April 8-10th, 2011. Reed College, Portland, OR

Posted by countercoin on March 15, 2011 · 2 Comments 

Keynote Events

Film screening: COINTELPRO 101

(4/8) 5pm-Vollum Lounge
COINTELPRO was the FBI’s counterintelligence program used to crush domestic liberation movements during the 1960s and 1970s.  This film documents the state’s tactics through interviews with those who lived through this war on dissent.

Elaine Brown: On Memory and Resistance

(4/8) 8pm-Vollum Lecture Hall
Elaine Brown was a leader in the Black Panther Party and saw first hand how the state functions to destroy libratory social movements.  Brown’s lecture will connect this history with her work in supporting the 2010 Georgia prison strike, the largest prison strike in US history.

April 9th: Anthropology’s Dissidents: Roberto Gonzales, John Kelly, David Price, & John Allison

(4/9) 8pm-Vollum Lecture Hall
The US military is currently appropriating anthropology as a tool of counterinsurgency.  A panel of leading rebel anthropologists will discuss what is at stake and how to build resistance inside and outside the academy.

Presentations
Saturday April 9th

Session #1

Counterinsurgency and the Police

Kristian Williams and Will Munger
9-10:30am
Eliot 414
In the first part of this presentation, author Kristian Williams will describe the historical transfer of counterinsurgency theory, strategy, and technique, from the U.S. military to the domestic police and back again.  In the second part, Will Munger will present a contemporary case study, drawn from his thesis research on the collaboration between counterinsurgency experts at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Salinas Police Department.

The Curious Case of Connor Cash

Conner Cash & Kevin Van Meter
9-10:30am
Eliot 103
Ten years ago the FBI arrested Conor Cash during what is now referred to the Green Scare.  Four years of charges were followed by a two-week trail, a few important developments in the case and case law, and a jury acquittal in less than two hours.  Cash one of the only “Green Scare” defendants who is not in jail and there are a number of important reasons for this beyond his innocence. Cash and Van Meter – one of the core support group members at the time – will provide a chronology of the case, describe the surrounding environment, and detail the support campaign toward providing lessons for current political organizing in general and political prisoner support work in particular.  This is the first time either has spoken publicly about the case.

Session #2

Insurrectionary-counter to Counterinsurgency

David Cunningham, Anti-Poverty Committee, Coast Salish territories

10:35-12:05pm

Eliot 414

Over the last decade the Anti-Poverty Committee has been in direct confrontation with the state. Consequently a campaign of counter-insurgency has been implemented to neutralize various struggles, ranging from undercover cops to states of emergency.  To continue agitating, new political realities had to be created- so as not to be captured by the apparatuses of control. We maintain that empire is in a mode of perpetual state of
emergency and responds to all social conflict with its methods of counter-insurgency. It is our duty to understand this unity and to destroy it. Our own choice is to fight autonomously, and to this end counter the state with the insurrectionary potentialities that exist in our day-to-day struggles.

“My Year with the Military”

John Allison Ex-member of the US Army’s Human Terrain System
10:35-12:05pm
Eliot 103
John Allison is an anthropologist who did his doctoral thesis research in the Afghan Hindu Kush before the forty year war began. In 2009 he had his first return to the military since he was John Allison, SP-4, RA19579701 during his tour in Korea, 1958-9. During 2009-10 he had new experiences with the US Military both at Fort Irwin where he directed the cultural resource program, and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where, as a contracted social scientist, your Department of Defense – at great cost to you - trained him for duty with a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan.
He resigned from the program after 4 months when the final practicum, the MARDEX exercise was beginning and Allison understood that COIN was, literally, anti-American.
He requests attendees read the following articles before his presentation.
http://zeroanthropology.net/all-posts/the-leavenworth-diary-double-agent-anthropologist-inside-the-human-terrain-system/

Grand Juries: Practical Tools for Conspiracy.

Carrie Feldman

10:35-12:05pm
Vollum CC126
This presentation will analyze the use of grand juries and conspiracy charges as tools to extend the prosecutorial power of the state, with a focus on their use against radicals and dissidents. We will explore the strategies and history of grand jury resistance, as well as practical tools for supporting targets of state repression.

