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January
24, 2002
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
January
22, 2002
Brendan
Cooney
Moby-Dick
and the Hunt
for Osama bin Laden
Rick Giombetti
Progressive
Pols for Enron?
Judith
Resnik
Invading
the Courts?
Kevin
Alexander Gray
The
Crisis in Black Leadership
January
21, 2002
Marjorie
Cohn
Will
Walker's Words
Be Used Against Him?
Ahmad
Faruqui
MLK
Jr. and the Palestinians
January
19. 2002
Jordan
Green
Enron
Stole Our Future
January
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
The
Enron Model
Walt Brasch
Enron
at the White House
CounterPunch
Wire
Human
Rights Groups Says Guantanamo Prisoners Must
Be Treated as POWs
January
17, 2002
Gideon
Levy
Bulldozing
Rafah
Uri Avnery
That
Weapons Shipment
January
16, 2002
John Chuckman
The
Angel and the Pretzel
Lawrence
McGuire
Subverting
the
Geneva Convention
Kathy
Kelly
An
Open Letter to
Richard Perle on Iraq
January
15, 2002
George
Monbiot
Greenpeace,
Lord Melchett
and the Business of Betrayal
Jack McCarthy
Follow
the Pretzel
William
Blum
Atta
and the Times:
Follow the Changing Story
Edward
Said
Emerging
Alternatives
in Palestine
January
14, 2002
David
Vest
Open
Bag. Eat Pretzels.
Patrick
Cockburn
Collapse
of Georgia
Ignored by the World
Mokhiber/Weissman
Enron's
Accountants:
When In Doubt, Shred It
January
13, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
Why
We Kill People
January
12, 2002
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Forbidden
Truths
January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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bin Laden and Bush
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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January
24, 2002
"Are
you there or do you have a syphilitic
penis in your mouth performing oral sex?"
This Is "Terrorism"?
The Prosecution of Petrelis
and Pasquarelli
By Alexander Cockburn
Throwing the book at people is nothing new, but
in our post 9/11 world the screws are tightening. Take San Francisco,
whose District Attorney is Terence "Kayo" Hallinan,
regarded by many with some justification as a progressive fellow.
Indeed in his 2000 reelection bid Hallinan survived years of
abuse in the San Francisco Chronicle for supposedly being altogether
too slack a prosecutor, with poor conviction rates and kindred
offenses betokening softness on crime.
Yet this is the same District Attorney
Hallinan who's hit two gay men who are AIDS activists with an
escalating barrage of charges, currently amounting to 36 alleged
felonies and misdemeanors, all adding up to what he has stigmatized
in the local press as "terrorism". Terrorism's a trigger
word these days, as Sara Jane Olson, aka Kathy Soliah, recently
discovered when a judge put her away for twenty years to life
for acts back in the 1970s.
Held in San Francisco county jail since
November 28 of last year are Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli.
Neither man has been able to make bail, which Hallinan successfully
requested to be set at $500,000 for Petrelis and $600,000 for
Pasquarelli.
Why this astonishing bail? What it boils
down to is that the two accused are dissidents notorious for
raising all kinds of inconvenient, sometimes obscene hell about
AIDS issues. They've long been detested by San Francisco's AIDS
establishment, which Petrelis in particular has savaged as being
disfigured by overpaid executives, ineffective HIV prevention
campaigns and all-round complacency and sloth.
They've taken kooky positions. Pasquarelli,
for example, believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Petrelis hasn't
scrupled to form alliances with right-wingers in Congress when
it suits his tactical book. Being attacked by them can be an
unpleasant experience. Who wants to get phoned in the middle
of the night and, as one recipient alleges, be asked, "Are
you there or do you have a syphilitic penis in your mouth performing
oral sex."
The two were thrown in jail because of
an escalating campaign they launched late last year amidst calls
for an expansion of quarantining laws across the country, prompted
by fears of bio-terrorism. Petrelis and Pasquarelli took after
a San Francisco public health official, Jeffrey Klausner, for
seeming to have endorsed the quarantining of people with AIDS.
They also applied increasing pressure on the media, notably the
San Francisco Chronicle, for relaying what the two claimed were
inflated statistics about spikes in the rates of syphilis and
HIV in San Francisco. The higher the stats, the more dollars
flow to various AIDS bureaucracies.
The Chronicle claimed tremulously that
not only had its reporters been showered with filthy nocturnal
calls to their homes but that there had been a bomb threat against
the paper.
What does this amount to? After all,
if convicted on these charges Petrelis and Pasquarelli could
face years in prison.
On the basis of what has surfaced so
far, the charges and the bail are way out of kilter with the
apparent facts of the case. As a gay activist puts it, "I
do think the culprits in this sordid affair are the awful people
who went to the police after what seemed to me to be silly phone
calls that obviously were not threatening. That department of
public health guy should be fired from his job and sent packing
for going to the police. These people rip gays and lesbians off,
get well paid for it, then when someone tries to make them accountable
they go running to the cops to do even more dirty work. It's
embarrassing to be a part of a community that forgets its activist
past and falls so quickly in league with the Bush/Ashcroft-send-everyone-to-jail-that-we
don't-like-in-the-name-of-fighting-terrorism crowd."
The charges against Petrelis and Pasquarelli
defy logical explanation unless we acknowledge the venom and
loathing the pair inspire in the respectable element in San Francisco
and among some well known political organizers.
Take Kate Sorensen, an AIDS activist
who herself was held on $1 million bail for leading demonstrations
outside the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia two
summers ago. The DA in that city took her to trial on three felonies,
though she ended up convicted of a misdemeanor. Such experiences
have not evoked any solidarity in Sorensen for the imprisoned
San Francisco pair. Wrote Sorensen recently, "I will fight
for our right to demonstrate. I will fight for our right to free
speech. I will fight this police state, but I will not fight
for you."
