Today's Stories

May 23, 2008

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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From the H-Blocks to a Texas Jail

The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

By SANDY BOYER and SHAUN HARKIN

TWENTY-SIX years ago, Pol Brennan was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, watching his friends die on hunger strike. Today, he is in solitary confinement in a Texas immigration holding center.

His story reveals a great deal about the evolving Anglo-American attitude toward the IRA wrought by the Northern Ireland Peace Process. It is also where the war on "terrorism" meets the war on immigrants in the United States.

Pol Brennan was born in 1953 in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Belfast, Northern Ireland. While growing up, being detained and beaten by British soldiers or the pro-British police force was almost routine. By 1972, when he was 19, like many of his generation, he joined the IRA to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

In 1976, Brennan was convicted of possessing explosives and immediately joined the blanket protest in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison. Here, IRA men refused to wear the prison uniform, demanding to be recognized, rightly, as political prisoners. They lived for years in cold prison cells, covered in nothing but a blanket.

Brennan shared a cell with Bobby Sands, the first man to die on the 1981 hunger strike for political status. As 10 men died, he lost several other friends. Along with British miners, Irish hunger strikers were on the vicious cutting edge of the Thatcher regime's attack on working people everywhere.

In 1983, two years after the hunger strike ended, Brennan was one of 38 IRA prisoners who escaped from the H-Blocks. It was the largest prison break in British history from Her Majesty's Prison Maze, considered one of the most secure prisons in Europe.

Pol made his way to the Bay Area, where he met and married Joanna Volz, a U.S. citizen. They lived quietly until January 1993, when federal agents arrested Brennan on a British extradition warrant. He was forced to spend more than seven years fighting extradition, and was imprisoned for three of those years, half the time in a building with no windows. A campaign to block his extradition received wide support, with Noam Chomsky, Christy Moore and Alexander Cockburn among the many who spoke out on his behalf.

The British government finally withdrew its extradition request in October 2000. By that time, Northern Ireland had changed dramatically. The IRA had ended its war. Sinn Fein, the main Republican political party, had agreed to govern Northern Ireland in coalition with Unionist political parties whose bottom line has always been preserving British rule in Ireland. In this new environment, Britain released IRA prisoners and withdrew its extradition requests.

The U.S. government also dramatically changed its attitude toward the IRA. In response to the 1994 IRA ceasefire, it suspended deportation proceedings against some former Republican prisoners. However, even after the extradition request was withdrawn, Pol Brennan still faced deportation proceedings. But they were put on hold while his application for political asylum was pending.

Pol, Joanna and her daughter Molly were able to live a peaceful and relatively normal life in the Bay Area. He worked legally as a carpenter, she as a legal clerk with the public defender's office. Brennan was able to indulge his passion for astronomy by volunteering at the local planetarium. The couple adopted two whippets. They named one Marley, after Pol's late friend Larry Marley, the architect of the escape from Long Kesh.

* * *

THEIR NORMAL life was suddenly interrupted on January 26. Brennan and Volz were driving from Oakland to Texas to visit her relatives when they were stopped at an immigration checkpoint, 100 miles inside the U.S. border. Brennan produced his work authorization, but the two were detained because it had expired. Brennan was able to reach his lawyer, who faxed the Border Patrol agents documentation that he had an asylum case pending and had applied to renew the work permit.

But the agents ran Brennan's name through their computers and came up with the 1983 escape from Long Kesh. Brennan says, "They acted as if they had caught the terrorist al-Zarqawi, as they as they huddled around their computer screens. Their little eyes were jiggling in their heads with excitement."

The Border Patrol agents ignored the evidence faxed to them by Brennan's lawyer. As Brennan describes it, "They said, 'Well, just because you have an application pending doesn't mean you have a legal right to be in the United States. So we are going to detain you.'"

Pol Brennan was taken to the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos in southern Texas. He was initially placed in the general population with men from Central and South America, Trinidad and Jamaica, and even Palestine.

Brennan was soon moved to solitary confinement, because, apparently, he was considered an escape risk since he broke out of Long Kesh 25 years earlier. It was as if they expected the IRA to invade South Texas to free him.

