----- Original Message -----
From: Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: Jailed Climate Hero Tim DeChristopher Thrown in the Hole
Tim DeChristopher. Another Great American Hero of the Working/Middle Class. Where are Obama and his people, the ones who should be lifting Tim DeChristopher to their shoulders? Oh yes, they're busy stepping off new pipe lines to Texas.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----From: Miriam VieniSent: Friday, March 30, 2012 3:37 PMSubject: RE: Jailed Climate Hero Tim DeChristopher Thrown in the HoleThe story about what has been done by our government to this idealistic
young man is a horror. I've heard interviews with him. He had such spirit
and his motivations were of the highest, and they will break him.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:35 PM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: Jailed Climate Hero Tim DeChristopher Thrown in the Hole
Jailed Climate Hero Tim DeChristopher Thrown in the Hole
Jeff Goodell
Rolling Stone, POSTED: March 28, 2:20 PM ET | By Jeff Goodell
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/jailed-climate-h
ero-tim-dechristopher-thrown-in-the-hole-20120328
"Have you ever read Franz Kafka's The Trial?"
That is the first thing that Patrick Shea, a member of jailed climate
activist Tim DeChristopher's legal defense team, says to me when I call him
this morning to ask him about reports that DeChristopher has been pulled out
of his minimum security camp at Herlong federal prison in California and
thrown into isolated confinement in an 8 x 10-foot cell. His latest crime?
Sending an email to a colleague with a "threat" to give back a $25,000
donation to his legal defense fund because DeChristopher, one of the most
principled people I have ever encountered, discovered that his donor was
exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs.
If you don't know the backstory to DeChristopher's imprisonment, you can
read about it here. (Short version: He was sentenced to two years in
prison last July for having nonviolently disrupted a federal auction of oil
and gas leases in 2008.) This case was a sham before it took this latest
turn. If there were any justice in the world, DeChristopher would have been
pardoned before he ever set foot in jail. The fact that it is now possible
he will serve out the rest of his sentence in a tiny cell with only one
break a week to go outside is an outrage, and one that should have everyone
who cares about justice and the abuse of political power in America marching
in the streets.
According to Shea, a veteran lawyer and director of the federal Bureau of
Land Management during the Clinton administration, this is what happened to
DeChristopher: On March 5, he wrote an email to Dylan Schneider, the
treasurer and volunteer coordinator at Peaceful Uprising, a climate activism
group co-founded by DeChristopher. In the email (you can read the whole
thing below), DeChristopher discusses the fact that an unnamed corporate
donor who contributed to his legal defense fund is exporting U.S.
manufacturing jobs and laying off workers. DeChristopher is not happy: "I
feel like I have some influence and hence some responsibility to do
something," he writes. "If they are saving money by screwing their workers,
I can't in good conscience accept some of that money." He then says that
he plans to send a letter to the owner of the company that made the
donation, explaining why it bothers him. He writes, "This letter will
include a threat to wage a campaign against them if they don't reverse
course and keep the plants open."
Let's be clear about what DeChristopher is doing here: He's threatening to
give back a $25,000 donation because the donor's company is exporting jobs,
thus tainting the donation in his eyes. Is this the action of a dangerous
criminal?
According to Shea, five days later, on March 9th, DeChristopher was pulled
out of his minimum-security camp and told he was being moved to a cell in
Herlong's Special Housing Unit (SHU). "When Tim asked why," Shea explains,
"he was told that a U.S. Congressman had called and told prison officials
that he was threatening people outside of prison." With that, he hauled off
to the SHU, where he has been ever since. He shares his 8 x 10 cell with
another man and, according to Shea, has been allowed outside the tiny cell
only four times for brief periods of exercise in what Shea describes as "a
dog kennel."
I asked Shea how a letter to a colleague threatening to give back a donation
could have caused DeChristopher this kind of trouble. "Prison officials
have special software they use to scan emails," Shea says. "They picked up
on the word 'threat.' If I had to guess what happened next, the content of
the email was described by someone in the Bureau of Prisons to someone else,
probably someone who had worked for the Bureau in Washington D.C., and the
congressman was asked to call the Bureau and demand an investigation.
Shortly thereafter, the congressional staff called back on behalf of a
congressman and requested an investigation, and that was it. Tim was hauled
off to the SHU."
I asked Shea if he knew the name of the congressman who called. "I do not,"
he says. "I only know this because the prison official who hauled Tim out
of the camp told him a congressman had called."
How is it that a call from a congressman--some oil-funded hack, no
doubt--can get DeChristopher thrown in the hole? How can giving money
back--money donated to your legal defense fund, no less!--be considered a
threat? "Under federal rules, you are not allowed to organize political
action from within the prison," Shea explains. Of course, all DeChristopher
did was write a letter discussing the idea, but when you're deemed an enemy
of Big Oil and their cronies in D.C., that is enough. It's the 21st century
equivalent of being a Cold War Soviet spy.
The worst of it, Shea says, is that because DeChristopher is being held
under investigation, he is in a Kafka-esque limbo--there are no time limits
for when the investigation must start or end, and no appeals to his case are
allowed until the investigation concludes.
"He is essentially a political prisoner," says Shea.
Moral outrage aside, DeChristopher's treatment also brings up First
Amendment issues: If you go to jail, do you lose the right of free speech?
"Under these rules," Shea asks, "Would Martin Luther King's 'Letter from a
Birmingham Jail' have been allowed? I think the answer is an obvious 'no.'
And what does that say about the kind of country we've become?"
As for how DeChristopher is handling isolation, Shea sounds worried. "I saw
Tim last Sunday," he says. "He's sullen and angry." DeChristopher is
allowed very little exercise or fresh air, Shea says, and his cell mate
talks all the time and is driving him nuts. He is allowed five books--among
them is a history of liberal religion in America. When he is released, he
told Shea, he wants to attend Harvard Divinity School and become a Unitarian
minister. But right now, that's still a long way off. "I've been visiting
prisoners for more than 30 years, and I get concerned when they get that
beady-eyed look," Shea says. "And Tim has it."
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