Sorensen's self-righteous stance was
elicited by an open letter of concern addressing the prosecution
of Petrelis and Pasquarelli. Organized by the radical gay civil
libertarian Bill Dobbs of Queer Watch, the open letter (go to
the site www.openletteronline.com
and look under politics, then petrelis/pasquarelli) has been
signed by hundreds including many well known gay figures such
as Harvey Fierstein, Scott Tucker, Barbara Smith and Judy Greenspan.
The letter questions the motivation for the charges and makes
the scarcely extremist demand that the two get fair legal treatment
and reasonable bail, a point emphasised eloquently by Chris Farrell
in a public response to Sorensen.
"I am shocked," Farrell wrote
to Sorensen, "that you don't support free speech or the
right to demonstrate-but only 'our' right to free speech and
'our' right to demonstrate. Apparently Petrelis and Pasquarelli
are part of a 'them' who don't deserve these rights. I don't
think you can claim to fight 'this police state' when you are
willing to ignore prosecutions designed to chill dissent so long
as the targets are people you don't approve of. It may be convenient
to have the cops lock up your opponents, but it isn't good politics.
Your resistance to the ideology and activities of ACT UP San
Francisco is demeaned if you accept the FBI as an ally. A genuine
commitment to civil liberties requires support for the rights
of everyone, and a test of that commitment comes when it's the
rights of people we despise that are at risk. The letter seeks
'fair legal treatment' and 'reasonable bail' for Pasquarelli
and Petrelis. If you value those principles, despite your anger
over the tactics of ACT UP San Francisco, your endorsement of
these very simple demands could be a powerful act of conscience."
Sorensen never responded.
Moderate though the terms of the Dobbs
letter are, it has aroused much hostility not only from Sorensen
but from the San Francisco gay establishment whose animus against
Petrelis and Pasquarelli was what apparently prompted Hallinan
to have the pair charged and arrested in the first place. On
November 15 Martin Delaney of Project Inform, Mike Shriver of
the Mayor's office and fifteen others, published a letter in
the Bay Area Reporter urging people to pressure Hallinan, demanding
"full prosecution of Pasquarelli, Petrelis and their collaborators."
Petrelis and Pasquarelli have a potent
posse howling for their heads. "They fucked with the wrong
people," said a health official quoted in the San Francisco
Examiner on January 23. The "wrong people" include
a broad swath of liberals and leftists in and out of government,
the AIDS establishment and media figures, and commentators including
Petrelis' erstwhile admirer Andrew Sullivan and Michelangelo
Signorile, who attacked Petrelis and Pasquarelli in the New York
Press in a letter that drew the following admiring note: "Michelangelo
Signorile: I am a sergeant/inspector with the San Francisco Police
Dept. I am the inspector who put together the case involving
David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis. I am also a lesbian.
I thought your article was well-written and to the point. I have
read your stuff over the years, and respect your viewpoint. Keep
on writing. Lea Militello, San Francisco."
The "wrong people" can get
real nasty. On November 13, according to ACT UP San Francisco
(of which Pasquarelli is a leading light) an official complaint
of domestic terrorism was filed with the FBI by UCSF AIDS researcher
Stephen Morin, former aide to Minority Whip Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-Ca). Memos from Morin acquired by defense lawyers outline
a plan to apply the domestic terrorism clause of the Anti-Terrorism
Act to ACT UP SF as early as October 25, 2001, before it was
even signed into law.
Then, on November 19, 2001 there was
a meeting of officials from UCSF, the Mayor's AIDS Office and
the FBI to discuss ACT UP San Francisco. An ACT UP press release
claims that people attending that November 19 meeting included
"gay gadfly and UCSF media representative Jeff Sheehy and
the Mayor's AIDS Policy Advisor, Michael Shriver, a former member
of ACT UP San Francisco. Shriver was a member of the group in
the late eighties and was involved in a number of controversial
protests including shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge and the
storming of San Francisco's Opera House on opening night."
In December the Los Angeles Times reported
that the FBI had declined to intervene. But as Dobbs says, "The
bit of good news about the FBI declining action is far outweighed
by the fact that Bureau apparently considered this outrageous
invitation, also by the specter of the Patriot Act hanging over
the heads of activists across the country."
Time was when a decent death threat used
to be a badge of honor in the Fourth Estate. Jimmy Breslin recently
recalled to Dobbs his "Son of Sam" days when violent
threats were so routine at the New York Daily News that the paper's
switchboard operator was wont to ask such callers whether they
were registering "general death threats" or "specific
death threats for Mr Breslin".
Granted, he's a terror survivor of Attack
by Lizard in the LA Zoo and granted that his wife Sharon Stone
is the marquee celebrity for one of Petrelis' targets, the American
Foundation for AIDS Research, but Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein
should remember that Daily News phone operator and get his paper
off its prosecutorial high horse.
Hallinan's got a radical past and even
radical pretensions. He knows as well as anyone that conspiracy
charges have long been used to smash protest. And he knows as
well as anyone that militant protest is at the cutting edge of
social conscience. It's easy to grandstand about the foul tactics,
the obscenities, the all-round vulgarity of Pasquarelli and Petrelis,
but does this add up to a demand that they get thrown into prison
for many years? Of course it doesn't. Judge Parker Meeks Jr should
resist the entreaties of the Posse and cut the preposterous bail
drastically or release them on their own recognizance. Hallinan
should get his sense of perspective back, and drop the drastic
charges.
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