Tacoma SDS

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee - The City of Tacoma has confirmed that the Tacoma PD and Port of Tacoma Police have collected and shared intelligence data on various local and regional activist groups such as Hate Free Zone (Seattle), Community-to-Community (Bellingham), People for Peace Justice and Healing (Tacoma), the Pierce County ACLU, BORDC-Tacoma, and the Tacoma Students for a Democratic Society (Tacoma SDS) since at least 2006.

As President Barack Obama declared with a fanfare his intention to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp last week, he made no mention of another growing US-run prison - with more than twice as many inmates and an even murkier legal status.

Every Monday, at a Red Cross compound in Kabul, Pashtu families gather for a glimpse by live video feed of brothers, sons and husbands who have disappeared into a feared detention centre at the main American base in Afghanistan.

As many of you know the IWW has been organizing Truck Drivers in Eastern North Carolina and Virginia for much of the past year. In response to our growing power and planned founding convention this upcoming weekend, the bosses have begun firing the union's leadership. Two log drivers and five container haulers have lost their job over the past two days.

The union is already discussing legal and direct action means to fight these unjust firing, but right now we need funds to support our fired drivers.

My daughter and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to see the inauguration with the Martin Luther King Jr Commission from the State of Arkansas. The travel involved a grueling 22 hour bus ride with three driver changes and a host of challenges involving security, changing guidance and massive crowds. I will never be the same because of my experience. My words would just be another trite effort at describing how I felt, how I feel now, and what I experienced, but on the bus I met a young man, his two brothers and his Mother.

Leonard was severely beaten upon his arrival at the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. When he went into population after his transfer, some inmates assaulted him. The severity of his injuries is that he suffered numerous blows to his head and body, receiving a large bump on his head, possibly a concussion, and numerous bruises. Also, one of his fingers is swollen and discolored and he has pain in his chest and ribcage. There was blood everywhere from his injuries.

A former police officer in California has been charged with the murder of an unarmed black man at a railway station.

Johannes Mehserle, a transport officer at the time, is accused of shooting Oscar Grant, 22, in the back as he lay face down on a train platform.

Mr Grant was among several people taken off a San Francisco to Oakland train when police intervened to stop a fight.

The 1 January shooting, filmed on mobile phones, has provoked frequent and at times violent protests.

In the year prior to 9/11, Immigration Naturalization Services (as it was called at the time) was scouting locations for a detention/deportation facility within 25 miles of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Having been rejected by a number of smaller communities, they were welcomed to Tacoma, WA and offered two possible sites near Commencement Bay. The preferred site was near residential zoning (though not within existing neighborhoods) and the other site was in an industrial area known as the Tacoma Tar Pits, one of the top ten most contaminated Superfund Wastesites in the county.

Construction to expand the federal immigration lockup on the Tacoma Tideflats might have violated restrictions put into place after an environmental cleanup at the site, state officials said Thursday.

The Geo Group, a Florida-based contractor that runs the Northwest Detention Center, dug through clean soil into potentially contaminated groundwater in apparent violation of a restrictive covenant imposed in 2003, according to the state Department of Ecology.

Risk to the public is believed to be minimal. State inspectors planned to visit the site today.

In the early hours of January 1st, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed a 22 year old man, Oscar Grant, on the platform of the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland. Witnesses report that Grant was "lying on his stomach with his hands out in a non-threatening position when he was shot". Police have confirmed Grant was unarmed and have suggested the shooting was an accident. Grant lived in Hayward and leaves behind a 4-year-old daughter.

A diverse group of Jewish Canadian women are currently occupying the Israeli consulate at 180 Bloor Street West in Toronto. This action is in protest against the on-going Israeli assault on the people of Gaza.

The group is carrying out this occupation in solidarity with the 1.5 million people of Gaza and to ensure that Jewish voices against the massacre in Gaza are being heard. They are demanding that Israel end its military assault and lift the 18-month siege on the Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid into the territory.