The following was submitted to the editors of the Opinion section of the Chicago Tribune as the official Chicago National Lawyers Guild response to their own piece on the NATO 3 case to further the public discourse. The Tribune has not published our response.
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On Friday, February 7, 2014, a Cook County jury acquitted the NATO 3 of all terrorism charges, opting instead to convict them of lower level offenses. The acquittal of the terrorism charges is the culmination of the tireless efforts of the defense team, most of whom are members of the National Lawyers Guild. It is also a victory for the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, who organized the NATO Legal Support project, providing round-the-clock support for activists leading up to the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.
On Monday, February 10, 2014, just days after the announcement of the jury’s verdict, the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune published a piece hailing the actions of police and prosecutors and calling for stiff sentences for the three young men. (http://www.chicagotribune.
In an attempt to drum up fear, the Tribune editorial asks readers to “[r]emember the masked agitators, dressed in black, snaking their way to the front of the parade ranks.” However, it fails to mention that two of those masked agitators were undercover Chicago Police Officers, Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygun. The editorial piece argues that “[w]hen a 20-year-old calls himself an anarchist in such a setting,” police and prosecutors are justified in treating him like a terrorist. Markedly absent from the piece, is the fact that this “setting” was one manufactured by undercover police officers. Recordings played at the NATO 3 trial revealed that Chikko and Uygun supplied the defendants with alcohol on multiple occasions, suggested the idea of making the Molotov cocktails and even assisted in building them by cutting up their own bandanas to use as wicks.
The problem is not, as the Tribune suggests, that these young men may have identified as anarchists. The problem is that accepting the position of the Tribune’s editorial board means condoning a reversion to the days of widespread illegal spying through the resurrection of operations like the Chicago Police Red Squad, which targeted political activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Unfortunately, this seems to have already begun; Even before becoming involved with the NATO 3, and lacking any training in undercover work, Chikko and Uygun spied on activists in cafes, at concerts, and at peaceful protests.
Rather than respecting the decision of the jury to acquit these young men of terrorism charges, the editorial board of the Tribune published a reprehensibly misinformed piece that is a continuation of the political prosecution beget by the City and the State’s Attorney. By comparing the heavy-handed suppression of political dissidence to the Boston Marathon bombing attacks, Alvarez and the Tribune are trivializing terrorism, something that, fortunately, the jury in the NATO 3 case refused to do.
