The United States constantly
accuses its adversaries of holding political prisoners, while insisting it has none of its own. But for its entire history, the US government has used incarceration of its political opponents as a tool to crush dissent and advance the interests of economic elites.
Well-known cases are those entrapped or framed in US national security state
sting operations, or imprisoned with extreme sentences for a minor offense because of their political activism, such as Black revolutionary
George Jackson.
Each period of struggle by the working class and oppressed peoples against ruling-class control results in some activists locked up for their revolutionary work. “Political prisoner” has often meant those revolutionaries jailed for fighting their national oppression, as is the case with a great number of
Black Panthers.
In contrast, a century ago, most political prisoners in the United States were Marxists, labor organizers, and anti-war activists, such as Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, and Big Bill Haywood.
Today, the US national security state considers its most dangerous enemies those who expose its crimes at home and abroad.
There are also many thousands of incarcerated people who never received a fair trial, or were innocent of the crimes they have been jailed for. A high percentage of them are non-white, peoples subject to second-class citizenship in the US. A number are executed, such as
Troy Davis, or spend their whole lives in prison.
While the United States represents just over 4% of the world’s population, it holds approximately
20% of its prisoners. Black North Americans are imprisoned five times the rate of whites.
The following list of political prisoners currently detained by the US government categorizes them into seven groups:
- national security state employees and reporters locked up for publicizing blatant government criminality
- representatives of foreign governments that Washington seeks to overthrow who were imprisoned for “violating” illegal unilateral US sanctions
- Black, Native American, and Latino revolutionaries fighting for the rights of their peoples
- Arabs and Muslims targeted after 9/11
- prisoners detained in the Guantánamo torture center without charges
- women locked up for defending themselves against violent attacks
- environmental activists
1. Journalists and national security state employees exposing illegal US surveillance operations and war crimes
A number of whistleblowers in the United States have previously been imprisoned or are wanted. These have included:
- US Army intelligence analyst
Chelsea Manning
- NSA contractor
Edward Snowden
- Air Force intelligence specialist
Reality Winner
- CIA analyst
John Kiriakou
- hacktivist
Jeremy Hammond
- CIA officer
Jeffrey Sterling
- NSA executive
Thomas Drake
- hacktivist
Aaron Swartz
- Air National Guard intelligence analyst
Matt DeHart
- journalist
Barrett Brown
- FBI agent
Terry AlburyAmong those imprisoned today are the following:
Julian Assange is a
renowned journalist and editor of WikiLeaks who was arrested in 2019 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had political asylum since 2012. In April 2022, a British judge ordered Assange extradited to the US to face up to 175 years in prison for publishing truthful information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has indicted Assange under the Espionage Act, even though he published the same information as did the New York Times and Washington Post.
Researcher Mark Weisbrot explained in 2017, “
Julian Assange is a political prisoner. … His crime, and that of WikiLeaks, has been the practice of journalism, and particularly in defense of human rights and civil liberties. … Assange and WikiLeaks’ real offense was to expose the crimes of the most powerful people in the world.”
Extraditing Assange, a journalist and Australian citizen, to the United States would have even more
negative repercussions for our present remnants of free press and democratic rights. No case better embodies the old
IWW banner for “class war prisoners”: “Remember! We’re in here for you, you’re out there for us.”
Roger Waters and
Noam Chomsky have also spoken about the importance of the Assange case.
Daniel Hale has been imprisoned since 2019. He was sentenced to 45 months for releasing documents showing US military drone strikes in Afghanistan largely killed innocent people. Hale participated in the drone program while in the Air Force and NSA from 2009 to 2013, and later became an outspoken critic and a defender of whistle blowers.
Hale is believed to have been the source material for
The Drone Papers. The documentary
National Bird documents whistleblowers in the US drone assassination program. For his truth-telling, Hale received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence and the Blueprint for Free Speech International Whistleblowing Prize.
Chris Hedges has written about his case.
Joshua Schulte, a former hacker employed by the CIA, was blamed for releasing two billion pages of secret CIA data, known as Vault 7, to WikiLeaks. Vault 7 programs were CIA techniques used to compromise Wifi networks, hack into Skype, defeat anti-virus software, hack Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices, and commandeer the guidance systems in cars.
Schulte has been imprisoned since 2018 and faces up to 80 years, in
brutal conditions similar to those endured by Assange today.
Ana Belén Montes was a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who
alerted Cuba of US plans of aggression. She was arrested in 2001, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, and was held in solitary confinement in Fort Worth, Texas for most of her 21 years behind bars.
Montes told the judge, “I consider that the policy of our government towards Cuba is cruel and unjust, deeply unfriendly; I considered myself morally obligated to help the Island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to define its own destiny, its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate. … how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders should not be and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let them decide how they want to conduct their internal affairs.”
2. Foreigners imprisoned for ‘violating’ illegal US sanctions on their countries
Mun Chol Myong is a
North Korean was extradited and imprisoned in the United States on March 20, 2021. Mun was
arrested in Malaysia in May 2019 after a Washington, DC judge issued a warrant for his arrest. His supposed “crime” of conspiracy and money laundering in fact consisted of supplying needed goods to the DPRK by circumventing US sanctions on the country.
A top Justice Department official claimed foreigners who have never been in the US can be extradited to it for violating domestic laws. The US has enforced a blockade against North Korea since 1950, the start of the US war on Korea, designed to cripple its economic and social development.
Alex Saab, a
Venezuelan diplomat, was jailed on June 12, 2020 in Cabo Verde on orders of the United States. He was then seized by US agents and brought to a Miami prison on October 16, 2021.