Today, Pol is locked in a cell 23 hours a day. He spends the other hour in the TV room. He sustains himself with books and phone calls to the outside world. When it is his turn to use the phone, the guards bring it on a trolley and hand it to him through the cell door. Brennan then has to hold the phone at an angle and punch in the 10-digit code for the prison phone system. He can only make collect calls or use a phone card.

Joanna Volz has moved to Texas, where she can be near Pol. She visits for half an hour once a week. They talk through a telephone, separated by a plastic wall. Sometimes, he has been handcuffed throughout the visit.

An immigration judge denied Brennan bail, saying he is a "flight risk" and "a danger to the community." The judge, who is notoriously anti-immigrant, ignored numerous letters of support from the Bay Area, including one from Brennan's employer saying his job was being held open for him. Brennan was deemed a "flight risk" despite the fact that he had twice reported back to prison in California after his bail was revoked.

Now Brennan will have to go through a pro-forma hearing before the same judge on his political asylum application. From there, he will go to the Board of Immigration Appeals and, if necessary, to the Court of Appeals. He will almost certainly remain in prison at least through September.

* * *

POL BRENNAN is collateral damage in the war on "terrorism." His 32-year-old IRA conviction and the escape from Long Kesh are keeping him from receiving a green card or U.S. citizenship. In the present political climate, unlike when the IRA declared its ceasefire, there is no great urgency to helping former Republican prisoners.

Brennan is also a victim, like many millions of others, of the U.S. government's anti-immigrant dragnet. Pol was stopped at the immigration checkpoint because the Department of Homeland Security hadn't renewed his work authorization. His bail application was refused by an immigration judge so biased that he routinely rules against all immigrants, even Cubans.

Now, Brennan's asylum application will almost certainly be decided by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Pol describes what's happening to immigrants in this situation:

Regretfully, current policy has been shaped by post-9/11 paranoia, and to some extent xenophobia that we can see in such actions as the USA PATRIOT Act and the hundreds of miles of border fencing and walls now under construction along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The vast majority of detainees here are from Central and South America (Mexico included). who suffer the ill effects of U.S. trade, industrial and agricultural policies that undercut key sectors of their home economies and directly necessitate their seeking greener pastures to survive. Meanwhile, my case inches along.

Joanna Volz sums up Pol's situation: "This is just old news. The war is over. It's time this was over. The incident Pol was involved in happened 30-odd years ago. But this all keeps repeating itself. It's like a roundabout. Everybody else is trying to move on, but he's held back. It's just not fair."

The Irish government can certainly demand Brennan's release and call for an end to deportations proceedings. Born in Belfast, under the Irish Constitution, he is as much an Irish citizen as if he was born in Dublin. The then-Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Albert Reynolds convinced Bill Clinton to let Gerry Adams visit the U.S. over the heated objections of the British government. On April 30, the outgoing Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was given the unusual honor of addressing a joint session of Congress.

Ireland's economic importance to the U.S. should guarantee a hearing. U.S. companies have invested $84 billion in Ireland, more than double the total for China and India combined. In 2005, U.S. exports to Ireland were valued at $9 billion, while Irish exports to the U.S. totaled $28 billion. Unfortunately, the Irish government has shown no interest in fighting for Pol Brennan, and it will require political pressure at home to change their minds.

Popular mobilization and political pressure aimed at both the U.S. and Irish government is the best way to fight for Pol's release. The California Ancient Order of Hibernians, the largest Irish organization in the U.S., has passed a resolution urging the "Department of Homeland Security to withdraw its opposition to bail and allow Pol Brennan to live and work legally in the U.S, until his political asylum case is adjudicated." His neighbors in Oakland are pressing his Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, to intervene.

* * *

What you can do

For more information on Pol Brennan's case and to find out how you can show your support, go to the Pol Brennan Support Web site. Supporters are circulating an online petition demanding that Pol not be deported from the U.S.

Sandy Boyer is the co-host of Radio Free Eireann on WBAI in New York City and a veteran organizer for Irish political prisoners.

Shaun Harkin is an immigrant rights activist in Chicago and contributor to SocialistWorker.org.

 

 

 

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