If you have been following the Bradley Manning case at all, you are probably already familiar with the sort of torture he has been receiving in military prison. Prison is a lonely and alienating place, and it can mean everything in the world to a prisoner to receive a letter from someone giving them support and love. Every letter Bradley Manning gets will help him through his darkest hour. Letters will be opened, "contraband" discarded and then mailed weekly to Bradley via someone on his approved correspondence list via Courage to Resist, a non profit organization that helps soldiers who are dissenting against the military. You can write to Bradley Manning at:

Bradley Manning
c/o Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610
USA

If this is your first time writing to a prisoner, (or even if its not) please read The guide to writing to prisoners. This information comes from http://www.bradleymanning.org/ Go there to find out more you can do to support Bradley Manning.

Solidarity actions in the UK would be awesome!

original story at http://torrentfreak.com/oldest-bittorrent-site-targeted-by-police-owner-...

One of, if not the oldest BitTorrent communities still around today has been targeted by police and anti-piracy officers. The owner of FileSoup, one the most enduring sites since the introduction of the BitTorrent protocol, was arrested by police and denied his phone call and legal representation for more than seven hours.

After gaining a warrant eleven days earlier, on Monday 27th July at 09:05 police backed up by the MPAA-funded UK anti-piracy group FACT conducted a raid on the home address of the owner of one of the most enduring torrent sites on the Internet.

Founded way back in 2003 - a light year in BitTorrent terms - UK based FileSoup is one of the original torrent sites and has built a solid reputation while keeping a surprisingly low profile, particularly considering its status. It has already outlived The Pirate Bay by around 9 months and is believed to be the oldest community still around today.

The search warrant for the owner of FileSoup was issued under Section 109 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 and authorized the gathering of any evidence related to the illegal distribution or file-sharing of copyright films. Notably, since 2005 FileSoup hasn’t operated a tracker but links to metadata which links to material hosted elsewhere. It has never hosted any copyrighted content.

The 4 operators of The Pirate Bay are going to stand trial monday in Stockholm, Sweden.  The operators face fines or up to 2 years in prison if found guilty.   This trial will undoubtedly have far reaching consequences for intelectual property and copyright law if the creators are found guilty.  Swedish public broadcasting will be streaming the trial live, but without translation.  For those of us who don't speak english, we can follow the trial on http://trial.thepiratebay.org

All charges against Dee Allen have been dropped! See http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/02/11/18569533.php for more information.

[col. writ. 10/1/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
By the time you read this the $700 billion bailout will have been old news, one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history.

But it will not heal that which ails the nation as it trips and stumbles like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

The reasons are simple.

For the problems are systemic, built into the rapacious nature of the machinery humming all around us. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption of democratic forms at the service of the financial services industry is a bottomless maw, a gaping mouth that is never sated.

Why was there no alarm when millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures made inevitable by variable mortgage rates? When millions lost manufacturing jobs to low paying service gigs? When living standards crumbled, and when take home pay fell to 1973 levels?

Where was the alarm?

There was no alarm -- for this was the 'blind hand of the market' at work, the leveling way of globalism, the new world order moving through, preparing the way for the triumph of capitalism uber alles.

Few were the politicians who gave voice to this immense social suffering. Fewer still used their power to try to assuage their pain, for they too were drunk on the wine of globalism.

But when the ripples spread upwards, from the foreclosed homes to the foreclosing banks -and from the banks to investment houses, Congress stirred from their drunken stupor, and rang alarm bells loudest.

"It's an economic 9/11!", some bellowed; "It's a financial tsunami!", yelled others.

When Americans were hoodwinked into ruinous sub-prime loans, and millions were faced with foreclosures, where was the alarm?

More importantly, where was the help for those who were endangered?

Nowhere. Nowhere.

If they helped them the present economic crisis would've been mitigated.

Instead, we're in a situation where a scam artist sets up shop in a street-corner, playing a fraudulent 3-card monty hustle, and along comes a cop. The cop, instead of rousting the scam artist, rifles the pockets of every passerby, and delivers the stolen loot to the scammer.

The scam artist, of course, is the financial investment houses; the cop, of course, is Congress -- and you are the passerby, hustled and robbed by both of them.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, 160 years ago, that the State was but the executive for capitalist. After what we are all seeing, who can doubt it?

The Empire is crumbling.

--(c) '08 maj

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!

PLEASE CONTACT:
International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone - 215-476-8812/ Fax - 215-476-6180
E-mail - icffmaj [at] aol.com
AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!

Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370

Dear Friends, Family, and Comrades:

We are the RNC 8: individuals targeted because of our political beliefs and
work organizing for protests at the 2008 Republican National Convention, in
what appears to be the first use of Minnesota’s version of the US Patriot
Act. The 8 of us are currently charged with Conspiracy to Commit Riot in
Furtherance of Terrorism, a 2nd degree felony that carries the possibility of
several years in prison. We are writing to let you know about our situation, to
ask for support, and to offer words of hope.

A little background: the RNC Welcoming Committee was a group formed in late
2006 upon hearing that the 2008 Republican National Convention would be
descending on Minneapolis-St. Paul where we live, work, and build community.
The Welcoming Committee’s purpose was to serve as an
anarchist/anti-authoritarian organizing body, creating an informational and
logistical framework for radical resistance to the RNC. We spent more than a
year and a half doing outreach, facilitating meetings throughout the country,
and networking folks of all political persuasions who shared a common interest
in voicing dissent in the streets of St. Paul while the GOP’s machine chugged
away inside the convention.

In mid-August the Welcoming Committee opened a “Convergence Center,” a
space for protesters to gather, eat, share resources, and build networks of
solidarity. On Friday, August 29th, 2008, as folks were finishing dinner and
sitting down to a movie the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department stormed in,
guns   drawn, ordering everyone to the ground. This evening raid resulted in
seized property (mostly literature), and after being cuffed, searched, and
IDed, the 60+ individual inside were released.

The next morning, on Saturday, August 30th, the Sheriff’s department executed
search warrants on three houses, seizing personal and common household items
and arresting the first 5 of us- Monica Bicking, Garrett Fitzgerald, Erik
Oseland, Nathanael Secor, and Eryn Trimmer. Later that day Luce Guillen-Givins
was arrested leaving a public meeting at a park. Rob Czernik and Max Specktor
were arrested on Monday, September 1, bringing the number to its present 8. All
were held on probable cause and released on $10,000 bail on Thursday, September
4, the last day of the RNC.

These arrests were preemptive, targeting known organizers in an attempt to
derail anti-RNC protests before the convention had even begun. Conspiracy
charges expand upon the traditional notion of crime. Instead of condemning
action, the very concept of conspiracy criminalizes thought and camaraderie,
the development of relationships, the willingness to hope that our world might
change and the realization that we can be agents of that change.

Conspiracy charges serve a very particular purpose- to criminalize dissent.
They create a convenient method for incapacitating activists, with the
potential for diverting limited resources towards protracted legal battles and
terrorizing entire communities into silence and inaction. Though not the first
conspiracy case against organizers- not even the first in recent memory- our
case may be precedent-setting. Minnesota’s terrorism statutes have never been
enacted in this way before, and if they win their case against us, they will
only be strengthened as they continue their crusade on ever more widespread
fronts. We view our case as an opportunity to demonstrate community solidarity
in the face of repression, to establish a precedent of successful resistance to
the government’s attempts to destroy our movements.

Right now we are in the very early stages of a legal battle that will require
large sums of money and enormous personal resources. We have already been
overwhelmed by the outpouring of support locally and throughout the country,
and are grateful for everything that people have done for us. We now have a
Twin Cities-based support committee and are developing a national support
network that we feel confident will help us through the coming months. For more
information on the case and how to support us, or to donate, go to
http://RNC8.org

We have been humbled by such an immense initial show of solidarity and are
inspired to turn our attention back to the very issues that motivated us to
organize against the RNC in the first place. What’s happening to us is part
of a much broader and very serious problem. The fact is that we live in a
police state- some people first realized this in the streets of St. Paul during
the convention, but many others live with that reality their whole lives.
People of color, poor and working class people, immigrants, are targeted and
criminalized on a daily basis, and we understand what that context suggests
about the repression the 8 of us face now. Because we are political organizers
who have built solid relationships through our work, because we have various
forms of privilege- some of us through our skin, some through our class, some
through our education- and because we have the resources to invoke a national
network of support, we are lucky, even as we are being targeted.

And so, while we ask for support in whatever form you are able to offer it, and
while we need that support to stay free, we also ask that you think of our case
as a late indicator of the oppressive climate in which we live. The best
solidarity is to keep the struggle going, and we hope that supporting us can be
a small part of broader movements for social change.

For better times and with love,

the RNC 8: 

Monica Bicking, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, Luce Guillen-Givins,
Nathanael Secor, Max Spector, Eryn Timmer, Erik Oseland,