Saab was arrested while on a diplomatic mission to procure
food and energy supplies to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, which was largely caused by the illegal US blockade of the nation.
As a diplomat, Saab has immunity from detention based on the UN Vienna Convention of 1961. The
UN Human Rights Commission and other international human rights defenders have denounced his extradition. The
National Lawyers Guild calls for Saab’s immediate release.
Simón Trinidad (Ricardo Palmera) was a long-time leader in mass movements for
social change in Colombia, and is a top negotiator for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In 2003, he was sent to Ecuador to make contact with UN official James Lemoyne, as part of efforts to revive peace talks with the Colombian government, and begin communication on the exchange of prisoners of war.
He was captured in Ecuador in 2004 and then extradited to the US on charges of narco-trafficking and kidnapping, and subjected to four separate trials, due to repeated mistrials. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 60 years at the Florence “Supermax” prison in Colorado.
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board of Chinese tech giant Huawei, was imprisoned in Canada in 2018 on a US extradition request, after Washington accused her company of misleading British bank HSBC over its business dealings in Iran, thereby violating its illegal unilateral sanctions. Meng was released in September 2021.
3. Fighters for their people’s national oppression against second-class citizenship
Many Black political prisoners in the United States were targets of the police state’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1960s and ’70s, when the FBI sought to destroy the movement for Black freedom.
As journalist
Glen Ford explained, “If you attempt to lead Black people on an independent political path, the US state will seek to neutralize you, imprison you, or kill you. If you exercise your right to defend yourself, and your people, from the oppressive arm of the state, they make you into an outlaw, and hunt you down.”
The FBI said it goals in COINTELPRO were to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize,” adding that “no opportunity must be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques … for maximum effectiveness … and a final goal should be to prevent the long range growth of militant black organizations, especially among youth.”
This police state operation against Black liberation resulted in at least 38 Black Panther Party members being killed, including
Fred Hampton and
Mark Clark, with hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges for their armed self-defense actions, several for more than 45 years.
The website
Members of the Black Panther Party Still Imprisoned registered the number incarcerated in 2014, although several have died since then. The films “
The FBI’s War on Black America” and “
Cointelpro 101” document the police state’s dirty work.
Those currently imprisoned include:
Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most prominent former Black Panther political prisoner. In 1981, COINTELPRO style, he was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia cop. Judge Albert Sabo, who ruled in his case and in his appeals, was heard by a court reporter to state “I’m going to help them fry the ni**er.” Black jurors were excluded. Witnesses were bribed and threatened to lie on the stand. Documents were hidden in the state prosecutor’s office.
Mumia was an organizer and campaigner against police abuses in the Black community, and was the president of the Association of Black Journalists. During his imprisonment, now commuted to life, he has published several books. More information can be found in the films “
Mumia Abu Jamal: A Case For Reasonable Doubt?” and “
Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary” or the websites
freemumia.com and
bringmumiahome.com.
Leonard Peltier was an activist in the
American Indian Movement (AIM) whose goal was to organize indigenous communities to stand up for their rights. Sentenced to life as a result of a COINTELPRO operation, he has been imprisoned for 46 years for killing two FBI agents. Peltier participated in the AIM encampments on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where a 1975 shootout instigated by the FBI occurred.
Some 64 Native Americans, most with ties to AIM, were murdered. Their deaths went uninvestigated by the FBI. Evidence exonerating Peltier in the FBI case was withheld by the FBI. In his appeals, the government admitted it had no evidence he killed the two FBI agents, suppressed evidence proving this, and fabricated other “evidence.”
The other AIM members tried for the killings were exonerated in trial by reason of self-defense. One prosecutor admitted, “Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don’t know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it.”
Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the American Association of Jurists, and 54 Congresspeople,
among many others, have called for his freedom. The film “
Incident at Ogala,” produced by Robert Redford, and the best-selling book “
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement” made the case widely known. More information can be found at the websites
whoisleonardpeltier.info and
Peltier’s Prison Writings.
Mutulu Shakur, of the Republic of New Afrika movement, participated in presentations to the UN on discrimination experienced by Black communities, and by 1970 a
target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration. He helped free Assata Shakur from prison in 1979, and she now has a bounty on her head.
In 1988 he was convicted of conspiracy related to a 1981 robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed, and sentenced to 60 years. At no time did the evidence show that Mutulu Shakur killed anyone.
He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur, who has asylum in Cuba.
At two trials the evidence indicated others were responsible for the deaths (one became a government witness in return for a sentencing deal). The remaining defendants were acquitted for the murder allegations. More information can be found at
mutulushakur.com and the
Jericho Movement.
Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) was chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a Black Panther leader. FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover himself named
H. Rap Brown – along with Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford – as targets of COINTELPRO.
In a October 1971 standoff with police, he was shot and seized, and spent five years in Attica prison. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI closely surveilled Al-Amin, generating pages of 44,000 documents. In 2000, two sheriffs came to Al-Amin’s store with a warrant for failure to appear in court for a case later thrown out. Both were shot and one killed. Al-Amin was sentenced to life without parole, even though
Otis Jackson confessed to the shootings. More information is available at
whathappened2rap.com.
Veronza Bowers was an organizer in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. He has been imprisoned for 49 years for the murder of a US park ranger, on the word of two government informers. There were no eye witnesses and no other independent evidence. See more at
veronza.org and
prisonersolidarity.com.
Ed Poindexter and
Mondo we Langa (who died in prison in 2016) were leaders of the Black Panthers in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1960s, and
https://corruptionbycops.com/the-united-states-has-many-political-prisoners-heres-a-list/