Carrie Feldman has worked with radical legal and prisoner support groups in the Twin Cities for a number of years. In 2009, she was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury that was investigating Animal Liberation Front actions, and spent four months in jail for refusing to cooperate.

Session #3

Eric McDavid and Marie Mason:  Case Studies in Repression

1-2:30 pm
Elliot 414
Eric McDavid and Marie Mason are two anarchist prisoners sentenced to nearly two decades each.  Their cases are an illustration of how the state uses informants and plea agreements to target “key activists” and legitimate a policing system that exerts diffuse control. In this discussion, information on the use of grand juries, plea agreements, and roundups like Operation Backfire to intimidate movements of resistance will be presented. To explore this terrain further, individuals from Marie and Eric’s support crews will talk about their cases, the basic nuts and bolts and history, with an open-ended wrap up of where they’re currently at and what our strategies are moving forward.

We hope for this presentation to flow into a discussion around experiences and strategies for long-term anarchist prisoner support.  We’d like to see more collaborative thinking and efforts between prisoner support crews, and hope that this conference can serve as an opportunity to increase connections between these too-often segmented groups.  Importantly, we’d like to push past or even against the framework of “political prisoners” and employ a broader social framework to the political dimensions of repression.  How can prisoner support be nuanced, sustainable, and effective?

Cultures of Resistance: The Earth First! Case Study

Panagioti Tsolkas

1-2:30 pm
Eliot 103
A dialogue regarding the history and perspectives within Earth First!, both before and while it was being heavily impacted by the Green Scare. How this direct action culture emboldened, fortified and furthered actions and how we are now seeing very evidently with all of the court documents coming out today, that a lot of the courageous
actions, including monkey-wrenching and sabotage, taken in the 90′s and 2000′s were relationships/affinities that grew out of Earth First! culture. We want to assess this with the convergence and talk about the lessons we need to learn from the Green Scare, including some specific improvements in security culture. But more importantly, we want to discuss rebuilding resistance cultures that celebrate all the tools in the toolbox and repel the chill factor from repression. We seek to learn lessons about our movement security, grow stronger from it and talk and act louder then ever, more boldly then ever about supporting a vibrant movement, both above and below ground.

Countering Counterinsurgency: Strategies, Situations and Tactics.

John Kelly, University of Chicago
1-2:30pm
Vollum CC126
Counterinsurgency doctrines preemptively define local situations in transvalued, global terms: insurgencies are a kind of bad political weather, dangerous threats.  I will use examples from my own research in Thailand, Burma, Northeast India and elsewhere to discuss the stark consequences of such transvaluation. This talk will begin by examining the early antidemocratic roots of the “insurgency” metaphor and concept, and then track the fall, rise, and current status of “insurgency” and “counterinsurgency” metaphors in military theory and practice.  The term rose to systematic deployment in late colonial days, through Kashmir, Algeria and Vietnam, then fell into disgrace, till the recent revival with a US defense apparatus already ensconced in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Lines of tension are visible in contemporary military and political cross talk: while the Quadrennial Defense Report seeks to lock in counterinsurgency and long war as basic to the entire US defense establishment, and while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton relies upon “tidal” and “storm” threat metaphors when assessing policy especially for the Global South, President Barrack Obama, esp. as influenced by Samantha Power et al from his campaign staff, continues to resist the metaphors of dangerous tidal forces in politics.  Obama’s performance is engagingly incoherent: while he gives Gen. David Petraeus, architect of US counterinsurgency doctrine, essentially a carte blanche in Afghanistan, he avoids all personal commitment to counterinsurgency and long war doctrine.  Meanwhile, especially in Egypt, explicitly Gandhian non-violence re-emerges as a strategy and tactics manual for politics of resistance.  In light of the above, countering counterinsurgency should not mean celebrating or declaring insurgency: countering counterinsurgency, effectively, must be to refuse the moral economy of counterinsurgency, which assigns a mindless tidal force-of-nature status to the alleged insurgents.  We can instead seek acceptance of and recognition for world citizens and rational subjects with rights and real grievances.  What follows from recognition and acceptance is not extension of the planned long war but restoration of the long peace.

