling point and the resistance of the people will take place.

The question of torture: national liberation is the real issue

One of Obama’s first actions as president this past week was to issue an executive order mandating the closure of the Guantanamo prison and making the statement, “the United States will not torture.”

Many people are appeased by this move, but if we are truly progressive we must go further.

The question of torture cannot be taken out of context of the larger issue: the U.S. has no right to invade other countries, occupy them, murder the people, steal their resources and take away the people’s self-determination, for the benefit of America and Americans.

When the U.S. or any imperialist power launches acts of domination, be they military invasions, covert actions, political attacks or deadly economic embargoes, the country, nation or people have a right to resist the hostile, colonizing force, to defend their sovereignty, to fight back on every possible front!

Under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Gen. Alexander Haig declared that henceforth all freedom fighters will be known as “terrorists.” Thus began the concerted U.S. campaign to criminalize all anti-colonial forces, for which the revolutionary era of the 1960s was so well known.

For us to simply focus on the issue of torture and not the human right to national liberation is to say that thieves should treat their victims better when they force their way into someone’s house and steal everything in it.

It is also hypocritical not to demand an end to torture of oppressed people inside the U.S!

Despite Obama’s rhetoric about “post racial” America, there are in fact two Americas. There’s white America and there are the “others.” There are colonies inside this country.

Indigenous people, to whom land this rightfully belongs, are forced to live a Gaza-like existence on their own stolen land, on “reservations” with life expectancies in their 40s.

Indigenous resistance fighter Leonard Pelletier, who has been held as a political prisoner for a generation, was just recently beaten and tortured in prison.

There are nearly two and a half million people in prisons in the U.S., most of them African, Mexican or other impoverished oppressed people.

Mandatory minimums and discriminatory sentencing have millions of black people in and out of prisons—many locked up for life—for things most white people never serve a day for.

African communities live under martial law and war conditions imposed by a government policy of police containment that is popularly endorsed by the majority of white people.

Where is Obama’s condemnation of policeman Jon Burge in Obama’s home base of Chicago? Obama has yet to make a statement about the terror inflicted on hundreds of African men by Burge’s forces in Chicago for over 20 years.

Locked up inside the brutal U.S. prisons African and Mexican people are regularly tortured. Pelican Bay and Corcoran prisons in California are notorious. Angola in Louisiana and Parchman Farm in Mississippi are brutal plantation work camps continuing the system of slavery.

In every state African men, women and children are locked up and brutalized more often than in any other country on the planet, including those puppet countries that carry out U.S. torture through “extraordinary rendition.”

Some of the army guards at Abu Ghraib were prison guards in predominately African prisons in Pennsylvania. They were well trained in torture methods in U.S. prisons for their Iraq duty.

Here too, the question is not how to wage a nicer war against the black community, but to support the right of African, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples to resist, as Malcolm X said by any means necessary.