The U.S. rulers accelerated their assault on workers' rights in the wake of the September 11 attacks, seeking to see how far they could go using their "war on terrorism" before running into opposition to their attacks.

But as more people like Rabih Haddad, Michael Italie, Sami Al-Arian, and Ian Harvey began organizing to oppose political firings and victimizations, others have been emboldened to do the same. The conduct of five Cuban revolutionaries framed-up in Florida on federal espionage and related charges is part of this response. The five, in face of massive police pressure and life sentences or the death penalty, remained in fighting spirit and gave political statements at their sentencing hearings condemning Washington's history of aggression against Cuba.

Winning support among students, unions, farm organizations, and others for these and other such fights is crucial to the future of the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression. Those who are stepping forward to defend their jobs and rights today are part of a political response that can strengthen the unions for the very kind of attacks they will more and more face from the employers and the government.

And in some parts of the country civil liberties organizations, such as the ACLU in New Jersey, are helping to shed light on the undemocratic character of the federal government's roundup by demanding states and counties abide by their own laws and report on who is being kept behind prison bars and that requests for legal representation be respected.

As a lawyer for several detainees aptly said, the U.S. government is turning constitutional safeguards on their head: "First you are guilty, then you are a suspect, then you are released," he said of the experience of those he represents.

Washington has extended its treatment of prisoners in the United States to those they have captured in Afghanistan. With stories and pictures of hooded, shackled, manhandled men held in cages, they hope to inure workers and farmers to the kind of brutal treatment the U.S. rulers are capable of meting out.

With its usual imperial arrogance, Washington is carrying this out on Cuban soil, on a base illegally occupied for decades. That it would take the prisoners and cage them in open-air cells is a renewed affront to the sovereignty of Cuba and to revolutionary Cuba's stand opposing Washington's war against the people of Afghanistan.
 
 
Related article:
Washington's 'terror' detentions are an assault on workers' rights  
 
 
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