Session #4“Targeting Translation: U.S. Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language”

Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington
2:35-5:05pm
Eliot 414
Much has been written recently about the rise of counterinsurgency, stressing the “protection of the population” as the preferred strategy of the U.S. in its permanent “global war on terror.” Rafael will focus on two of the most prevalent tropes in the discourse of counterinsurgency: the “weaponization” and “targeting” of foreign languages. How is the counterinsurgent notion of languages as “weapons” and “targets” linked to the strategic imperative of deploying translation as a means for colonizing the lifeworld of occupied populations? How does the American military seek to expropriate the practice of translation through the development of automatic translation systems and exploitation of the mediating power of native interpreters? What are the limits and contradictions to the targeting of speech and the militarization of linguistic exchange
between occupiers and occupied? What do these limits on the weaponization of translation tell us about the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency as a strategy for sustaining the U.S. empire?

Mapping Colonialism in the 21st Century: The Case of “Mexica Indigena”

Geoffrey Boyce, School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona
2:35-5:05 PM
Eliot 103
In 2005 a group of geographers from the University of Kansas began a “collaborative mapping” project with indigenous peoples in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, Mexico.  Dubbed “Mexica Indigena”, this project was pitched to the participating communities as a means of empowering them to defend traditional land claims and practices through the generation of geo-spatial data.  Yet, unbeknownst at the time to these communities, Mexica Indigena was in fact a program sponsored by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas – the pilot for a research program overseen by the American Geographical Society meant to augment U.S. intelligence and counter-insurgency efforts, now operating in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Lesser Antilles and Colombia.  This paper explores the implications of Mexica Indigena for a number of issues of contemporary concern, including military / academic collaboration, politics, ethics, and the colonial legacy of disciplines such as geography and anthropology.  Specifically, the controversial aftermath of Mexica Indigena exposes the deficiency of institutional protections against predatory research practices when the latter operate under the umbrella of U.S. “national security” interests – challenging common assumptions within the academy concerning the nature and beneficence of geo-spatial or ethnographic research, the position of Institutional Review Boards, and the value of academic research in general, in light of the colonial present.

Free ‘Em All!: Building a Political Prisoner and Prison Abolition Movement

Adam Carpinelli- NW Regional Organizer for the Jericho Amnesty Movement
2:35-5:05 PM
Vollum CC126
The point of intersection between the prison movement and the struggle for Political Prisoner (PP) amnesty is inseparable.  Many U.S.-held PP’s have been incarcerated for their resistance to police brutality, political repression and the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).  In addition, most of them are people of color; those whose ancestors were forced off their indigenous lands in Africa and the Americas.  In the 21st century the ever expanding population of persons in the PIC, Guantanomo or ICE detention centers are enslaved subjects of the U.S. Empire.  People in prison such as PP’s internationally revered as heroes and symbols for larger social and environmental justices movements are denied recognition by the U.S. government while demonstrating revolutionary principles, resilience and brilliance while locked up.  Historically from Attica to Walpole and in Georgia today our collective memory of revolutionary consciousness has echoed the legacy of George Jackson.  How do we support people in prisons and resistance behind bars?  How do movements design support for their Political Prisoners over the long term?  How can this support connect with already existing resistance to the PIC both inside and outside the razor wire?  This presentation will discuss the emergence of a PP movement in the last decade of the 20th century and how this potential relates to other aspects of revolutionary social change in context of working for PIC abolition, PP amnesty and a more just world

Workshops
Sunday April 10th

Prisoner Support Groups

Eliot 207
9-10:30am
This is a workshop around the role of prisoner support in resisting repression and challenging incarceration. We intend to cover things such as: researching for and assisting with trial preparation; educating communities about repression, political prisoners, and how to effectively (and safely) resist; working with the media; finding and working with lawyers; helping prisoners maintain the connection between the movement or community with which they identify; working with and educating family members and loved ones; agitating for better conditions for prisoners; helping the prisoner communicate with the outside world; and supporting the struggles of those on the inside. We propose these as additions to more traditional means of support – helping prisoners keep their spirits up with books, letters and visits – which are also incredibly important. We will also discuss how the government tries to malign prisoner support and the prisoners who utilize it.  This panel will focus largely on supporting folks who are pre-trial detainees.

