Salon.com > Anarchism

Chicago anarchist sent to boot camp for lie about bomb in Harry Potter book

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, never made a bomb. He was never found with any explosive-making materials; authorities thoroughly searched his house. The Polish immigrant did, however, tell a boastful lie that has landed him a stint at boot camp.

Just days before the Chicago NATO summit last May, Senakiewicz drunkenly told undercover agents that he had two homemade explosives hidden in his Chicago residence in a hollowed-out Harry Potter book. A search of his home found the bombs to be as fictitious as the boy wizard -- there weren't even any Harry Potter books at the address. But the 24-year-old anarchist, who Tuesday pleaded guilty to one felony count of falsely making a terrorist threat, could face deportation.

The Chicago Tribune reported:

At a hearing in the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Judge Nicholas Ford imposed the 4-year prison term and recommended that Senakiewicz be admitted into a prison boot camp. If he successfully completes the program he could be released in as little as 6 months, but prosecutors said the Polish native would be subject to deportation on completing his sentence.

Grand jury resistor Leah-Lynn released from prison

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:57:00 +0000

As Salon reported last week, 24-year-old Portland anarchist Leah-Lynn Plante was imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury. Like two other Northwest activists incarcerated earlier this year, Plante had not been charged or convicted with a crime but was nonetheless jailed for her silence.

Plante's support network announced Friday that she was released from federal prison a couple of days ago after spending a week in solitary confinement. The announcement says that information is scarce and that Plante, having believed she would face 18 months behind bars, is too traumatized to speak to the media. For unknown reasons, the announcement notes, Plante was classified as "different" from the two other Seattle grand jury resistors also taken in to federal custody in recent months. Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik remain incarcerated. Little is known about Duran's prison conditions, but it is believed he has been kept largely in solitary confinement. The statement from Plante's support network Friday noted that the freed grand jury resistor "urges people to step up support for Matt and Kteeo on all fronts."

Ohio anarchists’ terror plot

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Four of five self-proclaimed anarchists – calling themselves the Revolutionary People’s Party – have now confessed to involvement in a conspiracy in late April to use C-4 explosives to blow up an interstate highway bridge near Cleveland.

After their arrests, most of the suspects quickly agreed to discuss their plans with FBI agents during middle-of-the-night interviews. One of the would-be bombers said he just wanted to go to sleep and forget everything, court documents disclose.

Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of Lakewood, Ohio; and Connor C. Stevens, 20, of Berea, Ohio, all pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. district court in Cleveland. Each admitted conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, and attempted use of an explosive device to destroy property used in interstate commerce.

Riot porn from Kanye and Jay-Z

Wed, 30 May 2012 20:33:00 +0000

There is a name for videos capturing particularly dramatic riot scenes -- the sort with fire, tear gas, charging police horses, careening masked crowds and, often, a hardcore backing track. We call it riot porn. I've always thought it's a bad name. Not because the street scenes -- shot from Egypt to Oakland to Greece -- aren't titillating spectacles (and pornographic in that sense), but because all porn -- good or bad, exploitative or sex-positive -- is staged for the filming. Riots very much are not.

In this sense, the new music video for Kanye West and Jay-Z's track "No Church in the Wild" is the best actual riot porn I've ever seen. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is five minutes of a graphic, fiery and entirely staged riot. It opens with a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and lobbing it at a line of riot cops as masked comrades behind him raise their arms in support. Filmed in Prague, but presented as a non-specific yet decidedly European urban battleground, riot cops on horses violently beat the masked crowd, who fight back with fire and fists while Greco-Roman statues look on. Were it not for the surprising appearance of a chained elephant amidst the fray in the video's final frames, the footage looks (almost) like something straight out of Athen's Syntagma Square. Jay-Z and Kanye don't feature in the video at all, which makes artistic sense: I'd be more surprised to see Hove in a riot than a two-tonne elephant.

Chicago’s fishy NATO arrests

Tue, 22 May 2012 17:05:00 +0000

While thousands of NATO protesters streamed out of Chicago following Monday's final day of organized marches and rallies, the Chicago Tribune concluded that the summit had ended "without giving Chicago a black eye." And, indeed, although shocking images of heads bloodied by police batons have emerged, the city did not devolve into 1968-style unbridled chaos. This weekend's street scenes may not leave a lasting mark on the Windy City, but raids, police intimidation, protesters facing terrorism charges and reports of police entrapment leave a chilling imprint in the summit's wake.