Security Culture:  Recognizing and Subverting Repression

Eliot 207
10:35-12:35pm
The purpose of this panel is to break down the idea that security is only necessary for people who break the law or that we are the helpless victims of an all-seeing master. The panel is based on the recognition that government and industry will take action against anything that they perceive as a threat to their power, regardless of legality. We will explore some of the tactics used by the governmental and corporate security apparatuses to repress political activity as well as some simple ways to diminish the effectiveness of regular surveillance and infiltration. Panelists will discuss social media, electronic surveillance, informants/entrapment and the ways in which social dynamics and dysfunction leave us vulnerable to manipulation by the authorities. The goal of this panel is to present information that will facilitate a discussion about how to take steps to strengthen our communities without succumbing to paranoia.

White Supremacy and the Prison Crisis: Connecting the Dots

Lydia Bartholow – The Committee to Connect the Dots

Eliot 207
1:30- 3 pm
This workshop offers a framework for tackling white supremacy within radical currents.  We will briefly cover the history of white supremacy, the ways in which the prison industrial complex is central to the maintenance of a racist culture, and finish by working together to connect the dots between multiple struggles.

Lydia Bartholow is an educator, writer, clinical herbalist and registered nurse, currently working on her doctorate at Oregon Health Science University. Her scholarship and community work focus on mental health, prisons, racism, radical public health and the politics of the body. She has been organizing against prisons and in support of those in prison for over 10 years, and is currently a member of The Committee to Connect the Dots, a local organization working to end white supremacy, with an emphasis on destroying the prison industrial complex.

Lawyers:  Strong Allies, Weak Links

Vollum 110
1:30- 3 pm
Many activists targeted by state repression in recent years have voiced critical concerns about the role their lawyers have played in the trajectory of their cases.
The notion that certain cases may have achieved different outcomes if the people involved had secured different representation is disconcerting, to say the least.
We propose a dialogue between activists and lawyers about how to more effectively support political movements and political prisoners.

Prison Rebel Solidarity or Beyond the Pen Pal

Eliot 207
3:30- 5 pm
How do we support, both materially and conceptually, struggles going on in prisons? What efforts can be made to tie these struggles to those happening in the diffuse prison of our everyday ‘outside’ life? How can we respond to efforts of the state to destroy networks of communication both amongst and between prisoners and radicals on the outside? This is a discussion primarily based in the idea that those struggling against the prison system on both sides of the walls have the ability to meaningfully support each other in whatever efforts they might be making. This is an effort to move beyond (though certainly not abandon) the more typical forms of anarchist prisoner support (information dissemination, letter writing, legal aid, etc) in an effort to establish deep connections of solidarity and mutual support of action against the prison system. This discussion will consist of short presentations by various groups working to push forward this kind of work followed by general strategizing about the exciting as well as the limiting factors of such a framework.

Repression 2 Resistance:  how fighting state repression can make us stronger

Layne Mullett, Sarah Small, & Luce Guillen-Givins
Eliot 207
6:00-7:30pm
Supporting political prisoners and people facing politically motivated charges can be a difficult task.  These struggles often feel isolated, both from each other and from broader political work, even though this work is an essential part of countering counter-insurgency because it creates a context where people are less afraid to resist.  This workshop is an exploration of how fighting government repression and supporting political prisoners can and does open doors for us to advance and connect our movements while we support our comrades.  In the workshop we will discuss how our own experience organizing around the RNC8 case led us to build alliances with other people fighting repression, in particular the Puerto Rican independence movement’s struggle to free their political prisoners.  These relationships of solidarity have helped us to deepen our analysis of imperialism and colonialism and bring that analysis to our community.  We will then open up space to talk about how to break down some of the barriers that divide political prisoner work from other struggles, as well as the many challenges we face when trying to bridge that gap.  The workshop will also incorporate the State Repression Timeline Project, a 22-foot interactive timeline of the last decade of government repression in the United States.

Presenter Bios:  Layne Mullett and Sarah Small are both members of the Wild Poppies Collective, a Philadelphia based anti-imperialist group that works to end state repression and the prison industrial complex. Luce Guillen-Givins was one of the “RNC 8″ defendants, and had all felony charges against her dropped after a two-year legal and political battle stemming from the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Over the past decade, she has been involved in a variety of radical projects including prisoner support; immigration, labor and anti-war organizing; and several radical community spaces in the Twin Cities.

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