I wrote here last week, following up on a Rolling Stone piece by Rick Perlstein, about the proliferation of FBI entrapment schemes aimed at activists and anarchists in the past decade. Following the arrest of five individuals in Chicago over the weekend who now face terrorism charges, the question of entrapment perpetrated by law enforcement seems more important than ever.

Who gets to be an FBI threat?

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:38:00 +0000

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates "terrorists" out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who -- strung along in an FBI sting -- planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which "the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage."

FBI heroically locks up ridiculous anarchists on May Day

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you're not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or "dangerous" "anarchists.") America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to "blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area," according to the FBI's triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the "sting" part involved the bureau's informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they "topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland." But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Why Andrew Breitbart can’t grasp Occupy Wall Street

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:44:00 +0000

Andrew Breitbart has tracked down secret internal Occupy Wall Street emails that prove the entire movement is a leftist conspiracy to destabilize capitalism. There are anarchists involved! And ACORN!

Breitbart obtained a couple thousand listserv emails from some Occupy Wall Street participants and organizers arguing strategy and planning events, and he has "crowdsourced" his analysis of these emails because he doesn't really understand any of it.

Despite his inability to grasp who these people are and what they want, he has determined "the true purpose" of the movement, based on a couple of random things some anarchist organizers wrote to one another:

“If a Tree Falls”: Understanding the era of “eco-terrorism”

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Radicals perform a social function that they themselves often view with contempt, and one that is similarly misunderstood by people in the political mainstream who almost always see radicalism as crazy and counterproductive. People who chain themselves to old-growth redwoods -- or, for that matter, to the doors of abortion clinics -- hardly ever get what they want in the short or medium term, since what they want is generally unrealistic, and often amounts to a revolutionary change in the social order. But in posing an unrelenting and quixotic challenge to the consciences of their fellow citizens, radical activists often nudge us along toward more modest, incremental changes. Does anyone dispute that facts on the ground with regard to environmental policies and abortion rights have changed, thanks in part to the actions of activists many people view as deranged?

Activists arrested in London ahead of royal wedding

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:29:00 +0000

Arrests and police raids on squats across London appear to be preemptive strikes against activists before the royal wedding Friday.

The Guardian reported that the police raided five squats across the U.K. capital on Thursday, issuing arrests for petty crimes. But few are convinced that the arrests are not directly connected to Friday’s festivities.

A spokesman denied the raids had anything to do with the royal wedding. Police said the raid at a squat known as Ratstar in Camberwell was carried out under a section 18 warrant to search for stolen goods.

A spokesman said once officers arrived at the address they found that those inside were bypassing the electricity meter and were arrested for "electricity abstraction".

"It's business as usual," a spokesman said. "This is nothing to do with the royal wedding."

As the Guardian notes, senior police officers stated explicitly last week that "they would be taking preemptive action, including raiding squats and making arrests, in advance of the wedding to ensure that no criminal activity took place on the day," which makes apparent that today's arrests have little to do with "electricity abstraction" and more to do with containing unwanted elements in advance of the wedding day.

The first war on terror

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:01:00 +0000

"We shook off the empire as though it had been a nightmare," wrote the French radical journalist Juliette Adam, describing the handful of weeks in 1871 when the city of Paris ran itself at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The Paris Commune -- an idealistic interlude marked by the official separation of church and state, plans for universal education and workers' and women's rights -- haunted the late-19th-century lives that British historian Alex Butterworth recounts in "The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents." For some of these people -- idealistic anarchist radicals like the Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin -- the Commune represented a brief moment of possibility and promise. For others -- like Peter Rachkovsky, who ran Tsarist Russia's foreign intelligence service in Paris -- it was a nightmare whose return must be headed off at any cost.

Bomb the middle class

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:26:00 +0000

When François-Claudius Ravachol went to the guillotine in Paris on July 11, 1892, he gave one of the great performances in the history of "la Veuve" ("the widow"), as that ingenious beheading machine was often called. Ever since the French Revolution more than a century earlier, Dr. Guillotine's invention had provided kings, murderers and revolutionaries with the opportunity to make a dramatic exit, and huge throngs of Parisians turned out to watch them take their last steps and utter their final words.

Dignified to the end, Marie Antoinette reportedly apologized for stepping on the executioner's foot: "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose." Her husband, Louis XVI, also faced the end bravely, although his attempt to give a long-winded speech forgiving his enemies and calling for God's mercy was, quite literally, cut short. Robespierre, the revolution's greatest orator, went to his death with his jaw shattered from a gunshot wound, and could say nothing.